UHD Alliance Chief Hails Raising ‘Benchmark,’ Concedes He Wants More Logo ‘Usage’

Compliance with the alliance’s “performance metrics” on 4K resolution, high dynamic range and wide color gamut determines which hardware and content products and services qualify to carry the logo, the group said at January 2016 CES when announcing the Ultra HD Premium certification program (see 1601030003). “Obviously, it’s up to the individual member companies to decide to what extent they want to use the logo,” Basse told the session. “Obviously, I would want to see more usage of the logo in the marketplace than we actually see today. But I think the good news here is, though, regardless of what the logo usage ends up in the marketplace, we really succeeded in setting a benchmark for what UHD quality should actually look like.”

Of the 139 Ultra HD Blu-ray titles that, according to NPD, were introduced through April 9, all are “mastered adhering to UHD Alliance guidelines,” Basse said. “And by the way, all carry the logo in one form or the other. So I think we’ve already been able to at least, for Hollywood, come up with a common consensus of what HDR is.”

As for getting more TVs to carry the logo, “on the device side, that’s obviously a little harder to get to because there’s just a lot of difficult business questions for the individual members there,” Basse said. All the major manufacturers “now have at least one, if not several, TV models” that meet the alliance’s Ultra HD Premium “device spec,” he said. “So whether or not they use the logo, we actually made an impact in the market in terms of actually setting the benchmark and having people aspiring to meet that benchmark, which I think is a great achievement in and of itself.”

From the “perspective” of Fox, where Basse is chief technology officer, “as a movie studio, it’s actually straightforward to make HDR content, because our capture today already is in high dynamic range,” Basse said. It’s also straightforward “to distribute movies” to the home “in a new format,” whether it be as a digital or physical product, he said. But “the picture is the opposite” for HDR broadcasting, where there's a “huge investment burden” for new cameras and other equipment, he said. Backward compatibility with standard-dynamic-range content is another big hurdle, he said. There's also “still not a whole lot of consensus around exactly what the HDR format for broadcast would be,” he said. “That’s fundamentally, I think, why the movie industry is leading the pack here quite a bit.”

ATSC 3.0 supports the HDR “transfer functions” of perceptual quantization (PQ) and hybrid log-gamma, LG consultant Madeleine Noland told the supersession. The standard also supports static metadata for PQ HDR, said Noland, who chairs ATSC’s S34 specialist group on ATSC 3.0 video. “As we like to say in the TV world, stay tuned, we might have some more for you” in HDR for ATSC 3.0, she said. “The discussions continue on additional HDR technologies, and probably there will be some public news coming out in the coming weeks on that,” she said. Additional news also is expected soon on the "color front," she said. In February, ATSC President Mark Richer identified five HDR proposals as likely amendments to A/341, ATSC 3.0's video book (see 1702230067).

When the suite of ATSC 3.0 standards will be complete is “the most commonly asked question I get,” Noland said. “Final approval of the entire standard is expected in Q2 -- in other words, right around the corner,” she said. “We’re working on some additional video-standard elements, which might come a little bit later, but the core video is nearly done.” Some of those enhancements might include providing for dynamic metadata, she said: “These are all in discussion within the group.”