Video Breakthroughs

CES 2013 is officially concluded. With over 150,000 people in attendance and almost 2 million square feet of exhibit space, the CEA has stated that it was their largest convention since its founding over 45 years ago.

I journeyed to Sin City to get an up-close look at the Ultra HD offerings from some of the biggest display manufacturers in the world, including Sharp, LG, Samsung, ViewSonic, Toshiba, Sony, Westinghouse, and Vizio. I will share my impressions of each in a few moments.

There appears to be plenty of cynicism regarding the future of Ultra High Definition technology. Many believe that price, lack of content, insufficient bandwidth, and enormous screen size will inevitably lead to its failure. While some of these limitations are apparent, one cannot simply dismiss the adoption of new technology because it sounds impossible or impractical. Technology is always evolving, and sometimes rapid changes in infrastructure allow for further adoption of new technology. Remember the incredible doubt when flat panel TV’s first debuted? These display companies know that their Ultra HD products are very expensive, and many of them intend to bring manufacturing costs down over the next few years. So why should we doubt progression? Ok, moving on to the summary…

The big focus for 2013 at Cisco Service Provider Video Technology Group is ‘unity in video experiences’. What that means in practice is taking multi-screen TV to the next level, ensuring that Pay TV services are available on every device around the home and beyond and that the service feels like a unified whole, just delivered to different screens.

Cisco has combined its existing cloud and network capabilities with the client-side software products and knowledge acquired through NDS to enable ‘unity in video experiences’. Those two companies were married last summer and the result of that union, after a five month gestation period, is Videoscape Unity, which was introduced at CES this week. This platform is the basis upon which Cisco service provider customers can build their next-generation offers.

Just in case anyone was in doubt that the 4K revolution is happening, Nvidia has just announced that its much anticipated Tegra 4 mobile chipset will include "4K Ultra-High-Def video support"

The Tegra 4 is significant because it has six times the GPU horsepower of the Tegra 3, and also incorporates ARM's most advanced CPU core, the Cortex A15. Just a few days ago, we predicted that ARM was going to be a technology to watch this year.

The new chipset will obviously be used in mobile platforms, from phones to tablets, and quite possibly games controllers and consoles, and the raw video processing power is unmatched in what is already a feverishly active area for technical innovation.

Perhaps this week or next, DASH-264, the long-awaited MPEG DASH interoperability specification will go public. This is the needed document that will at last spell out codecs and DRM schemes for DASH.Fraunhofer, now showing in the South Hall of International CES, is a member of the DASH industry forum (DASH-IF), and is giving visitors an audio sample of what they can expect.

Stereo audio in DASH will use the HE-AAC codec, an MPEG standard developed by multiple companies. For multichannel audio, however, the spec will offer three possible solutions: DTS-HD, one from the Dolby family, and HE-AAC multichannel, Fraunhofer's baby.

Un seul écran ne suffit plus à notre nouvelle consommation télévisuelle. Et les deux phénomènes à la mode du moment, TV connectée et Social TV, ont au moins un grand point en commun : leur dépendance croissante vis-à-vis d'un écran compagnon, appelé "le second écran", qui --dans les faits-- devient de plus en plus le premier !

Réunis en marge du CES à Las Vegas, les professionnels du secteur, qui continuent de tâtonner, ont fait le point hier sur un nouveau format et un écosystème naissant et prometteur, à l'occasion d'un "Sommet du 2nd écran" qui a fait salle comble. Compte-rendu.