About 50% of UHD Services Use HDR, Up Tenfold From 2 Years Ago, Says Ultra HD Forum
The Ultra HD Forum will soon publish an updated “service tracker” that will cover 150 “consumer-facing” content offerings that reach 3 billion subscribers globally, Ben Schwarz, who chairs the forum’s communications working group, told a webinar Monday hosted by Europe’s DVB consortium. The forum had planned to announce the new tracker at the now-canceled NAB Show, said Schwarz.
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Of the 3 billion subscribers covered in the tracker, about 10% have access to UHD services, which the forum defines as those having 4K, HDR or both, said Schwarz. Three-quarters of the offerings “out there in the world today are predominantly linear services,” and those reach 125 million subscribers globally, he said. “Though it’s a huge proportion of services,” those offerings reach only 42% of UHD subscribers, he said. VOD services, a quarter of the total, reach nearly 60% of the UHD subscriber base, he said.
About half the UHD services available to consumers use HDR, said Schwarz. “This was hugely encouraging” when the forum uncovered that data point, he said. “Just two years ago, it was like 5%,” he said. “Already a quarter of the services have next-generation audio, mainly Dolby Atmos, but there’s quite a few that have other services.” Only forum members will get access to the “raw data” when the service tracker is released in the next few weeks, said Schwarz.
Draft Version 8.0 of the next-gen Versatile Video Coding codec was released this month, said Ateme Vice President Sassan Pejhan. Work began on VVC in 2015 after standardization of the existing H.265 was complete, he said. “The goal, coronavirus notwithstanding, is to have a full international standard, an official standard, by July.” The first commercial VVC hardware implementations would be possible about a year later, he said.
Boosting compression efficiency while minimizing added system “complexity” compared with H.265 are VVC’s intended hallmarks, said Pejhan. “It doesn’t really make sense if you have a tool that gives you 2% better compression, but at a cost of 10% more complexity of a decoder."
The goal of VVC is to achieve 50% more compression efficiency than H.265, “and we’re almost there,” said Pejhan. With 4K content encoded with VVC, “we’re getting around the 40% mark,” he said. VVC encoder complexity is about 10 times that of H.265, “but the good news is, the decoder complexity is less than twice,” he said. “That’s really important, because you want to keep those set-top-box costs or those mobile-device costs low. Decoder complexity also has an impact on your battery life.”