The International Telecommunications Union announced today that the standardization of the Ultra High Definition TV specifications are near completion. That means that soon (or, ahem, a little later) UHDTV products will enter the market (I’m sure that one of the upcoming Bond films will feature one of these TVs). UHDTV has 16 times higher resolution than ’standard’ HDTV (7,680 x 4,320 pixels) and can support 22 audio channels. NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting network, has been experimenting with UHDTV since 1995 [1], [2] and has already made available some very basic UHDTV content. The uncompressed stream for a UHDTV is 24Gbps. which NHK managed to trim down to 120Mbps. Add an extra 10-30Mbps for the audio channels. That’s a total of 150Mbps.
Today, neither satellite nor terrestrial TV can deliver this bit rate at affordable costs (broadcasting at these rates would require for example multiple satellite transponders). Fiber on the other hand can deliver analogous bitrates, today.
