Here are some audio and video trends for 2018.
Buying headphones in 2018 is going to be a fragmented mess because of a silent goodbye to the 3.5mm audio plug, Majority of new headphones introduced at CES were wireless and there are several different wireless systems. Bluetooth audio has historically sacrificed sound quality for convenience relative to a wired connection. However, there are a couple of standards now that promise “better-than-CD” audio quality. For wired connections where we once had the solid reliability of a 3.5mm analog connector working with any jack shaped to receive it, there’s now a divergence of digital alternatives:Lightning, USB-C, and Sony’s 4.4mm Pentaconn connector.
Voice, connectivity and AI took center stage at the Consumer Electronics Show. Alexa Skills and the Voice Experience is really getting off. With over 15 million Amazon Echo devices shipped and 244 million projected by 2022 it is expected to take lead with Google Home Assistant and Apple Homepod with Siri following. Also Google Assistant was mentioned a lot in CES. Google Sold 6.75 Million ‘Google Home’ Devices In the Last 80 Days. ‘Language assistants were a big topic at this year’s CES. More and more manufacturers like JBL and Creative are integrating smart helpers into their WLAN speakers. Alexa support comes to 2018 TVs from Sony, Hisense and LG. Google launches smart displays with JBL, Lenovo, LG and Sony. There will be also other competitors aiming to this market, for example “China’s Google,” shouted out most loudly for voice. Microsoft’s Cortana had a crappy CES so it seems that Amazon Alexa will soon arrive on Windows PCs (HP, ASUS, Acer and others). Introducing Single-Chip Solutions for Building Alexa-Enabled Products.Sony launches a bunch of new headphones and adds Google Assistant functionality to the line.
Binaural, ambisonic, spatial, surround, 3D will be talked about. The most accessible exhibitions of this technology are in Youtube VR and Facebook 360, where users can interact with 360º videos that contain spatial audio. AR/VR was hot topic at CES 2018.
Sound bars are popular for compact home theater setups. Traditional home cinema systems with AV receivers and large speaker arsenals are only used by film and sound enthusiasts who sacrifice space in the living room for this purpose.
People listen to four hours of audio content every day. Streaming platforms like Spotify take a big bit of that. Streaming accounts for 41% of music consumption was the 2017’s most jaw dropping statistic. People will also listen a lot of music from YouTube.
Acoustics-based NFC is being pushed to market as it requires only a microphone and speaker, eliminating tags and chips. Chirp and LISNR are two emerging companies facilitating soundwave communication.
Wireless headphones and speakers become more common. Portable loudspeakers without cables are more popular than ever with music listeners. Most popular connection technology is Bluetooth.More and more manufacturers are breaking away from the cable and are showing new models and updates of completely wireless in-ear headphones at the CES 2018.
There is a bit of nostalgia involved: Several traditional technology tries to make come-back in 2018. The traditionalists among the music lovers continue to use records, so new record players keep coming. Cassette tapes making a comeback thanks to young, independent artists. Artists like Justin Bieber, Eminem and Metallica have all put out material on tape recently as a recent blockbuster film “Guardians of the Galaxy” put a hero center stage with a Sony Walkman. Tube amplifiers are back for traditionalist audiophiles that think that tubes can make your music to sound better.
4K video resolution is hot and 8K going to be pushed to market. TV has progressed to the 4K ultra-high-definition stage with its 3,840 × 2,160 pixel resolution. LG Display has made a 65-inch rollable 4K OLED TV. LG displayed 8K OLED TV at CES. Samsung has technology scales the image resolution to a 8K with AI. LG, Panasonic, and TCL put the spotlight on the chips that do the video processing: For the foreseeable future, any advances in image quality will be coming from these chips, not from the displays themselves.
Welcome ATSC 3.0 in USA: In November, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued new rules that will let TV broadcasters adopt the next-generation wireless TV standard designated ATSC 3.0. This new standard defines the specifications for ultra-high-definition (UHD) or 4K over-the-air (OTA) digital TV. But over-the-air is minority in USA as roughly 75% of households pay for their TV reception for cable or satellite distribution.
Home theater headsets have come a long way. AR/VR is hot. Oculus partners with Xiaomi to launch the Oculus Go and Mi VR Standalone.
Wired peripherals and electronics are still a major part of the market. Cabling for AV systems will have new features: a new HDMI standard and how active cables will provide both power and video to consumer devices.
3D cameras are hot. HP’s Z 3D Camera puts Sprout’s scanning power on your PC. Intel’s new cameras add human-like 3D vision to any machine.
When almost all AV products are pushing more and more features, it seems that almost Everything is too complicated for an average Joe.
Sources:
https://www.smartbrief.com/original/2018/01/10-audio-marketing-trends-2018
http://www.computerbild.de/artikel/avf-News-Audio-Trends-CES-2018-11264743.html
https://www.marketplace.org/2017/11/22/business/cassette-tapes-make-comeback
http://aeaaudio.com/why-tubes-are-back-and-how-to-get-in-on-it/
https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/coolest-best-audio-gadgets-ces-2018/
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/18/16903516/headphones-wireless-analog-jack-future-ces-2018
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/08/alexa-support-comes-to-2018-tvs-from-sony-and-hisense/
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332845
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYhgJlEn880
http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/7368-tekoaly-skaalaa-televisiokuvan-8k-tarkkuuteen
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/6/16859102/lg-display-rollable-oled-65-inch-ces-2018
https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/08/eagle-wearable-home-theater/
http://www.electronicdesign.com/community-home/free-tv-keeps-getting-better-welcome-atsc-30
https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/18/intel-realsense-ready-to-use-depth-cameras/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/hps-z-3d-camera-puts-sprouts-scanning-power-on-your-pc/
841 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
The surveillance camera learns to see almost in the dark
Semiconductor’s new CMOS cells are now in the near-infrared area.
NIR Area (Near Infrared) is usually spoken at wavelengths of 700 to 2500 nanometers. ON Sem’s new CMOS cells are AR0522 and AR0431. They are also the first CMOS cells operating in the NIR area.
The AR0522 sensor is a ½, 5-inch 5.1 megapixel image sensor based on a 2.2 micron backlit display. It is specifically designed for low-light high-resolution industrial video cameras.
AR0431 is a 1 / 3.2-inch four-megapixel cell with a pixel size of 2.2 microns. You can tell up to 120 frames in the frame rate. This is particularly suitable for surveillance applications requiring slow motion video.
NIR technology, developed by Sem, improves the quantum efficiency of an image sensor, i.e. how well a cell captures information in different areas of the spectrum without the quality of color in the visible light region deteriorating.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/7829-valvontakamera-oppii-nakemaan-lahes-pimeassa
Tomi Engdahl says:
Who Made the First Human Audio Recordings? Edison? Not so Fast!
https://hackaday.com/2018/04/09/who-made-the-first-human-audio-recordings-edison-not-so-fast/
You probably learned in school that Thomas Edison was the first human voice recorded, reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb. As it turns out though, that’s not strictly true. Edison might have been the first person to play his voice back, but he wasn’t the first to deliberately record. That honor goes to a French inventor named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Light L16 camera review: futuristic frustration
A fantastic piece of technology that’s only slightly greater than the sum of its parts
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/4/10/17218758/light-l16-review-camera-photos
The Light L16 camera is an engineering marvel. It takes 16 different smartphone-sized imaging modules, each carefully aligned behind a piece of glass, and uses them in concert with each other to create images that are bigger and better-looking than the results the individual cameras are capable of. It does all this in a form factor that’s two or three times thicker than, but not quite as wide as, an iPad mini, something that actually fits in a few pockets and is easy enough to stow in a bag. That’s Light’s selling point for this $2,000 camera: the L16 is ostensibly a full bag of camera gear in one body.
At a very high level, this is the experience of using the L16. With a scrub of your thumb across the 5-inch touchscreen, you can quickly zoom from a 28mm wide-angle perspective to a 150mm telephoto view or anywhere in between.
Otherwise, the L16 is mostly a bother. The photos it takes are in a strange-quality limbo between smartphone images and something that was shot with a mirrorless or DSLR camera. The camera handles slower, contemplative photography just fine, but it had trouble keeping up when I photographed more demanding scenes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Senate Committee on the Judiciary:
Full video: Mark Zuckerberg’s first hearing before Congress, titled “Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data”; hearing begins at 40:07 — Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation DATE: Tuesday, April 10 …
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/facebook-social-media-privacy-and-the-use-and-abuse-of-data
Tomi Engdahl says:
Washington Post:
Full transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s first day of congressional hearings —
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Issie Lapowsky / Wired:
Facebook confirms some users’ private messages were collected by quiz app that Cambridge Analytica used to glean data, says 1,500 people were affected — THE DATA CONSULTING firm Cambridge Analytica, which harvested as many as 87 million Facebook users’ personal data, also could have accessed …
Cambridge Analytica Could Also Access Private Facebook Messages
https://www.wired.com/story/cambridge-analytica-private-facebook-messages
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michelle Castillo / CNBC:
Facebook debuts a Data Abuse Bounty to reward those who report misuse of data by app devs; payouts are for cases affecting 10K+ users and range from $500-$40K
Facebook is offering a $40,000 bounty if you find the next Cambridge Analytica
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-will-pay-up-to-40000-if-you-find-a-big-data-leak.html
Facebook is launching a data abuse bounty program to ask its users to help it find companies using unauthorized data.
It will pay from $500 to upward of $40,000 for substantiated cases.
Only Facebook is included in the program at this time, not other platforms like Instagram.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Top Music Videos Including ‘Despacito’ Defaced by Hackers
https://www.securityweek.com/top-music-videos-including-despacito-defaced-hackers
Some of the most popular music videos on YouTube including mega-hit “Despacito” momentarily disappeared Tuesday in an apparent hacking.
Fans looking for videos by top artists including Drake, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift found the footage removed and replaced by messages that included “Free Palestine.”
Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” — the most-watched video of all time at five billion views — was briefly replaced by an image of a gun-toting gang in red hoods that appeared to come from the Spanish series “Money Heist.”
Most videos were back up by early Tuesday US time but some still had defaced captions, which boasted of hacking by a duo calling themselves Prosox and Kuroi’SH.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OTT more a complement than a competitor to pay TV
http://www.broadbandtechreport.com/articles/2018/04/ott-more-a-complement-than-a-competitor-to-pay-tv.html?cmpid=enl_btr_weekly_2018-04-10&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24
According to Parks Associates, U.S. broadband households report their average monthly expenditure on video entertainment outside of a pay TV subscription has dropped from $29 in the past two years to $23 in the last half of 2017. The research house says spending on Internet video has held steady at roughly $9 per month for several years, while reduced spending on cinema tickets and DVDs/Blu-ray discs contributed significantly to the overall decline. Other Parks research also indicates a decline in multiplatform usage among households, as use rates on individual screens declined despite the fact that overall video viewing has held steady.
“The number of overall consumers viewing video on a connected device remains steady at 92% of U.S. broadband households, but viewers are using fewer devices to access that content,” said Brett Sappington, Parks’ senior director. “This finding indicates that consumers are starting to settle into particular viewing habits. They are focusing more on their favorite screen and connected devices and are reducing time spent on other video screens.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Leap Motion Announces Open Source Augmented Reality Headset
https://hackaday.com/2018/04/10/leap-motion-announces-open-source-augmented-reality-headset/
Leap Motion just dropped what may be the biggest tease in Augmented and Virtual Reality since Google Cardboard. The North Star is an augmented reality head-mounted display that boasts some impressive specs:
Dual 1600×1440 LCDs
120Hz refresh rate
100 degree FOV
Cost under $100 (in volume)
Open Source Hardware
Built-in Leap Motion camera for precise hand tracking
Tomi Engdahl says:
Blackmagic 4K Pocket Cinema MFT camera officially announced
https://www.43rumors.com/blackmagic-4k-pocket-cinema-mft-camera-officially-announced/
Those are the key specs (here is the PDF with the full specs):
– MFT mount
– HDR sensor
– 12-bit RAW cinema 4K 60fps and full HD at up to 120fps
– 13 stops Dynamic Range
– dual native ISO up to 25,600
– external RAW recording
– 12-bit CinemaDNG RAW and 10-bit Apple ProRes 422 (HQ)
– 5 inch touch screen
– USB-C and standard sized HDMI
– Canon LP-E6N or locking DC12 volt power connection
– SD/UHS-II and CFast
– Bluetooth wireless camera control
– 3.5mm audio jack+mini XLR and headphone jack
– $1,250 (includes a copy of DaVinci Resolve Studio normally priced at $299.00)
Tomi Engdahl says:
The current state of Linux video editing 2018
https://opensource.com/article/18/4/new-state-video-editing-linux?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
Linux is a big deal in modern movie-making. Whether you’re a hobbyist or a professional, you can find Linux software that meets your needs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 Fascinating Food Photography Tricks Revealed
https://www.healthyway.com/content/fascinating-food-photography-tricks-revealed/
We can never look at photos of food the same way again
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook is adding AR drawing to Facebook Camera in the coming weeks and rolling out Instagram’s Boomerang loops to it now — You’ll soon be able to draw on the world around you and shoot back-and-forth Instagram Boomerang GIFs with the Facebook Camera. Bringing additional creative tools …
Facebook Stories adds funky AR drawing and Instagram’s Boomerang
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/12/facebook-3d-drawing/
“We wanted to give people an easy way to create with augmented reality and draw in the world around them” says John Barnett, a Facebook Camera Product Manager about the feature it calls “3D drawing”. It’s rolling out to users over the coming weeks. Matt Navarra first spotted the features.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Comcast:
Comcast plans to include Netflix with its TV bundles starting this month and gives no details about pricing; it will handle Netflix billing for customers
Comcast And Netflix Expand Partnership Following Successful Xfinity X1 Integration
https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/comcast-and-netflix-expand-partnership-following-successful-xfinity-x1-integration
Comcast and Netflix today announced an expansion of their partnership that will provide Comcast the ability to include a Netflix subscription in new and existing Xfinity packages. In 2016, Comcast launched Netflix on the X1 platform, offering customers a fully integrated entertainment experience featuring voice control and seamless access to the Netflix service. Netflix has quickly become one of the most popular voice searches and highly-viewed services on the platform; and among households watching Netflix on X1, X1 has quickly become the most used platform for Netflix viewing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Week In Review: Design
https://semiengineering.com/the-week-in-review-design-125/
Fraunhofer IIS uncorked its first JPEG XS codec implementation for video production. JPEG XS allows transferring high-resolution video data over standard Ethernet or other wired connections and is optimized for the use with mezzanine compression when high image quality data has to be transferred via limited bandwidth or has to be processed with limited computing resources.
Fraunhofer IIS’s MPEG-H TV Audio System was integrated into products from Ericsson and Innopia. Ericsson’s contribution-path encode/decode solution allows broadcasters to generate an MPEG-H bitstream with all the necessary metadata at the site of an event and transport it back to the studio for further processing and final emission. Innopia’s set-top-box for the Korean market incorporates an ATSC 3.0 tuner that can connects to any TV with HDMI inputs to receive terrestrial UHD TV broadcasts, along with broadband-delivered content, with MPEG-H 3D Audio.
Tomi Engdahl says:
These Celebrity Portraits Are Fake. Sort of
https://www.wired.com/story/celebrity-portraits-gallery/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stereo vision system measures connector pin height and position
https://www.vision-systems.com/articles/print/volume-23/issue-3/features/stereo-vision-system-measures-connector-pin-height-and-position.html?cmpid=enl_vsd_vsd_newsletter_2018-04-16&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24&eid=289644432&bid=2068224
Engineers at Eberhard (Schlierbach, Germany; http://www.eberhard-ag.com), a builder of high-speed connector production equipment, have developed a machine vision system that simultaneously measures connector pin height and position without contact.
The new optical inspection system improves accuracy and reduces costs when compared to existing contact test methods, which typically require two different stations and complex, product-specific adapters, says Dr.-Ing. Bjoern Haller, head of development at Eberhard.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Qualcomm Brings AI, Vision Processing to IoT
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333185
After surpassing $1 billion in IoT revenue in FY2017, Qualcomm is announcing new product families purpose-built for IoT applications. The company began by announcing a new family of IoT chipsets, the QCS603 and QCS605, along with software and reference designs, all dubbed the Qualcomm Vision Intelligence Platform. The platform brings the image and artificial intelligence (AI) processing capabilities found on its Snapdragon chipsets for premium smartphones to a wide range of consumer and industrial applications.
The new QCS chipsets and other elements of the platform will leverage the latest technology from Qualcomm. The chipsets will leverage the same kind of AI processing solution in the latest Snapdragon 845 smartphone processors called the Artificial Intelligence Engine (AIE). The AIE takes advantage of the heterogeneous chip architecture that that combines the Kryo 300 CPU cores, Hexagon 685 Vector Processor, and Adreno 615 GPU into a single system-on-chip. In addition, the Vision Intelligence Platform includes an integrated Spectra 270 ISP that supports dual-16 MP image sensors. The platform also includes other image technologies to improve the overall image performance, including staggered HDR, advanced electronic image stabilization, dewarp, de-noise, chromatic aberration correction, and motion compensated temporal filters.
Tomi Engdahl says:
YouTube CEO addresses demonetization, ignores frustrated small creators
Susan Wojcicki also announced a pilot program to patch over its spotty monetization algorithms
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/17/17249016/youtube-ceo-addresses-demonetization-partners-program-advertising
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced in a blog post today that YouTube will be launching a pilot program with a small group of users in an attempt to address and ameliorate its creators’ continued concerns regarding demonetization and other recent, largely unpopular changes to the YouTube Partners Program.
In the post, which was largely an update from the past year and in particular the past few months, Wojcicki acknowledged the frustrations of many content creators who have voiced their concerns, saying that the last two weeks had been “challenging” and that YouTube was “committed to communicate more with all of you,” while trumpeting that “channels earning five figures annually grew more than 35 percent, while channels earning six figures annually grew more than 40 percent.”
An Update on Our 2018 Priorities
https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/04/an-update-on-our-2018-priorities.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Simon Usborne / The Guardian:
With 125M subscribers, Netflix has become so powerful it can snub Cannes but TV and film execs fear what that means for the future of the industry
Netflix’s ‘new world order’: a streaming giant on the brink of global domination
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/apr/17/netflixs-new-world-order-a-streaming-giant-on-the-brink-of-global-domination
The online entertainment company, which boasts 125 million subscribers, has become so powerful it can even afford to snub Cannes. Are cinephiles – and conventional broadcasters – right to fear for the future?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Matthew Garrahan / Financial Times:
Sources: Netflix plans to spend ~$1B on original productions in Europe this year, more than double what it spent last year, across multiple languages — Netflix will escalate its assault on European broadcasters by sharply increasing its content investment across the continent …
Netflix plots $1bn European investment drive
US streaming service will double production budget in region in 2018
https://www.ft.com/content/952029b0-4311-11e8-93cf-67ac3a6482fd
plans to spend about $1bn on original productions this year.
The company will expand both its English and foreign language offerings, with new dramas going into production in Spain, Germany, Italy, France, Poland, Turkey and the Netherlands.
targeting an international market of 700m broadband-enabled households.
More than 73m of Netflix subscribers come from outside the US, with the remainder based in its home market.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This “Obama” Video Should Absolutely Terrify You
http://www.iflscience.com/technology/this-fake-obama-video-highlights-the-growing-danger-of-deepfake-videos/
A video produced by BuzzFeed has highlighted the growing problem of DeepFake videos, as it becomes easier than ever to make celebrities appear to say and do anything.
“This is now going to be the new reality, surely by 2020, but potentially as early as this year.”
And this Obama video highlights that, while the technology is still fairly complex, it is getting both easier and better. Remember that if something you watch seems unbelievable, well, it just might be.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HDMI 2.1 For A More Immersive Viewing Experience
https://semiengineering.com/hdmi-2-1-for-a-more-immersive-viewing-experience/
From uncompressed 8K to Dynamic HDR, the latest specification presents a leap forward in capabilities.
With the advent of richer television and gaming content, consumers’ expectations have gone from ultra-high-resolution 4K displays to 10K with finer image details, more color gamut, and higher bandwidth. To deliver premium content to digital televisions and trending HDMI-based mobile devices, the HDMI Forum recently announced the HDMI specification, version 2.1. The re-architected HDMI 2.1 offers new features and capabilities including higher video resolutions (7680×4320 or 8K and 10240×4320 or 10K), more vivid colors and brightness, higher-quality and more sophisticated audio format, and a fluid gaming experience. This article describes HDMI 2.1’s key enhancements such as: uncompressed 8K resolution, Dynamic HDR, enhanced Audio Return Channel (eARC), and Enhanced Refresh Rate.
Higher bandwidth
An uncompressed 8K resolution, at 60 frames-per-second, requires transmission of a vast amount of data at up to 48 gigabits per second (Gbps) from a source device to a sink or display device via a single HDMI link or cable.
a typical 4K video at 60 frames-per-second demands up to 18 Gbps bandwidth. To transmit the additional pixels, the HDMI 2.1 specification provides:
Packetized low-layer transport with fixed rate link which greatly improves the efficiency of data transmission
Embedded clock scheme that frees up one more differential signal pairs for data transmission
Dynamic HDR
High Dynamic Range (HDR) allows more accurate color depth and transfers more luminous and detailed images/videos to the display. It greatly improves the quality and viewing experience for consumers regardless of content resolution and display size.
The HDMI 2.0 specification supported HDR; however, it was static meaning the image/video data packet was transmitted with a constant value stream for color depth, detail, brightness, etc.
To overcome this limitation, the HDMI 2.1 specification supports Dynamic HDR by encompassing a more capable metadata in the HDMI link called Extended Metadata Packet (EMP). EMP transmits multiple sets of HDR data frame by frame or scene by scene.
Enhanced Audio Return Channel (eARC)
Because of modern digital televisions’ slim chassis and thin bezel design, not much physical space is allocated to speakers which may force consumers to purchase a separate speaker system. In the past, consumers connected these speakers with a pair of analog signals (a cable with red and white banana connectors) or a TOSLINK (a fiber optic cable). These configurations did not provide enough bandwidth for the best sound quality. To overcome this limitation, HDMI introduced Audio Return Channel (ARC), which allowed transmission of the highest quality audio format, via two signals, in the HDMI interface.
Enhanced Refresh Rate
Gaming content is generated and displayed differently than video content for traditional consumer electronic devices. Some gaming content contains static images that don’t have many moving objects (simple frames), and some may contain many moving parts and dynamic objects (complicated frames) where the GPU needs more time to generate and process. To provide a smoother gaming experience, HDMI 2.1 supports Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and Quick Frame Transport (QFT) features which allow transmission of simpler frames as soon as they are generated so more time is allocated to the complicated frames that are within the same bandwidth.
In addition, gaming content requires a more fluid viewing experience at 50 to 60 frames-per-second versus a “movie-like” experience that requires only 24 frames-per-second.
Summary
The advent of rich video and graphic content is challenging the display market to enable 4K, 8K, and even 10K ultra-high resolutions. The requirement for more pixels and transmission bandwidth is driving different requirements for television, smartphone, and gaming displays.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Installer kits allow for near-invisible fiber-optic HDMI cabling
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/pt/2018/04/installer-kits-allow-for-near-invisible-fiber-optic-hdmi-cabling.html?cmpid=enl_cim_cim_data_center_newsletter_2018-04-19&pwhid=e8db06ed14609698465f1047e5984b63cb4378bd1778b17304d68673fe5cbd2798aa8300d050a73d96d04d9ea94e73adc417b4d6e8392599eabc952675516bc0&eid=293591077&bid=2073559
The Inneos InvisiCable is a complete HDMI 2.0 fiber cable solution that employs its Real4K optical adapters, along with translucent SSF optical fiber that is capable of disappearing in home or office environments. Designed to support today’s state-of-the-art A/V formats, the 18Gbps fiber cabling solution is capable of transmitting true, uncompressed 4K UltraHD content, as well as other formats such as high dynamic range (HDR) 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, high refresh rates, object-based surround sound including Dolby Atmos, and future formats.
Inneos InvisiCable Kits Allow Near-Invisible Fiber Optic HDMI Cabling
The Inneos Fiber HDMI 2.0 cable can be used by integrators to connect HDMI components needing 18Gbps connectivity.
https://www.cepro.com/article/inneos_invisicable_kits_near-invisible_fiber_optic_hdmi_cabling
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jessica Guynn / USA Today:
Photo-sharing and storage company SmugMug acquires Flickr from Oath, promises to revitalize and maintain Flickr as a standalone service — SAN FRANCISCO — Flickr has been snapped up by Silicon Valley photo-sharing and storage company SmugMug, USA TODAY has learned.
Exclusive: Flickr bought by SmugMug, which vows to revitalize the photo service
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/04/20/smugmug-buys-flickr-verizon-oath/537377002/
Flickr has been snapped up by Silicon Valley photo-sharing and storage company SmugMug, USA TODAY has learned.
SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill told USA TODAY he’s committed to breathing new life into the faded social networking pioneer, which hosted photos and lively interactions long before it became trendy.
SmugMug, an independent, family-run company, will maintain Flickr as a standalone community of amateur and professional photographers
The surprise deal ends months of uncertainty for Flickr, whose fate had been up in the air since last year when Yahoo was bought by Verizon for $4.5 billion and joined with AOL in Verizon’s Oath subsidiary.
Traffic has shrunk from its heyday, but Flickr says it has more than 75 million registered photographers and more than 100 million unique users who post tens of billions of photos. In March, Flickr had 13.1 million unique visitors, up from 10.8 million a year earlier, according to research firm comScore.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Watch how Steven Spielberg framed ‘Ready Player One’ shots in VR
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/watch-how-steven-spielberg-framed-ready-player-one-shots-in-vr/?utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook
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Watch how Steven Spielberg framed ‘Ready Player One’ shots in VR
Lucas Matney
19 hours ago
Despite plenty of skepticism over early trailers and the source material itself, Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One has been doing very well at the box office. En mi opinion, it made a lot of quality shifts from the book that made it a quality popcorn flick that wasn’t too nerdishly pretentious.
A lot of people in the virtual reality industry had sky-high expectations for the movie to drive people to buying VR headsets, and while that probably isn’t happening, the movie has given an opportunity to a lot of these insiders to showcase how far the technology has come. Today, HTC released a video showing how VR was used in the production of Ready Player One by the actors and the man himself, Steven Spielberg.
The video offers a healthy chunk of heavy-handed PR for Vive. Nevertheless, what’s cool about the video is what it showcases about how acting has changed because of visual effects
Tomi Engdahl says:
Instead of stealing instruments, musicians turn to Splice
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/16/splice-sounds/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
They used it to make your next favorite song
The percentage of Top 40 music made with our platform blows my mind,” says Splice co-founder Steve Martocci.
collaborate with famous DJ Zedd, resulting in the Billboard No. 12 hit “Starving.”
Splice has attracted $47 million in funding to power this all-new music economy. That might be a shock, considering Martocci estimates that 95 percent of digital instruments and sample packs are pirated because they’re often expensive with no try-before-you-buy option. Even Kanye West got caught stealing the trendy Serum digital synthesizer.
But Splice lets artists pay $7.99 per month to download up to 100 samples they can use royalty-free to create music. That’s cheaper than it costs to listen to music on Spotify. Splice then compensates artists based on how frequently their sounds are downloaded
Splice Studio integrates with composition software like GarageBand, Logic and Ableton to offer cloud-synced version control.
Splice Studio automatically backs up the artist’s work-in-progress song after every single edit so they can always reverse changes and safely work with collaborators without having to nervously save manually and fret about keeping all the copies organized.
Splice lets musicians access plugins, software and instruments on a rent-to-own basis, where they can pause payment and resume later.
makes Splice “easier than piracy,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Software enables vision-guided drone development
https://www.vision-systems.com/articles/print/volume-22/issue-11/features/software-enables-vision-guided-drone-development.html?cmpid=enl_vsd_vsd_newsletter_2018-04-23&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24&eid=289644432&bid=2076061
Up to now, one tradeoff of using a programmable system on a chip (SoC) compared with GPU and typical SoC industry alternatives is the amount of hardware expertise required to implement image-processing pipelines and machine-learning inference engines.
To remove that design barrier, new software-defined programming gives software and system engineers the opportunity to use industry-standard libraries and frameworks to create a system model.
Embedded vision systems can be split into two high-level categories: systems that perceive the environment or systems that perceive the environment and take action. Vision-guided robotics and drones take action, needing to respond to situations such as sensing obstacles and avoiding collisions.
Within the civil space, drones used in commercial, medical, agricultural, broadcast, and law-enforcement applications offer significant advantages, such as reducing cost by providing capabilities that have previously required the use of helicopters (Figure 1).
Drones can also be deployed to custom services, such as the forthcoming Amazon Prime delivery service or the delivery of medical products to remote areas of Uganda. For agricultural applications, drones can use hyperspectral imaging to determine the health of crops.
uch diverse applications demonstrate current trends in the wider embedded vision world: First is intelligence from machine learning. With embedded intelligence, drones are able to extract information from the scene captured by its cameras and act upon that information.
Next are open, high-level languages and frameworks for implementing intelligence. The most commonly used of these are open-source multi-platform frameworks like OpenCV for computer vision and OpenVX for cross-platform computer vision acceleration within the embedded vision world and the Caffe deep learning framework within the machine-learning sphere.
Third is multi-level security to ensure the drone remains operational and uncompromised, which requires security at the device, system and network levels. And the final trend is the ubiquity of embedded vision itself. While vision-guided robots and drones are not yet as ubiquitous as our smart phones, applications using them are experiencing significant growth as developers exploit new use cases.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hyperspectral imaging: Vision landscape expands with the rise of hyperspectral imaging technology
https://www.vision-systems.com/articles/print/volume-22/issue-11/departments/technology-trends/hyperspectral-imaging-vision-landscape-expands-with-the-rise-of-hyperspectral-imaging-technology.html?cmpid=enl_vsd_vsd_newsletter_2018-04-23&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24&eid=289644432&bid=2076061
Two methods used to capture images beyond the visible wavelengths include multispectral and hyperspectral imaging. Hyperspectral imaging involves narrow, usually contiguous spectral bands, involving possibly hundreds or thousands of spectra, while multispectral imaging involves spectral bands of varying bandwidths, not necessarily contiguous, but with up to 10 bands strategically selected.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Designers leverage off-the-shelf components for embedded vision systems
https://www.vision-systems.com/articles/print/volume-22/issue-7/features/designers-leverage-off-the-shelf-components-for-embedded-vision-systems.html?cmpid=enl_vsd_vsd_newsletter_2018-04-23&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24&eid=289644432&bid=2076061
Developments in FPGA software, custom-built processors, single-board computers and compact vision systems offer designers a variety of choices when building embedded vision systems.
With the advent of faster processors, FPGA-based intellectual property, custom image processors, open-source software and modular compact vision systems, designers are faced with numerous choices when developing embedded vision systems. However, although the definition of what comprises an embedded vision system can be loosely described as one that combines an embedded computer and a vision system, this can vary depending on the final product manufactured.
Designers of smart cellular mobile devices or vision systems for automotive applications, for example, require highly integrated, rugged and compact vision processors and image sensors. Alternatively, those involved in the development of medical imaging systems such as borescopes, may require a less-compact, board-level based system that can be integrated into end-user product housings. For those integrating systems for the machine vision market, a smart camera may be viewed as such an embedded machine vision system. Many developers of machine vision systems, however, think of such systems as rugged, expandable products that allow a variety of camera interfaces to be deployed using off-the-shelf software.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Mulligan / Music Industry Blog:
At $7.4B, streaming revenue was 43% of all recorded music revenues in 2017; revenue for artists selling directly via platforms like Bandcamp grew 27.2% YoY
Global Recorded Music Revenues Grew By $1.4 Billion in 2017
https://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/19/global-recorded-music-revenues-grew-by-1-4-billion-in-2017/
2017 was a stellar year for the recorded music business. Global recorded music revenues reached $17.4 billion in 2017 in trade values, up from $16 billion in 2016, an annual growth rate of 8.5%. That $1.4 billion of growth puts the global total just below 2008 levels ($17.7 billion) meaning that the decline wrought through much of the last 10 years has been expunged. The recorded music business is locked firmly in growth mode, following nearly $1 billion growth in 2016.
Streaming has, unsurprisingly, been the driver of growth, growing revenues by 39% year-on-year, adding $2.1 billion to reach $7.4 billion, representing 43% of all revenues. The growth was comfortably larger than the $783 million / -10% that legacy formats (ie downloads and physical) collectively declined by.
Universal Music retained its market leadership position in 2017 with revenues of $5,162 million, representing 29.7% of all revenues, followed by Sony Music ($3,635 million / 22.1%) while Warner Music enjoyed the biggest revenue growth rate and market share shift, reaching $3,127 million / 18%. Meanwhile independents delivered $4,798 million representing 27.6%.
But perhaps the biggest story of all is the growth of artists without labels. With 27.2% year-on-year growth this was the fastest growing segment in 2017.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What these movies really look like before special effects are added
Read More: http://www.looper.com/95690/movies-really-look-like-special-effects-added/?utm_campaign=clip
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Wolf of Wall Street VFX Highlights
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocfRVAH9yU
A look at some of the more challenging shots Brainstorm Digital put together from Martin Scorsese’s new film The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, and Matthew McConaughey.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Consortium of Amazon, Netflix, and many Hollywood studios sues IPTV service SET TV, claims mass copyright infringement, seeks injunction to shutter service
Netflix, Amazon and Hollywood Sue “SET TV” Over IPTV Piracy
By Ernesto on April 22, 2018
https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-amazon-and-hollywood-sue-set-tv-over-iptv-piracy-180422/
Several major Hollywood studios, Amazon, and Netflix have filed a lawsuit against Set Broadcast, LLC, which sells the popular IPTV service SET TV. The companies accuse the service and its operators of facilitating mass copyright infringement. In addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, the movie studios request an injunction to stop the infringing activity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Steve Pratt / Pacific Content:
As it prepares to launch a podcasts app, Google adds seamless podcast listening across devices, allowing users to listen on a phone and resume on Google Home
Exclusive: Inside The New Google Podcasts Strategy That Could Double Audiences Worldwide
https://blog.pacific-content.com/exclusive-inside-the-new-google-podcasts-strategy-that-could-double-audiences-worldwide-b556cdc26e43
Google has a new podcasting strategy that completely reimagines how people find and listen to shows. Today, part one of our exclusive five-part series.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Twitch’s Bits, a virtual good for fans to reward streamers, now work with Twitch Extensions, letting both creators and devs earn money via 80/20 revenue split
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/23/twitchs-creators-and-developers-gain-a-new-revenue-stream-with-launch-of-bits-in-extensions/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Home Video The case for Android TV for pay TV operators
The case for Android TV for pay TV operators
http://www.broadbandtechreport.com/articles/2018/04/the-case-for-android-tv-for-pay-tv-operators.html?cmpid=enl_btr_weekly_2018-04-24&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24
Historically, the pay TV industry has found it difficult to respond rapidly to changing market forces that impacted the set-top box user interface. With monolithic legacy middleware stacks and less-than-flexible development environments, many pay TV operators felt unable to innovate quickly enough at the user interface (UI) level.
In parallel, the over-the-top (OTT) video market had attracted consumers with its flexible offerings, affordability and innovative rate of change. However, pay TV operators are now embracing new technology and non-traditional methods of video delivery, and they too are attracting consumers with new OTT-style flexible services.
Thanks to the launch of Google’s Android TV Operator Tier, pay TV operators have been provided with a new platform to drive change in their industry – both to the UI on the set-top box, as well as to their business models. Android TV has become an attractive entity, both to the providers and to their consumers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Comcast aims to tighten up streaming video
http://www.broadbandtechreport.com/articles/2018/04/comcast-aims-to-tighten-up-streaming-video.html?cmpid=enl_btr_weekly_2018-04-24&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24
he 2018 NAB Show in Las Vegas was exceptionally busy – perhaps the busiest ever – for Comcast Technology Solutions (NASDAQ:CMCSA), said Bart Spriester, GM and VP. Most of the interactions were centered around workflow and the orchestration of streaming video services.
Comcast Technology Solutions was formed in October 2016 by the combination of Comcast Wholesale, thePlatform and THIS TECHNOLOGY. The group – whose portfolio includes video management, publication, distribution and monetization – provides an all-in-one direct-to-consumer (D2C) solution to help content providers build, launch and manage over-the-top (OTT) video.
“It seems like which type of encoder … or the Lego blocks used to deliver a service (has become) less important, and it (has become) more important to understand the end-to-end or orchestration of the video pipeline,” Spriester said.
“The major news … is that we have the (infrastructure) and are adding other things onto it, like linear rights management. That will solve the problem of inserting fresh content onto the OTT stream. We are bringing the (power of) the Comcast CDN to bear,” Spriester said.
The LRM component helps put the right content in based on blackouts and zip codes, while AdStor, the second of the three NAB announcements, stores ads in the cloud and uses a decision maker to pull the ads and stich them into the video stream.
While with manual processes it can take 24 to 72 hours before a linear advertisement can be effectively transcoded and delivered across all channels, AdStor’s cloud-based work flow takes just minutes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kellen / Droid Life:
Source: Google Play Music will be replaced by YouTube’s upcoming music streaming service, with Play Music users forced to use the new service by the end of 2018 — When Google finally launches its rumored YouTube Remix platform this year, one of its other services will be put to rest.
https://www.droid-life.com/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/www.droid-life.com/2018/04/24/youtube-remix-google-play-music/_index.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Event-Driven Vision Comes Aboard
Prophesee launches event-driven sensor on a single-computer board
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333212
Capturing “events” in images by using a bio-inspired approach sounds not just cool but downright futuristic. But how many developers have actually witnessed event-based machine vision technology at work?
Most developers have heard or read about it, and they might be curious. But they‘re stuck on the sideline without hands-on experience with novel non-frame-based machine vision technology.
Prophesee, a Paris-based startup, wants these spectators in the game. The company is rolling out this week a first-of-its- kind reference system for vision system developers to try, test and understand how neuromorphic vision works.
Initial users targeted for Prophesse’s reference design will be “developers of industry automation machines and robotics,” Luca Verre, CEO of Prophesee told EE Times. “Our customers in automotive and IoT systems will also find the reference system useful to characterize [Prophesee’s] sensor performance.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Initiative “Pilot Season” to Ignite Exclusive Episodic VR Content
https://www.eeweb.com/profile/eeweb/news/new-initiative-pilot-season-to-ignite-exclusive-episodic-vr-content
Samsung Electronics America, Inc. launched Pilot Season, a new initiative aimed at infusing exclusive original episodic Virtual Reality (VR) content into the Samsung VR Video service. Pilot Season adds to the company’s efforts in expanding VR content offerings while driving growth within the independent VR filmmaker community.
Through the program, a select set of indie filmmakers received a grant from Samsung to create original VR episodes and were offered the opportunity to utilize the 360 Round camera, Samsung’s professional 360-degree camera. In addition, filmmakers receive exclusive distribution via a dedicated channel on the Samsung VR Video service.
To find the Pilot Season debut episodes, with a Samsung Gear VR with Controller, powered by Oculus, coupled with a compatible Galaxy device such as Galaxy S9 or S9+, head to the Oculus store and navigate to Samsung VR Video service
Tomi Engdahl says:
Forging Voices and Faces: The Dangers of Audio and Video Fabrication
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/forging-voices-and-faces-the-dangers-of-audio-and-video-fabrication
Technology companies including Google, Baidu, and Adobe have recently funded efforts to fabricate audio or video from samples of speech or fragments of footage. Startups including Voicery and Lyrebird have developed customizable human voices (built from audio recorded by professional voice actors) that can be programmed to say anything. These companies have also released do-it-yourself software that lets you synthesize your own voice (or someone else’s, with their permission) from a 1-minute recording. And open-source tools to build such programs are available on Github.
The results are now convincing enough to raise concerns that these tools could fall into the wrong hands. “It’s not unreasonable to think that you could fool a large group of people with the technology in the state that it’s in today,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Facebook says it’s partnering with RED to develop a professional-grade VR camera, as part of its Surround 360 platform; pricing and release TBD — We don’t yet know what it looks like, or how much it will cost — Facebook is partnering with camera maker RED to develop …
Facebook partners with RED to develop a high-end, professional VR camera
We don’t yet know what it looks like, or how much it will cost
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/1/17308694/facebook-oculus-red-camera-partnership-vr-6dof-immersive-film
Facebook is partnering with camera maker RED to develop a professional-grade virtual reality camera system that can capture high-resolution imagery in so-called 6DoF, or six degrees of freedom, which allows it to be viewed and explored in real time within virtual reality. The rig, which doesn’t yet have pricing or release date info available, is a culmination of Facebook’s internal efforts on its Surround 360 platform. RED’s upcoming VR camera will now be the one Facebook suggests to filmmakers and other creators who want to make the most high-fidelity, immersive entertainment and art. The news was announced today at Facebook’s F8 developer conference.
“A year ago we set out to find a hardware partner to help us deliver this technology,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Software Defined Video Over Ethernet
http://sdvoe.org/
It is universally acknowledged that the transition of the AV industry to IP-based solutions is inevitable. Moving AV distribution to IP offers the possibility to create dramatically new architectures and entirely new user experiences. However, too many different approaches exist and are confusing the market and customers. Furthermore, many technologies simply fail to meet the performance needs of pro AV. For these reasons, adoption of AV over IP has been slow.
The SDVoE Alliance is bringing leading companies in the space together around a standardized hardware and software platform. The SDVoE platform will disrupt the pro AV industry by enabling applications that were previously unrealizable.
All AV distribution applications that demand zero-latency, uncompromised video can benefit from SDVoE technology. SDVoE network architectures are based on off-the-shelf Ethernet switches thus offering substantial cost savings and greater system flexibility and scalability over traditional approaches. Markets that benefit from SDVoE technology include education, healthcare, enterprise, entertainment, hospitality, retail, houses of worship, government, military, industrial and security.
A Full Stack Solution for AV over IP
http://sdvoe.org/technology/
SDVoE is the only off-the-shelf technology that offers a “full stack solution.” Other technologies provide only parts of a solution – how to move bits down a wire, or how to deal with timing errors on a network. Each of these pieces of the puzzle are important, but without SDVoE, manufacturers and users are left to cobble together solutions out of many pieces. SDVoE addresses the full 7-layer OSI stack and offers solutions at every layer. We take the very best of what the IT industry gives us for moving bits from place to place – TIA-568 cable plants, Ethernet, TCP/IP and IGMP then add SDVoE on top.
SDVoE Session Management addresses how the SDVoE controller manages issues like which device will broadcast on which multicast address, who is subscribed to various audio and video feeds, and where to route IR and COM control signals.
SDVoE Adaptive Clock Resynchronization is the way SDVoE devices encode and decode HDMI audio and video signals. This technology converts those signals into and back from network streams for the lower layers.
The SDVoE API technically fits into layer 7, but really serves as the interface between the application layer and everything below it. The SDVoE API lets manufacturers, developers and system integrators exercise their creativity to reimagine traditional AV use cases and invent totally new ones not yet conceived or even possible without the SDVoE platform.
SDVoE technology creates a flexible hardware and software platform which can enable many applications including matrix switches, KVM switches, video walls controllers and multiview image processors. It can also be integrated into sources and displays, all networkable. But beyond that, SDVoE technology paves the way for the creation of whole new classes of applications.
Interoperability
The technology that underlies all SDVoE products is the same – the SDVoE API, SDVoE clock resynchronization and SDVoE session management. This ensures that devices from different manufacturers are interoperable by design. AV traffic, as well as control, pass seamlessly from one to any other, and the unified API allows software built on the SDVoE platform to control all functions of any SDVoE core hardware.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HDBaseT-IP vs. SDVoE: A Smackdown of AV over IP Standards
https://www.commercialintegrator.com/av/hdbaset-ip-vs-sdvoe-av-over-ip/
HDBaseT-IP and SDVoE compete for long-distance AV over IP supremacy. One has a big head start, and the other, a recognized brand and HD video over Cat 5.
HDBaseT-IP vs. SDVoE is the smackdown in the commercial space, each vying to become the reigning standard for long-distance AV over IP.
“There is a battle about to start: SDVoE (Software Defined Video Over Ethernet) versus HDBaseT-IP,” says Paul Harris, CEO of Aurora Multimedia, a New Jersey-based manufacturer of video distribution systems.
“It’s already begun. The question is who’s going to win over AV over IP? This is going to be a really interesting matchup.”
On one side of the showdown is SDVoE from the SDVoE Alliance, which includes members Aurora Multimedia, AptoVision, Sony, Netgear, Christie, ZeeVee and others.
AptoVision, which recently sold to Semtech, is the driver of the SDVoE Alliance and now has the ever-important backing of the new parent company, a sizable semiconductor manufacturer. Harris believes Semtech will invest heavily in the category.
On the other side of the battle is HDBaseT-IP from the HDBaseT Alliance, which includes members Crestron, Extron, Samsung, LG, Sony, Harman, Aurora Multimedia and others. These companies primarily buy chipsets from Valens Semiconductor, the driving force behind HDBaseT.
The new protocol and strategy were introduced earlier this year at ISE 2017, shortly after the SDVoE camp launched its own Alliance. Both made their big European splash at ISE. Awkward.
The Need for Speed & Lossless Video
Driving this competition — and there are more than just these two — is the need for more bandwidth for multiroom video transmission that does not compress video and undermine visual imagery.
That need has driven the explosive growth of AV over IP in the market that can handle a 10Gbps signal versus the 1Gbps over traditional HDBaseT.
“You really can’t do [email protected] 4:4:4 over 1Gbps,” Harris says. “It’s not practical, because you’re getting a 20:1 compression.”
With that kind of compression, he explains, you lose enough information so that the images are “not visually lossless.” Also, HDR may not work well at a 20:1 compression.
“BlueRiver, which is a 10Gbps technology, can properly do [email protected] 4:4:4 with no detectable artifacts with or without motion,” according to Harris.
“10Gbps is the way of the future and the path for 8K. Once into those higher refresh rates and bandwidth, you must be on a 10Gbps system. Period.”
But problems still remain with 10Gbps, including heat output and price.
Also, the price points for 10Gbps switches are higher but they continue to come down every year.
The solution to those problems might lie in a hybrid HDBaseT-IP technology.
“HDBaseT seemed like it was a technology that was on its way out, but maybe we’re all wrong about that,” Harris says. “Maybe we need this technology to be the fix for IP itself.”
He says single- and double-gang HDBaseT-IP wallplates can be used to “bridge” IP and deliver 10Gbps [email protected] 4:4:4 from the wallplate to the network. These wallplates would be less expensive than conventional 10Gbps A/V-over-IP transmitters and receivers.
Is HDBaseT-IP Too Late?
Especially in the residential market, an HDBaseT victory might seem assured because of its big headstart in HDMI-over-Cat 5.
The platform is widely deployed by leading A/V manufacturers, whose compliant products are largely interoperable.
That said, SDVoE is raking in new partners on the commercial side, and products today are alive and installed.
On the other hand, Harris believes HDBaseT-IP products won’t be available for another two to three years. Even so, SDVoE’s headstart in this category doesn’t faze him.
Ultimately, it won’t matter because “the most important things in an AV over IP system are the network switch and the cabling,” he says. “Peripherals will come and go.”
“The most important things in an AV over IP system are the network switch and the cabling. Peripherals will come and go.” — Paul Harris, Aurora Multimedia
Not to be Confused with IPBaseT?
In addition to its transceiver products, the company is aiming to take AV over IP one step further using a technology Harris calls IPBaseT: “It’s a simple concept… to create synergy between different standards that normally do not work together.”
He cites as examples such as the need for 10Gbps [email protected] 4:4:4 if you want to provide localized, real-time broadcast-quality, low-latency video, but at the same time transmit the same video over the Internet, which couldn’t handle the native file.
Another example is the H.264 compression standard, which is great for recording video and sending it via the web, but loses quality with color space conversion and macro blocking due to the technique and high compression of H.264.
Likewise, due to its high latency, H.264 compressed video can’t be used for broadcasting live performances locally.
“There is no one ‘right’ standard, they’re all right standards, whether it’s 1Gbps, 10Gbps, 10/100 style standards of VC-2, JPEG 2000, BlueRiver, or any other format,” he says.
“The reality is that we need to use them all, not just one.”
IPBaseT takes different IP-based A/V technologies and blends them together to create the illusion of a natively integrated system.
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/7957-android-taipuu-digiboksiksi-ihan-hyvin
Tomi Engdahl says:
SES clears Latin America’s path to widespread satellite 4K Ultra HD services
https://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2018/04/ses-satellite-4kuhd.html?cmpid=enl_cim_cim_data_center_newsletter_2018-05-07&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24&eid=289644432&bid=2093565
Following major space and ground infrastructure investments and the expansion of its Latin America video neighborhood, SES on April 10 announced the launch of its Ultra HD platform into the region to accelerate commercial 4K rollouts among leading cable, IPTV, and DTH providers across Latin America. The SES-backed antenna program, which led to the installation of satellite antennas at Pay TV distribution hubs throughout Latin America, puts SES in a prime position to help cable, IPTV and DTH providers reach 100% of the region’s vast audiences with advanced HD and Ultra HD content.
SES is the among the world’s leading satellite operator and the first to deliver a differentiated and scalable GEO-MEO offering worldwide, with more than 50 satellites in Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and 16 in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Home Video 27% of pay TV subs stay for the sports
27% of pay TV subs stay for the sports
http://www.broadbandtechreport.com/articles/2018/05/27-of-pay-tv-subs-stay-for-the-sports.html?cmpid=enl_btr_video_technology_2018-05-07&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24
According to Parks Associates, 27% of U.S. pay TV households surveyed say sports programming is the primary reason they subscribe to their pay TV service.
“While broadcast and pay TV remain key sources for live sports, OTT streaming options have become an important part of the live sports landscape,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
TV convergence: Unlocking OTT’s potential
http://www.broadbandtechreport.com/articles/2018/04/tv-convergence-unlocking-ott-s-potential.html?cmpid=enl_btr_video_technology_2018-05-07&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24
With the number of cord-cutters reportedly tripling in the past five years, and new technologies like fixed wireless 5G making home Internet more competitive, cable companies risk losing their allure unless they embrace convergence. Specifically, the convergence and interaction of traditional TV and over-the-top (OTT) video is now a mainstay in the industry, but has by no means reached its full potential, especially in the United States. Both platforms bring their own advantages; traditional TV – such as cable and broadcast – continues to have strong branding and a solid local base, while OTT breaks boundaries by enabling service provision across regions and permitting interactivity and personalization.
Via connected TVs, set-top boxes and multiscreen