Four companies have joined the UHD Alliance, the group told the FTC and Attorney General Loretta Lynch in Sept. 10 written notifications, according to a notice published in Tuesday’s Federal Register by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. The new members are Fraunhofer, of Germany; HiSilicon, of China; Novatek, of Taiwan; and Sharp, of Japan, the notice said. The notifications to the FTC and DOJ were required to extend antitrust protections to UHD Alliance members under the National Cooperative Research and Production Act of 1993, the notice said.

Key Digital introduced the Champion Series KD-4x4CSK and KD-8x8CSK HDMI matrix switchers with 4K Ultra HD support. The switchers send 4/8 HDMI sources to 4/8 HDMI outputs and support resolutions from SD up to 4Kx2K/60 [4:2:0] and 4Kx2K/30/25/24 [4:4:4], Key Digital said. Both switchers can pass 3D stereoscopic signal formats, it said.

The HEVC Advance patent pool for H.265 intellectual property licensing took the opportunity of announcing its first new member to disclose it's getting some industry pushback to its plan to charge high royalty fees on the licensing of H.265 content and devices. HEVC Advance is "actively soliciting input from market participants and considering adjustments to arrive at a royalty structure that enables continued and rapid adoption of HEVC and brings the associated benefits to stakeholders within the media and technology industries," the company said Wednesday. “We have received significant market feedback, particularly on content fees, and will adjust fees to support widespread use of HEVC,” CEO Pete Moller said in a statement. That HEVC Advance will charge a royalty on HEVC content and come to market with a high-priced, two-tier structure for royalty treatment in different parts of the world are but two of many stark differences that set it apart from the alternative HEVC patent pool run by MPEG LA when HEVC Advance announced its licensing regime in late July (see 1507220001). In contrast to HEVC Advance, MPEG LA charges only a 20-cents-per-unit hardware royalty across the board for the use of HEVC codecs with no delineation for the type of device, and allows a hardware supplier licensee its first 100,000 units royalty-free, said a summary of the HEVC license agreement posted this month at the MPEG LA website. MPEG LA also caps a supplier’s royalty obligation at $25 million a year, the summary said. As for HEVC Advance's new member, it's MediaTek, the prominent manufacturer of systems-on-a-chip semiconductors for mobile and home entertainment devices. “The addition of MediaTek will substantially enhance the value of the HEVC Advance patent pool for our customers and is a significant step in realizing our goal of bringing HEVC to the global market by providing an efficient and transparent means to acquire necessary and high quality patent rights, at scale, in a fair, reasonable and balanced manner,” said Moller. “We continue to make great strides in building a substantial portfolio of high-quality HEVC essential patents available for license as we march toward our official launch in the fourth quarter.”

The 65-inch OLED 4K TV that Panasonic introduced at IFA will be priced at 7,999 pounds (about $12,440) when it goes on sale in the U.K. in October or November, Panasonic U.K. spokeswoman Helen Wilson emailed us Friday. Her email confirmed speculation at IFA that the set, model TX-65CZ950, would sell for about 8,000 pounds (see 1509020025). Nothing has been decided about pricing or availability of the TX-65CZ950 in the U.S. market, Panasonic North America representatives have told us.

Arianespace will launch the BSAT-4a satellite for Japan's Broadcasting Satellite System (B-SAT) in late 2017, it said in a Monday news release. The launch on an Ariane 5 rocket will be from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, under a contract between satellite manufacturer SSL and B-SAT. Arianespace has launched all of B-SAT's satellites. BSAT-4a is to provide digital broadcast services to Japan, including 4K and 8K Ultra HD TV services. Japanese broadcasters have earmarked the debut of 8K Ultra HD TV services in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

MaxLinear will debut a multichannel satellite Ultra HD set-top box and media server reference design at the IBC show in Amsterdam, it said Friday. The reference design, done jointly with Quantenna and STMicroelectronics, uses MaxLinear's MxL5xx satellite receivers, ST’s STiH418 4Kp60 Ultra HD decoder and Quantenna’s QSR1000 Wave 2 Wi-Fi chipset, MaxLinear said.

Sony launched a 4K Super 35mm camcorder Friday that it said fills a gap between its pro-grade PXW-FS7 and NEX-FS700 models and its consumer lineup of a7R II and a7S II video cameras. The new PXW-FS5 targets a user base including documentary and independent film makers, online content creators, student film makers and DSLR users looking to step up, said the company. At just under 2 pounds, the camera is light enough for handheld operation and it can be mounted on a drone, said the company. The PXW-FS5 is the first Super35 camcorder with built-in electronic variable neutral density filters, which expand depth of field representation by the large-format 11.6 million-pixel sensor and also enable flexible exposure control, Sony said. List prices are $6,699 for the PXW-FS5 body and $7,299 with lens, it said.

TV sales trends at Conn’s “have turned positive after passing the difficult comparisons for the World Cup a year ago,” CEO Theo Wright said on an earnings call. TV same-store sales comparisons were positive for both July and August, Wright said Wednesday. Three-quarters of the TVs Conn’s sold in August were Ultra HD models, he said: “This is now the primary television technology at higher price points. We’re optimistic about the impact of better assortment and price point distribution, as we head into the holiday period for television.”

Satellites are the “optimal means of transmitting Ultra HD content to large audiences” because of their “bandwidth availability” and their global “footprints,” SES said in a white paper released Thursday at the IBC show in Amsterdam. That enables viewers “to receive the same quality signal wherever they may be located within the satellite coverage area,” said the paper, which extols the SES Ultra HD technology and marketing story. “And the best part is, satellites are Ultra HD ready and require no modification to accommodate Ultra HD transmissions.” Without H.265 compression, Ultra HD transmissions would be “prohibitively expensive for broadcasters and service providers,” it said. H.265 “has made inroads and already helps broadcasters today to transmit Ultra HD at less than four times the HD capacity,” it said. “As one of the largest digital video platforms in the world, SES has supported these developments right from the start. Home to over 40 direct-to-home TV platforms and nearly 7,000 TV channels, reaching 312 million households and 1.1 billion people worldwide, SES is in the pole position to drive Ultra HD forward.”

Ultra HD is tracking to become an “established feature” of TVs by 2020, Strategy Analytics said in a Wednesday report. The research firm predicts global sales of Ultra HD TVs this year may exceed 30 million units, and by 2020, six of 10 TVs sold annually will be Ultra HD, it said. Consumer “familiarity” with Ultra HD also continues to rise, it said. Of 2,000 U.S. consumers it canvassed in August, nearly two-thirds had heard of Ultra HD, and 30 percent claimed to have seen it in a home or retail store, it said. Of those claiming to have seen Ultra HD, 95 percent said they were either “extremely” or “somewhat” impressed with it, it said.