Lack of Standards, Bandwidth Key 4K Video Production Challenges
The CE industry “ran with things before the cake was fully baked,” Matt Smith, chief evangelist for video software platform company Anvato, said of Ultra HD at the Streaming Media East conference in New York. Smith led a panel on the challenges video content and distribution companies face in bringing 4K TV content to market -- including lack of standards -- “because of the notion that they can sell more monitors to us.” Ian Trow, senior director-emerging technology and strategy at Harmonic, said, “Anyone new to the subject would think the standards we've got are a fait accompli, and we're ready to roll.” But issues remain on color space and high dynamic range, he said.
Smith cited a perception in the video industry that “4K will be the next 3D TV where the tail is wagging the dog.” Will Law, chief architect in the Media division at Akamai Technologies, said 4K “doesn’t require new viewing technology,” removing a large barrier to adoption. At its best, 4K is “like having a little IMAX in your house,” Law said, saying 4K has a “much surer and predictable path than 3D ever did.” But looming questions include “how do we generate the content, do we have enough bandwidth to deliver it to the consumer, what are the various ways we can get it to the consumer and when should we start doing that,” he said.
While there’s a lot of talk about 4K at a technical level, business issues, including bandwidth, have yet to be addressed, Law said. The average Netflix stream across the top 10 ISPs is delivered at roughly 2.5 Mbps today, while Amazon, Netflix and Comcast have all announced 4K streaming products that deliver OTT content at 15-20 Mbps, or eight times what Netflix is currently delivering, Smith said. Today, content delivery network operators “have a lot of problems” delivering HD content at 2 Mbps with reliable quality, he said. And on the demand side, Smith said, many post-production facilities that edit medium- and long-form content have said “none of their clients have requested masters of their shows.” It’s a matter of concern that “people who are editing the content aren’t preserving it in 4K permanently,” he said.
Online broadcasting company AEG Digital Media is seeing “a lot of marketing dollars around wanting to be the first to do 4K” among its customers, said Joe Einstein, vice president-operations. A lot of the streaming AEG is doing is being archived in 4K, including conferences and music events, Einstein said. Although 4K is “basically the same production and we take a 1080p master out,” producing content in 4K is “still very hard and really expensive” just to get content to a broadcaster or theater distribution network, he said. That’s before getting the file to a broadcast center, compressing it for the Internet and “trying to deliver an 8-10-12 Mbps streaming file,” he said. Getting from point A to point B with 4K content is “many times more expensive than your traditional HD transmission,” he said.
On content suitability for 4K transmission, Trow said streaming makes much more sense for 4K early on because cinematic assets can be transcoded offline. Live content, such as sports, is “far, far more difficult,” he said. Sky Deutschland has been producing Bundesliga soccer transmissions for streaming, he said, but “there are many, many problems with making that scenario work for true native 4K or UHD content in a [live] TV environment.”
On a question about whether its production trucks could do a live football broadcast with an unlimited budget, AEG’s Einstein said its 3D truck could do 4K by swapping in 4K cameras and routing the signal, but it wouldn’t be able to do graphics or slow-motion -- “the things that make a production.” The company’s live 4K transmissions have been with opera productions where there are no graphics, he said. “It’s like the early days of HD,” he said of the relatively primitive content. “There are lots of closeups of a flower.”