Thomson Sees Deployment ‘Tricky’ for Next-Gen ATSC 3.0 Broadcast Standard
LAS VEGAS -- Broadcast equipment supplier Thomson Video is using the NAB Show this week to showcase its “first implementation” of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec that the Motion Picture Experts Group approved in late January, Jean Macher, Thomson’s marketing director for the Americas, told us Monday at his company’s booth. “We don’t have it running live yet, but it’s coming very soon, probably in June,” Macher said.
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At the booth, Thomson loaded HEVC-encoded VGA footage onto a Google Nexus tablet to simulate how HEVC video would look streamed to a mobile device in 640 x 360 resolution at 800 kbps and 30 frames per second, he said. “As you can see, it looks pretty good,” he said. The new HDMI 2.0 spec would allow HEVC streams up to 60 frames per second. Asked if delays in release of HDMI 2.0 was holding Thomson back, Macher said: “Like for everyone, yes, yes, yes."
Macher thinks that for HEVC implementation, “the first application that we see, honestly,” is for over-the-top video streaming to set-top players, “more than to TVs, initially,” he said. As for whether HEVC will find applications for over-the-air broadcasting in the U.S., Macher said: “Well, there’s ATSC 3.0.” That’s the HEVC-based next-gen broadcast standard that its developers say could be ready as a “candidate proposal” by year-end 2015 (CD April 9 p4). But ATSC 3.0 wouldn’t be backward-compatible with the existing ATSC system. The French-born Macher has been in the U.S. for 13 years, he said, “and I've done a lot with U.S. broadcasters, so why not” have HEVC for over-the-air? “But you've got to tell everybody, ‘Sorry, but that TV that you bought, you'll have to replace it.’ I cannot judge how big or how bad an impact it would have on the broadcasters’ community. It’s tricky."
At its booth, Thomson is showcasing Ultra HD for TV by streaming footage that was uploaded from a 4K video file encoded in MPEG-4 at “super-high” bitrates, and transferred to a file encoded in HEVC, Macher said. It then loaded the file onto an NTTDocomo HEVC software decoder that’s running in the back of the booth, beaming footage onto a 50-inch Panasonic 1080p plasma monitor at 12 Mbps, he said: “I'll be honest with you, though. Unfortunately, my display is not 4K, it’s 1080p. That means it’s downconverted from 4K to 1080p. But still, look at the detail. It gives you an idea of the potential for 4K, even on a 1080p display."
When “live” HEVC encoders become available in June, Thomson thinks it will be possible to encode HD-resolution video in real time, Macher said. At present, encoding in HEVC takes four times real time, he said. For 4K-resolution video, HEVC encoding will be possible at the start, but only through “file-transcoding,” not real-time encoding, he said. “Right now the requests we are seeing are for file-based 4K,” he said. “We could do real-time, but it’s just that in terms of priorities in the road map, we didn’t see the need early on, so we'll stick to file-transcoding for 4K.”