The industry may only now be rolling out 4K broadcasts in time for the World Cup, but attendees of the annual SES Industry Days conference will see a demonstration of 8K picture quality.
The Luxembourg operator is running a DVB-S2X test from a single 36MHz transponder on Astra 3B.
With a resolution of 7680×4320 pixels, the video will be encoded in HEVC and transmitted at a rate of 80 Mbit/s, which is four times higher than for a 4K signal.
“Even though 8K remains challenging with the video codecs available today, and is several years away from introduction to consumer homes, this demonstration shows that satellites are now capable of carrying 8K signals. As we always strive to take the video experience to the next level, we are very proud to provide this exciting glimpse at the future of television,” said Thomas Wrede, VP, New Technology & Standards at SES Video. “At the same time, we continue to be very much focused on supporting our customers and partners in bringing current technologies, such as 4K UHD and HDR, to consumer homes.”
The test transmission will also use a native IP formatted signal, providing some insight into the requirements of a future All-IP broadcast infrastructure for television.
SES has partnered with Spin Digital, which developed the expertise to decode and playback 8K HEVC signals in real-time through software, and encoded the content using its HEVC encoder.
In addition, has SES teamed up with Sharp/UMC, which is providing the 8K screens.
The 8K content, with a frame rate of 60 frames per second and 10-bit colour depth, features native 8K camera footage provided by PSNC (Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center) and an 8K animation (CGI) provided by Unigine Corp.
