philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

When 4K Isn’t Enough

NHK, which has been leading these efforts, announced the successful transmission of 8K last month when SHV signals were transmitted via a single standard UHF terrestrial broadcast channel over a distance of 27 km. According to NHK, the data was fitted into a “standard” six MHz broadcast channel via “image compression technologies” and was transmitted using “ultra-multilevel” orthogonal frequency division multiplexing and multiple-input multiple-output dual-polarization technologies.

This was followed up by another successful test of 8K transmission, this time at an event in Tokyo earlier this month in which a team of both public and private technology organizations conducted the world’s first successful test of transmission, storage and distribution of uncompressed 8K video over a 100 Gbps Ethernet connection.

The Olympics, which has traditionally been a test bed for new imaging technologies is the driving force behind Japan’s push to 8K. NHK reportedly is showing SHV footage of the Sochi Winter Olympics to Japanese audiences; and government officials have made well known their intentions to launch full-scale 8K broadcasting in time for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

At last year’s interBEE in Tokyo, a government official drove that point home, announcing that the country—which has so far spent about $10 million in its 4K/8K efforts, had moved testing for 4K forward to this year, with full-scale viewing by 2016, and that a timeline has been established to develop the appropriate standards and infrastructure to make 8K transmissions happen by 2020.

See the full story here: http://www.tvtechnology.com/from-the-editor/0120/when-k-isnt-enough/269055