4EVER Consortium to advance Ultra-HDTV technologies

Paving the Way for Ultra High Definition Television; French Research Consortium 4EVER Kicks off a 3 Year Multi-Million Euro Plan to Advance the Technologies Supporting the Production and Delivery of Ultra-HDTV

PARIS — ATEME, a global provider of compression solutions for Broadcast and Broadband, announced today the launch of an ambitious research program to reduce the bandwidth required for the delivery of Ultra High Definition Television using High Efficiency Video Coding. HEVC is the latest compression standard developed jointly by ISO/MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) and ITU-T/ VCEG (Video Coding Experts Group). Currently a draft, it is expected to be submitted for final standardization approval in January 2013 as MPEG-H Part 2.

The primary goal of the 4EVER program is to pave the way for the delivery of an enhanced high-definition television experience to viewers regardless of the viewing context (in the home, on the go, in public places and cinemas”¦), in a practical and inexpensive way. Initially a large part of the research effort will be invested in the evaluation of the television experience enhancement that can be offered from not just higher resolutions, but also higher frame rates, increased color depth, surround sound, and more.

ATEME’s objective beyond this program is the development of an industrial – efficient – affordable – deployable implementation of HEVC. An encoding system that broadcasters and service providers can rely on for large scale field trials all the way to commercial deployments of Ultra HDTV.

4EVER program members include Orange Labs, ATEME, france télévisions, GlobeCast, TeamCast, Technicolor and Doremi, as well as the Télécom ParisTech and INSA-IETR University labs.

The consortium expects to demonstrate a first complete Ultra HD production and transmission chain within one year, and several field trials are planned throughout the 4EVER project for sports events, music concerts and other live shows.