Evoca Aims to Be First ATSC 3.0 Service With 4K HDR10+ Support

Harmonic added HDR10+ support to its VOS360 cloud streaming platform and is doing the “first trial” of that enhancement with Evoca, an ATSC 3.0-based pay-TV service, said Harmonic Thursday. The Samsung-developed HDR10+ technology, supported by more than 130 companies, “adds dynamic metadata to HDR10 source files to optimize the color contrast and image details of each frame of the HDR video to the consumer's display capabilities,” said Harmonic. Evoca “could become the world's first ATSC 3.0 service that offers an ultra-high-definition channel encoded by HDR10+ for exceptional high dynamic range," said Michael Chase, Evova vice president-systems. Evoca "has been broadcasting a 4K stream over our 3.0 system for close to two years," emailed CEO Todd Achilles. With Evoca's carriage of Insight TV, "we are the only U.S. broadcaster with a full-time 4K channel over-the-air," he said. "HDR10+ is a new encoding format that offered more efficiency without sacrificing quality," said Achilles. "Collectively with Samsung and Harmonic, we encoded our 4K feed using HDR10+ and then watched it on a Samsung TV -- and everything worked great! This was just an initial test, but the results are very encouraging.”