Strong Rationale for Requiring 3rd-Party HDR10+ TV Certifications, Says Samsung Point Man

Under just-released terms of the HDR10+ licensing platform (see 1806200045), the Fox-Panasonic-Samsung consortium running the program had a strong rationale for requiring TV makers to submit their sets to third-party certification, while allowing Blu-ray player and over-the-top set-top manufacturers to self-certify, Bill Mandel, Samsung Research America vice president-industry relations, told us at last week’s Advanced Display Summit in West Hollywood, California (see 1806280006). The Blu-ray Disc Association “is just a gigantic organization that’s been around forever and they’re making really commodity products,” said Mandel, Samsung’s HDR10+ project manager. With TVs, “especially TVs that take a premium logo like ‘10+,’ we wanted to just make it kind of transparent to everybody that’s participating,” he said. “We set up these test centers,” including Allion Labs in Japan, TTA in South Korea and BlueFocus in the U.S., he said. For a “source device” like a Blu-ray player or OTT box to be capable of HDR10+, “it needs to be able to generate that VSIF data,” said Mandel of vendor-specific information field protocol. “That would have to be programmed into the firmware.” For a TV, “it needs to understand that that VSIF is coming,” he said. Products lacking that protocol will need to get a firmware update to enable them to render HDR10+, said Mandel. He doesn’t see it as a problem, he said. Each year, “more and more” products will have HDR10+ capability. Samsung has “already committed to upgrading the 2017 TVs to this protocol,” he said. “We’re already running the Amazon protocol” to enable the sets to render the display of Amazon Prime content in HDR10+, he said. Samsung’s 2018 TVs are “already compatible with Amazon,” he said. “We just started the process of adding the VSIF mechanism into those.”