Thomson Video Networks Demonstrates UHD Broadcasting of HDR Content

"In order to launch successful UHD services, broadcasters need to effectively leverage all emerging technologies and standards at their disposal. By significantly enhancing high-luminance content like sparkling metal and glittering lights, HDR takes the UHD TV viewing experience to new levels. In fact, both the European Broadcasting Union and Japanese standards authorities will soon begin requiring HDR for UHD broadcasts, and the first HDR-compatible TV sets are already on the market," said Eric Gallier, vice president of marketing, Thomson Video Networks. "By adding HDR support for live content to our ViBE 4K, we have accomplished another industry first — an encoding solution that enables broadcasters to address both HDR decoders and nonHDR TV sets in a single stream, with minimal overhead for the HDR metadata."

In Thomson Video Networks' HDR demonstration at IBC2015, ViBE 4K will take a UHD HDR signal from a SMPTE 2084-compliant broadcast feed and encode it to provide a standard UHD HEVC Main10 compressed stream with specific HDR information. The stream can then be decoded using any HEVC Main10-compliant decoder.

"ViBE 4K is perfect for forward-thinking broadcasters that are already expanding their infrastructures to provide a premium viewing experience to their customers, and HDR support will take these broadcasters one step closer to delivering a truly immersive live UHD experience," Gallier added. "ViBE 4K is just the latest example of our commitment to provide the most future-proof compression solutions on the market for contribution and distribution, especially since HDR support might soon become mandatory for UHD TV delivery."

About Thomson Video Networks
A global leader in advanced video compression solutions, Thomson Video Networks empowers media companies, video service providers, and broadcasters to deliver superior video quality at the highest density and lowest bandwidth for contribution, terrestrial, satellite, cable, IPTV, and OTT services. Through its innovative Behind Every Screen® approach, Thomson Video Networks combines both on-premises and cloud-based resources to create an all-encompassing video infrastructure for its advanced ingest/playout, branding, ad insertion, encoding/transcoding, and packaging technologies. Media enterprises now have every key capability they need to raise video quality and reduce cost of ownership not just for broadcast, but also for multi-screen services on every device and platform. Behind Every Screen you'll find Thomson Video Networks.