There are 189 ultra-high-definition services available to consumers worldwide. Over three quarters of them are linear television channels, according to the Ultra HD Forum.
Now tracking 190 commercial consumer-facing and B2B Ultra HD television service offerings, this online resource collates selected information from over three billion user subscriptions worldwide and presents it to the public on the Forum’s website. The complete service tracker can be found here.
According to Benjamin Schwarz, who maintains the Tracker for the Forum, “UHD service launches have continued to accelerate since 2013 when YouTube first streamed 4K publicly. Despite the COVID-related slowdown, growth this year is already at double digits again.” (see chart below)
The Ultra HD Forum celebrates its fifth year of successfully bringing together broadcasters, service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers, and technology vendors to accelerate Ultra HD television deployment.
Version 2.4 of the Forum’s Guidelines includes more material on live OTT distribution of UHD. The Forum’s online UHD service tracker has received a significant upgrade, including new prominence given to Next Generation Audio (NGA). And the Forum plans to issue its first Watermarking API before the end of this year.
The Ultra HD Forum has published free Guidelines for the UHD community since 2016. The Guidelines have been a source of useful information as the television industry has launched and incrementally enhanced UHD services.
The document presents a “foundation layer” of readily available, mature technologies, and an “enhancement layer,” including newer, more leading-edge technologies. Throughout five years of Guidelines development, more than 35 Forum member companies have contributed to the effort.
The Ultra HD Forum has also announced that it will release its Watermarking API for Encoder Integration before the end of 2020. Laurent Piron from Nagra, who chairs the Forum’s Security Group, said, “The generic C-language API enables the interfacing of a transcoder and a watermark pre-processor (WMP).
The API generates so-called A/B variants for Adaptive Bitrate content for both baseband and compressed forensic watermarking technologies.” He added, “We’re excited to provide a vendor-agnostic API that will facilitate the distribution of premium UHD content, which is one of our main missions at the Forum.”
