Where Will UHD/HDR Take Us?

It’s a bit of a cliché of our industry, but major live events really do drive progress and act as a focal point for evolving new standards, formats, and picture quality. Events like this fall’s FIFA World Cup essentially offer a stage to showcase innovations. Once the consumer reacts positively to them, this, in turn, generates interest from content owners, broadcasters and service providers to drive broader adoption and deliver the best possible viewing experience to their global subscriber bases.

Today’s expectations for pristine quality live streaming experiences are at an all-time high. In this year alone, we’ve seen Formula 1 races and leading global sporting events, such as the Winter Olympics and Wimbledon, showcased in 4K UHD. This is fast becoming the new industry norm for resolution. During the FIFA World Cup, Fox Sports will also be filming and broadcasting all 64 games in native 4K HDR. So, with the demand for this level of video quality at scale mounting, the question is will providers be able to keep up?

Making UHD A Reality

Solutions are in place to ensure that end users can experience 4K UHD/HDR in all its glory. Broadcasters, for example, can increase the amount of content created in both native 2160p and 1080p50/60 HDR — with 4K displays upconverting the latter images to 2160p (imperfect but an acceptable compromise in some cases). However, it’s not just the resolution and dynamic range that makes UHD as popular as it is. UHD requires progressive scans at 50Hz+, which is ideal for keeping up with fast-action sports and something that fans will strongly appreciate.

In addition, UHD offers a better conversion to other frame rates: progressive at 2160p50 converts with fewer artifacts to 2160p59.94 for international feeds that need different frame rates and single-production UHD can be used to derive better conventional HD outputs. That also includes different frame rates (so 2160p50 to 1080i29.97 works far better than if it were from 1080i25). Delivering these top-resolution quality experiences comes down to a handful of core technology innovations that are reshaping the playing field.

Streaming As You’ve Never Experienced It Before

Providing broadcasters with the tools to deliver UHD/HDR content more efficiently across multiple platforms has become a universal top priority. 5G is an evident tool that can support data-intensive resolutions such as 4K UHD and has specific capabilities that can help address the unique challenges of more immersive technologies such as 360-degree live video and virtual and augmented reality viewing. 5G enables guaranteed bandwidth, high data speeds, low latency and delivery reliability, which empowers better user experiences, such as the reception of higher-quality video, even in remote locations. Fox Sports successfully trialed live streaming 4K video over 5G at the 2018 US Open alongside Ericsson, Intel and AT&T.

5G has also had a profound impact and influence on remote productions, providing great potential to improve the quality of feeds from a venue to the cloud. It reduces the number of people and equipment that are needed on-site to cover an event, which inevitably creates sustainability advantages. Fewer people travelling will cut carbon emissions and it also takes away the reliance on on-premise hardware, lessening energy and power consumption.

5G mobile devices typically support HEVC, too, which is much better for efficiency and quality than H.264. HEVC is a video compression standard that is increasingly being used by broadcasters and which provides between 120:1 to 150:1 or better visually loss-less compression, which equates to a considerable bandwidth saving over the light compression codecs, but at the price of increased latency.

A New Live Streaming Landscape

Broadcasters still need to determine which formats offer the best efficiency and cost savings for producing and delivering UHD/HDR content. VVC (Versatile Video Coding) is today’s most efficient video coding standard. It opens the possibility of far more efficient encoding, which is particularly important for higher resolutions and frame rates, 4K and above, at least where HEVC isn’t already established.

VVC offers a path to even better quality and efficiency in the future. With immersive 4K HDR services continuing to flood the market in years to come, VVC opens the potential for much wider adoption of 4K, providing a more profound, richer viewing experience and even opening the way to potential 8K services further down the line (although 8K adoption for delivery to consumers appears an open question at this point). These technology developments mark a hugely exciting time for the media industry, helping broadcasters, service providers and content owners deliver the best possible media experiences to audiences worldwide.

Tony Jones is principal technologist at MediaKind.