UHD Spain analyzes the main challenges of streaming in Ultra High Definition

In its fourth virtual meeting, restricted to members of the association, UHD Spain It was attended by more than 40 attendees who shared their knowledge about the main challenges of streaming in Ultra High Definition.

The meeting, led by Parts of Pejhan, VP Emerging Technologies de Atem, outlined the workflows for video on demand and linear channels, as well as the main challenges of this next-generation image resolution and audio standard.

Xavier Redón, Product Manager of Cellnex, vice president of UHD Spain and coordinator of the Broadcast working group, made a brief welcome introduction to the meeting and gave way directly to Sassan Pejhan who, within a compact and complete hour-long agenda, began his masterclass by explaining his definition of UHD.

“From my own point of view, ultra high definition, also known as Ultra HD or UHD, is a standard that specifically refers to an image resolution with more pixels, higher pixel quality, better frame optimization and, the great forgotten, better sound quality, which includes immersive, customized and interactive sound,” he noted.

During the meeting Pejhan also presented a historical evolution of the codecs developed for UHD since the mid-80s of the last century, with H.120, through MPEG, TrueMotion and VP, AV1, VVC and until reaching the H.265/High-Efficiency Video Compression (HEVC) codec, one of the great essentials for a few years to watch content in 4K.

“A video compression technology that offers up to 50% higher compression ratios than previous compression standards, although the problem of the fragmented patent landscape has not yet been solved,” said Pejhan.

Currently the codec par excellence is HEVC, but this standard has a root problem that is making many companies opt for other alternatives, and it is none other than licenses. "HEVC is divided between several license packages, which greatly complicates adoption by developers and companies. This is where MPEG-5 and AV-1 come in with their open codes," he explained.

The surprising thing about the new MPEG-5 EVC "is that it offers the same quality as the current HEVC codec, but using a much lower average bitrate. This provides a much higher benefit when we talk about the fact that the bandwidth in transmissions would be reduced when the Internet connection is limited."

At the moment AV-1 seems like a strong competitor as it is receiving a lot of support from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, LG and Netflix. A very interesting feature about the AV-1 codec is the inclusion of film grain processing to maintain artistic intent and further reduce bandwidth. Ateme has been working on this functionality for some time and has up to 5 patents in this field.

Pejhan also talked about the new codec VVC, which allows you to reduce the size of videos to half of what they currently occupy in H.265/HEVC.

Main challenges

After the ATeme manager's explanation about the different codecs currently used in UHD and the workflows both in video on demand and in linear channels, Pejhan gave a presentation of the main challenges that UHD faces today, such as the higher bit rate, the tools to reduce the impact, the greater demand for resources and the impact on equipment density and device compatibility, and ended his masterclass with a conclusion on where to deploy a UHD streaming platform, in the cloud, on-prem or both.