Many Engineers Hold 4K in Disfavor for HDR Streaming, SMPTE Conference Shows
CAMPBELL, Calif. -- There seems growing sentiment in the engineering community that 4K resolution doesn't give the biggest bang for the buck, at least for delivering high-dynamic-range Ultra HD content via over-the-top or broadcast streams to the consumer. Disclosures on a recent Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers webinar suggested strongly that broadcasters that adopt ATSC 3.0 would prefer transmitting 1080p images with HDR and wide color gamut at 10 bits rather than use bandwidth-hungry 4K (see 1606160052). Panelists at an HDR workshop took much the same tack Tuesday during the Emerging Technology in the Connected Age conference hosted by SMPTE.
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Panel moderator Annie Chang, Disney vice president-technology standards and strategy, posed to her HDR panelists what she called “one of my favorite little questions.” She asked, “Does 4K UHD really matter” for delivering content via “adaptive” bit-rate streaming, where the signal is often prone to degradation because 4K consumes much bandwidth? The question drew loud applause from the audience of several hundred SMPTE-member engineers. As one of Disney’s top technology strategists, Chang, among other Disney representatives, has declined all requests for comment on the studio’s Ultra HD Blu-ray plans, specifically about industry chatter that Disney has ambitions to release Ultra HD Blu-ray titles in HDR and wide color, but with resolutions lower than 4K, as it's permitted to do under Blu-ray Disc Association specifications (see 1603110056).
“If you’re sitting at the right distance” from an Ultra HD screen “and you have all the bandwidth, you absolutely want higher spatial resolution,” responded Matthew Goldman, Ericsson senior vice president-technology, TV and media strategy. “But if you’re not doing all that and you have bandwidth issues and you have to cut something down, you want to leave the thing that really makes it dynamic and pop to the viewer, and that would be to keep the HDR aspect.”
YouTube Software Engineer Steven Robertson admits to “always been a resolution junkie,” he told Chang. Robertson’s workstation at YouTube has four 4K monitors on it, he said. YouTube even has a few 8K videos running on the service, “and I’m watching every single one of them,” he said. But “the number of our users that can stream 4K bandwidth-wise is a single-digit percentage,” he said. Moreover, “the reachability of people who have gone to buy 4K television sets” and are able to stream 4K content within their bandwidth constraints is quite small, “even with our most advanced VP9 compression,” he said. “That’s a serious challenge” in getting content creators to invest in 4K content with HDR and wide color, he said. On the other hand, “everybody can stream HD-HDR,” he said.
The discussion prompted one audience questioner to ask panelists whether they agree there's a good business case to be made for the introduction of 1080p TVs with HDR. “I’ll bite my tongue,” Chang responded to the question. Robin Atkins, Dolby Labs senior manager-applied vision science, said he started working on HDR displays “long before there was 4K, and you could easily see the benefit at that time.” His “opinion” is that “you get the benefit of high dynamic range, and then some of those TVs will also do 4K,” he said with tongue in cheek.
On an earlier panel, Dan Schinasi, director-product planning at Samsung Electronics America, was asked what "really is Ultra HD,” since many broadcasters are vowing to use ATSC 3.0 to transmit HDR images in wide color and at high frame rates, but in 1080p, not in 4K. “So I guess it’s no mystery that we put premium features in our premium products,” Schinasi said. “That doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone. But if somebody wants to serve up -- especially in broadcast -- if they want to serve up full HD with HDR, we’re open to that. Any movement in image quality is for the better, especially when there’s all this talk about switching over to ATSC 3.0. It can’t just be about moving to different spectrum. It has to do with moving the quality bar and the functionality and the utility of the TV as well. So we’re proponents of it and if the industry wants to move that way, we’ll move with them.”