Ian Nock

UHD Breakfast at Connected TV Event London

I took part in the UHD Breakfast Briefing on the morning of the second day of the excellent Connected TV World Summit last week.

The task of explaining HDR (and WCG) in the context of UHD in less than five minutes is a big one, made worse by my croaking NAB lurgy ridden voice. Having Thierry Fautier of Harmonic and President of the UltraHD Forum provide a great introduction about the UltraHD in the industry and the Forum in general, followed by my introduction to the technology made for an enjoyable and informative event.

 

However the best was for last as we enjoyed the involvement of Arian Koster from KPN, providing his operational view of running and deploying an advanced TV service. He drew attention to the technical, customer and operational factors of mass market deployment for a high tech and somewhat complex service – that needs attention both in the development of the technology and for the deployment and customer care aspects. We did not get the chance to address all of these during the breakfast, but there are solutions that allow an operator to deploy services in 2017 given the right business decisions and plan. This is an area we have been working for some time with other operators.

The challenge of mass market UHD HDR deployment for linear and on demand comes in the form of universality of consumption, the issues of supply video streams that need to be specific to particular displays, taking into account multiple formats of video (SDR BT.709, SDR BT.2020, HDR PQ10, HDR HLG, and even the possibility of HDR Dolby Vision), legacy 4K displays (using BT.709 colour space), SDR displays (using BT.2020), and HDR displays (PQ10 and/or HLG10). There are a number of technical solutions (Display capability content presentation, headend and STB based content conversions, simulcasting, long tail unicast, distribution format standardisation, and distribution factory approaches) to these challenges but each solution comes with pros and cons that need to be validated in the particular market and with the specific operator. If you are an operator looking towards making the step into UHD or have already deployed 4K services and want to expand into HDR service, then do please make contact – we can cut through the complexity and define the best go to market and technology approach.

Fairmile West is a Consulting company focused on working in the Consumer Device and Video arena. We work with clients on technology strategy and product delivery through key practices in Consumer Devices and Video Services. If you are interested in learning more about what we do, please do get in touch via our website – Contact us. You can also keep track with what interests us in the industry by following our Link blog at TV Tech News, and you can specifically follow news on Ultra HD via the following link – Ultra HD News.

Slides now available here: London May 18th, Ultra HD and breakfast. Pre-conference session during the Connected TV event, focussed on HDR.

Source: UHD Breakfast at Connected TV Event London, May 18 2017 – Ultra HD Forum

Published by Ian Nock

Ian Nock is the Managing Director of Fairmile West Consulting, and has over 25 years experience in high technology research, development, and operations. Since entering the TV industry in the late 1990s, he has worked in the delivery of many Satellite, Cable, IPTV and OTT video platforms across Europe in diverse roles that encompass technology and operations from production to consumption. Ian moved into consulting in 2004 working with some of the most innovative vendor and operator companies in the industry. He founded Fairmile West Consulting (www.fairmilewest.com) in 2012 as a multi-national, high expertise Digital TV and Media consulting and professional services company, working with large/small operators and technology vendors on product/technology strategy, architecture, and delivery. Taking an early interest in the development of Ultra HD, Fairmile West has been a member of the Ultra HD Forum since 2015 and Ian is the Chair of the Ultra HD Forum Interop Working Group. Ian is also the Chair of the IET Multimedia Communications Technical Professional Network. Ian graduated with a First Class Bachelors Degree in Engineering Technology in 1992 from Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University), undertaking research into medical automation, flexible packaging dynamics and post graduate research into artificial intelligence based control systems with a number of published papers in those areas. He quickly jumped out of academia into the nascent Internet and Networking industry before moving into TV. He is a member of the IET, IEEE, RTS and Fellow of the SCTE: The Society for Broadband Professionals. He blogs at http://fairmilewest.com, on LinkedIn and can be found on Twitter at @iannock.