Eutelsat Releases HDR Ultra-HD Channel on its Hot Bird Neighborhood

SDR vs HDR. Photo: Toys/Eutelsat

[Via Satellite 09-12-2016] Eutelsat Communications announced the launch from the Hot Bird video neighborhood of an Ultra-HD channel showing High Dynamic Range (HDR) content using Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) technology, the new HDR standard developed by the BBC and NHK. Eutelsat has teamed up with 4EVER-2, the French collaborative project on Ultra-HD, Ateme and Samsung to show the spectacular appeal of HDR Ultra-HD at IBC 2016.

Eutelsat demonstrated Ultra-HD images encoded using HLG, with HEVC encoding by Ateme, at IBC. HLG, which was recently adopted by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) as an international standard, uses a single distribution bitstream, which can be decoded by HDR receivers and also by legacy Standard Dynamic (SDR) displays, providing broadcasters with a way to accelerate time-to-market of their Ultra-HD content.

Called “HotBird 4k2 HDR,” the new channel is broadcasting across Europe from Eutelsat’s flagship Hot Bird neighborhood. It is showing sports, cultural and wildlife content from the 4EVER-2 consortium, dBW Communication, The Explorers Network and RAICom. The channel is broadcast at 50 frames per second, with 10 bits of color depth (1 billion colors) in the BT2020 environment. Content was presented on Samsung’s newest Quantum dot SUHD TV, which is capable of producing up to 1 billion colors and offering more than 1000-nit brightness.

HDR television creates richer and more dynamic images by increasing the contrast ratio between the lightest and darkest areas of the screen and increasing the volume of colors a screen can display, according to Eutelsat.