Dolby Seeks Dominant Spot for Dolby Digital Plus in Connected TV

Dolby is pushing to make Dolby Digital Plus the chosen format for surround-sound audio in the connected TV world. Vudu already incorporates 5.1-channel Dolby Digital Plus audio in its streaming movie service, and Dolby plans additional content aggregator announcements “very soon,” Craig Eggers, Dolby’s senior manager, consumer electronics partner marketing, told Consumer Electronics Daily. Eggers would not comment on specific aggregators or whether Dolby Digital Plus will be part of the Google TV announcement, set for after our deadline Tuesday.

With more over-the-top (OTT) content coming out in HD, Eggers said, Dolby wants to position Digital Plus as the “essential element” of the immersive surround-sound experience that completes a “cinematic-quality experience.” Most OTT services are using two-channel sound, he said. Eggers touted the scalability of Dolby Digital Plus, which he said enables content providers and aggregators to deliver content in 5.1- or 7.1-channel formats at half to two-thirds the bit rate required for Dolby Digital on DVD. Despite the reduced bit rate, sound quality remains at “DVD quality,” he said. Recent coding efficiencies could meet the needs of OTT delivery and “go all the way up to virtually lossless by adding more bits,” Eggers said. As bandwidth expands, he said, the scalability will enable 7.1-channel delivery for OTT services.

Vudu’s iteration of Dolby Digital Plus uses more efficient coding than the 1.5-Mbps data rate used for HD DVD, Eggers said, although he didn’t know the exact bit rate of the Vudu stream. Dolby has been working with companies to integrate Digital Plus into formats including ASF and MPEG-4 for OTT content delivery, he said.

Dolby is also pushing its volume-leveling technology, Dolby Volume, to the connected TV space. The new frontier presents a welcome opportunity for Dolby, with the House and Senate having recently passed different versions of the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, which would negate the need for a TV chip solution to varied volume levels in the broadcast world. “That only solves one problem,” Eggers said of the bill. “Dolby Volume makes a lot of sense in the new connected environment with so many kinds of content coming into your TV with different volume levels,” he said. “If a TV has all these widgets, you have all these different entertainment sources that need to be balanced.”