Deborah D. McAdams / 10.26.2012 01:55PM
McAdams On: Ultra HD
Where?
WOOT: Higher-definition TV was upper-cased this week by the good folks of
the Consumer Electronics Association, who decided to name 4KTV “Ultra-HD,” I
guess because they could. It might also have something to do with eclipsing the
use of another numeral in front of the abbreviation for television. That didn’t
go so well the last time around.
So now the CEA is BFF-ing TV again, after years of dissing it in favor of
smartphones and tablets and anything not TV. Recall that the CEA went steady with broadcasting during HDTV adoption. Then
things got rough and the two tried 3DTV, but the CEA was already cheating with
smartphones and completely forgot what broadcasting once meant to it.
Now the bloom is perhaps fading off the smartphone. There is increasing
evidence that the explosion in data consumption by smartphones is a function of
imaginary
calculus. And new
iDevices are seeming more and more like the old iDevices with the word
“new” in front of them. When the innovation gets pretend, a gaping hole appears
in the pipeline feeding our cultural addiction to technology —in this case,
video technology. Ultra-HD is perfectly poised to fill the void because it’s A) been around for a
few years, B) it’s easy to understand the concept, and C) it doesn’t require shutter
glasses.
The irony, however, is that while content can now be produced and displayed in
Ultra-HD, the likelihood of being able to watch
something in Ultra-HD is going to be slight for some time to come. Regular old
HDTV hasn’t even caught up with itself as far as viewing. More people have HDTV
sets than watch HDTV content. Nielsen recently reported that more than
three-quarters of U.S. households now have an HDTV set, with less than half
watching primetime in HD. @_@
The most probable explanation has to do with how cable and satellite present
HD. There’s the channel lineup, first of all. At my house, if you didn’t know
that all the HD channels are in the 600s, you’d never find them. And if you
didn’t know it was supposedly the HD tier, you’d never figure it out, because
it does not look significantly different from the SD tier. Despite what pay TV
operators would have the Federal Communications Commission believe about how
broadcasters are bleeding them with retransmission, they themselves are soaking
subscribers for HD content apparently transmitted at near-SD bit rates.
I wonder if far-flung systems are as careful about carriage contract bit rates
as those in New York, where network executives are eagle-eyeing resolution. I
don’t know how many alleged high-definition feeds I’ve seen myself that someone
appears to be proudly transmitting at 2.5 Mbps. There are still plenty of
multichannel infrastructures that don’t even support HD. There is only one
that’s widely available and to be had for the price of an antenna, which is of
course, over-the-air.
With regard to Ultra HD, broadcasters unfortunately are hamstrung as long as
they’re stuck with doing their primary channel in MPEG-2. Maybe the FCC, in its ongoing bid to be fair
or a reasonable facsimile thereof, should consider dispensing with the MPEG-2
requirement and let broadcasters sort out compression themselves. Clearly, it
should be an adaptive scheme, with software updatable receivers. This is
particularly relevant with the FCC fixin’ to shove two or more stations into
one 6 MHz allotment. The incentive auction proposal could at least put a bullet
in MPEG-2.
Something’s gotta give, because our good friends at the CEA started pushing
Ultra-HD TV sets at a Los Angeles-area electronics store this week. On account
of Christmas, you know. TWICE reports
that “more than 1,000 customers” were waiting for the sets to go on sale
yesterday. Forget that nothing can actually be had in 4K for these new sets. Something tells me that didn’t come
up on the showroom floor. - -