Even though its 4KTV portfolio is barely into its commercial stride, satellite operator SES has announced plans to showcase 8K television.
The demonstration will be presented at the company’s Industry Days conference, its traditional gathering in May to highlight the products and services it will be delivering over the coming twelve months.
The 8K content, with a frame rate of 60 frames per second and 10-bit colour depth, features native 8K camera footage provided by PSNC (Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre) and an 8K animation (CGI) provided by Unigine.
Relying on the new DVB-S2X standard that is said to enable greater efficiency, the transmission will be carried out on a single 36 MHz transponder on the ASTRA 3B satellite. With a resolution of 7680 x 4320 pixels, the video will be encoded in HEVC and transmitted at a rate of 80 Mbit/s, which is four times higher than for a 4K signal. In addition, the test transmission will use a native IP formatted signal, providing, said SES, “some insights” into the requirements of a future all-IP broadcast infrastructure for television.
For the demonstration, SES has partnered with Spin Digital, which offer technology to decode and playback 8K HEVC signals in real-time software, and also encoded the content using its HEVC encoder. In addition, SES teamed up with Sharp/UMC, which is providing the 8K screens.
“Even though 8K remains challenging with the video codecs available today and is several years away from introduction to consumer homes, this demonstration shows that satellites are now capable of carrying 8K signals,” explained Thomas Wrede, VP, new technology and standards at SES Video. As we always strive to take the video experience to the next level, we are very proud to provide this exciting glimpse at the future of television “At the same time, we continue to be very much focused on supporting our customers and partners in bringing current technologies, such as 4K UHD and HDR, to consumer homes.”
Source: https://www.rapidtvnews.com/2018052352222/ses-showcases-first-8ktv-broadcast.html#axzz5GLJ44rUf
