Hans Hoffmann

New Immersive Content for TV and Cinema on the Horizon—New Challenges for Standards [Standards Report from the Engineering Vice President]

When consumers “lean-back” on their sofas and decide to enjoy a “movie night” or sport event they expect not only a good story or documentary, but also high immersive audiovisual quality. The industry is therefore focused on developing technologies and formats to increase realism and to provide newly enhanced audiovisual experiences to viewers and listeners. The consumer flat panel display industry is clearly dominating this trend, particularly to keep their revenues high with new premium products. The new generations of television displays for the home, available for this year’s holiday shopping, will have four times the HD resolution, with more “vivid” colors and many more features. 3D consumer displays will also provide better 3D with glasses, and even some displays without glasses—and both 3D technologies will benefit from higher resolutions than HD. But the trend to Ultra High Definition Resolutions (UHDTV, 4 times or 16 times the HDTV resolution) comes as a surprise to many, since content in the native resolution of the “four times HD resolution displays” is still very rare. Other products will offer wider aspect ratios than today’s 16:9, making the home experience almost cinema-like. This push for immersive content in the consumer domain will impact content creators and technology professionals in the industry; consequently, standards bodies such as SMPTE will also be affected. It is clear that changing a TV format is a drastic move for the entire ecosystem from content creation to production, contribution, distribution, and presentation, and will take considerable time and technological developments. Remarkably, in immersive content creation, NHK, in collaboration with the BBC, recently provided ultra-high-definition television shootings in 8k/60p (7680 x 4320 pixels) of several key events at the 2012 Olympics. Those who were able to view these stunning images (for example, the 100m Mens running event) either