400 professionals from Europe, Asia and America speak in Seville about the television of the future

• With the UHD broadcast of the Paris Olympics on free-to-air DTT “Spain has become a powerhouse in video content creation”, Paul Gray, OMDIA

• The broadcast of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, in 4K format in Europe and America; and in 8K in China, has broken all records in terms of viewership

• The first high-performance CDN (content delivery network) service in Spain has been exclusively presented to address the need for high availability and quality in the delivery of high-value or premium video services

Seville, world center of the audiovisual sector. The Cartuja Auditorium in Seville has been filled with 400 attendees in the first two days of the X edition of the 4K HDR Summit and held in hybrid format until next Thursday, November 14. The Cartuja Science and Technology Park has become the world epicenter of Ultra High Definition (UHD) in Television and New Technologies with the presence of a total of 66 experts from 19 countries from three different continents (Europe, America and Asia), who discuss the present, future and applications of the most advanced audiovisual technology (UHD/4K, HDR, 8K), coinciding with the 21st edition of the European Film Festival of Seville.

One of the great attractions of this second day has been China, which has participated for the first time in this summit by the hand of the two UHD associations: the UHD World Association (UWA) and the Sichuan UHD Video Alliance (SUVA).

Seville, technological epicenter

The General Manager of the Cartuja Science and Technology Park, Luis Pérez, stressed that “there is no better place in Seville and Andalusia to hold this type of event”, as it is the result of the reuse of the assets of the 92 EXPO and already hosts “600 companies that generate 30,000 direct jobs, 10,000 university students and a turnover of 4,850 million euros in 2023”.

For his part, Alvaro Pimentel, Deputy Mayor of Seville, thanked Medina Media Events for its commitment to the Andalusian capital, which joins the consistory of Seville in its “strong commitment to innovation and new technologies”. “Seville can not only be a benchmark in tourism, but in new technologies and we are working on it, so that Seville is the technological epicenter of southern Andalusia, “stressed Alvaro Pimentel, who hopes that Seville is positioned ‘at the forefront of European ’smarts city’ as a more connected, efficient and inclusive city.”

China, for the first time at the 4K HDR Summit

Liqiang Zhao, Global Content Partnership at HUAWEI and representative of the UHD World Association (UWA), has started the cycle of presentations of the day putting in value this association that brings together leading technology multinationals. “More than 70% of cell phones and televisions around the world belong to the UWA,” said Liqiang Zhao, who stressed that ”the UWA is not only industry, but also standards. We are working on our White Paper to see how UHD will transform the viewers’ experience”.

For its part, the Sichuan UHD Video Alliance (SUVA) was represented by Cao Ju, Executive Secretary General and David Liu, Director of International Cooperation of this association that “have worked for the past ten years to develop the UHD industry in China”. With more than 100 members being part of the association, SUVA has been working tirelessly for several years to “develop and promote three forms of innovation with 5G, AI and 8K technology”.

A record-breaking Paris Olympics

The broadcasting of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in 4K format in several European and Asian countries, and even in 8K quality in China, has marked a milestone in Ultra High Definition (UHD), already consolidated in the broadcasting of major sporting events. Jorge de la Nuez, head of technology and operations of the Olympic Channel Service (OCS), has highlighted the pleasant experience of creating, publishing and distributing content for the Olympic Games in Paris, where they broke “all traffic records with millions of unique users per day. A great success for everyone,” said Jorge de la Nuez, whose work philosophy is to ‘never remain in a state of comfort’ in order to keep moving forward.

For his part, Sergey Podlesski, the new head of technical resources of the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS), detailed the work of the host broadcaster of the Olympic Games and member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which works on the care of “every detail of video and sound so that the viewer’s experience is optimal”. “We want what you see on televisionto be as realistic as possible, just as the human eye would capture it live,” said Sergey Podlesski.

Grup Mediapro, a benchmark for the production of sporting events

Miguel Mur, operations manager of Grup Mediapro, has exposed all the technical work carried out for the production in Ultra High Definition (UHD), with High Dynamic Range (HDR) and surround sound and stereo of the 37th America’s Cup sailing held this year in Barcelona, an event that aims to reach “the billion viewers”. An unprecedented technical deployment with “UHD HDR and 1080p, with 4K distribution and evaluation for surround audio ” for a rewarding but demanding experience for a leading audiovisual group that already produces a number of remote sporting events, including some LaLiga professional soccer matches, and native UHD productions.

France, a UHD benchmark in Europe

France is the European country next to Spain that is making the most progress in terms of development and implementation of UHD technology in DTT. According to experts, the future of UHD in Europe is bright, although its speed of deployment will depend on advances in telecommunications infrastructure, the development of more content in resolutions generated in 4K and 8K or the decrease in costs. Jacques Donat-Bouillud, director of France TV, has spoken of the current moment that our neighboring country is going through in terms of UHD and the implementation of this format in DTT, something that “will not be possible until at least the end of 2025”. “The broadcasting of the Paris Olympic Games in UHD translated into great results with one million people watching the opening ceremony and an average of 800,000 viewers watching the broadcasts.”

Robin Hérin, senior innovation and technology ATEME, has addressed the present and future of Ultra High Definition (UHD) in the audiovisual industry, ensuring that “we have more HDR than we’ve ever had and with greater ability to make immersive audio than ever,” which led him to speak of the MV-HEVC, a revolutionary “codec that allows transmit three-dimensional movies”.

For her part, Anaïs Libolt, director of broadcast and content in Europe at Dolby, has been responsible for unpacking the essential work that this multinational has played in the evolution of more realistic and immersive experiences leveraging technologies such as Dolby Vision and immersive audio with Dolby Atmos, as well as the experience at the Olympic Games in Paris 2024. “Dolby Atmos sound at the Olympic Games placed the viewer inside the action of the Games. For the first time, an innovative format based on serial ADM for contribution and Dolby AC-4 for distribution was used”.

Axel de Decker, software engineer R&D video network at Synamedia, discussed real-time video quality metrics and some of the advances his company has made in this area. “Measuring the quality of live video requires low complexity and high accuracy of perception,“ said the engineer, for whom one of the reasons for measuring video quality is ”to be able to make efficient transmissions”.

Benjamin Schwarz, COO of Greening of Streaming, spoke about efficiency and sustainability, addressing “UHD and its energy impact”. “Energy for data transmission depends much more on capacity than on volume,“ said Benjamin Schwarz, who specified that ”our first measurements show that HDR uses on average about one-fifth more energy in displays”.

Paul Gray’s realistic vision of UHD

Paul Gray, senior director of research at OMDIA and speaker of honor at the 4K HDR Summit, has offered his global view on Ultra High Definition (UHD) worldwide, from the lack of 8K content to the high costs in the market, through his specialty: research on particular consumer electronic devices. “We are at a point where the world is changing very rapidly and there are a lot of concerns around television, which leads us to think about how UHD can cope with those changes and how we can turn this situation into an opportunity to move forward, “ he has argued, while extolling the work of Spain with its UHD broadcast of the Paris Olympics through free-to-air DTT and free of charge. “Spain has become a powerhouse of content creation in the EU, much faster and in a stealth way”.

MoMe has exclusively introduced together with Synamedia the first high-performance CDN (content delivery network) service in Spain to address the need for high availability and quality in the delivery of high-value or premium video services. Robin Oakley, Senior Director & Edge CDN Solutions of Synamedia, together with Jaime Herbada, Director of Operations of MoMe, have offered this world premiere in the Cartuja Auditorium, where they have given visibility to this service with the “objective of offering an impeccable transmission ‘ to viewers of major sporting events, since, in the words of Robin Oakley, ’quality is not negotiable”.

The importance of next-generation audio

The Spanish-German Elena Burdiel, senior engineer at the German Fraunhofer IIS institute, explained how the “new generation audio MPEG-H Audio is being developed, with which the user experience is raised to new heights thanks to metadata”. Elena Burdiel described Fraunhofer IIS’s experience in Brazil, where “ATSC 3.0 has become the new standard that will gradually become mandatory by 2025”.

Jeroen Van der Voort, head of MI services professional at EVS, and Tomas Nielsen, managing director of Datos Media, have shared the stage to talk about the transition of televisions towards IP and UHD-4K. “Despite the great access we have to UHD TVs, there is not much content that is reaching them,” acknowledged Tomas Nielsen, who reviewed RTVE’s commitment to UHD. For his part, Jeroen Van der Voort has given some hints of the technical work done by EVS during the Olympic Games in Paris with a “huge technical deployment that allowed to have 10,000 hours of HD content and 8,000 hours in UHD”.

Lluís Ribes, director of sales engineering at Mediakind, has shared the work of this company to “further enhance the future of live broadcasting with the use of two cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing”; while Jordi Joaquim, head of distribution Spain and Portugal of AJA, has presented the new generation of ColorBox for broadcast, live events and on-set applications and has offered some details of Virtual Kona, the “revolutionary device in the cloud in which AJA is already working”.

A meeting with great repercussion in the industry and in the media

The 4K HDR Summit has been attended by international, national, regional and local media: Canal Sur and its programs Andalucía Directo and En Red, Canal Sur Informativos, Europa Press, Radio Nacional de España (RNE), 7TV, Las Mañanas de Andalucía on Canal Sur Radio, news bulletins from the Junta de Andalucía and the Ministry of Digital Transformation, ABC, La Vanguardia, El Correo, El Economista, Señal News, Andalucía Información, Diario Sur, ‘El Mira’ newspaper, Andalucía Noticias, Viva Sevilla, Revista Rubik, El Pespunte, Sevilla Informa, Las Provincias, MSN, Teleprensa, Gente Digital, Hoy Diario, Elegir Hoy, TVB Europe, tvyvideo. com, etc.

Third day, first virtual

The tenth edition of the 4K HDR Summit continues this Wednesday, November 13 with the third day -first virtual- in which this summit will travel to different parts of the world to learn first hand how Ultra High Definition (UHD) is developed in some of the most important international public broadcasters from Radio Televisión Española (RTVE), from its director of audiovisual policies Ángel García Castillejo, to the Japanese NHK with Kodai Kikuchi, research engineer in science and technology, through the British BBC, represented by Andrew Dunne, expert in television production delivery; Germany’s SWR , with engineer Stephan Heimbecher; Korea’s KBS , with production manager Seunggun Lee; and José Francisco Loza Uribe, from Televisa-Univision Mexico. Also participating will be the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) with the Dutchman Frans de Jong; the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) with the Portuguese Nuno Duarte; Eutelsat with the Italian Cristiano Benzi; the UltraHD Forum with the British Ian Nock; Hispasat with the Spanish Jorge Rodríguez; and Cellnex with Xavier Redón.

The conferences of the 4K HDR Summit 2024 can be followed on Medina Media Events’ ‘The Observatory’ and will be available 24/365. On this platform, attendees can also schedule video meetings with other participants and speakers, in addition to exclusive virtual demonstrations.

The tenth edition of the 4K HDR Summit is organized by Medina Media Events and has the support of the Digital Agency of Andalusia (ADA), Dolby, MOME, Vicomtech, Canal Sur Radio and Television, EVS, Synamedia, Fraunhofer IIS, Axion, Mediakind, Ateme, AJA, Hispasat, Quantum, Cellnex, Eutelsat, Rohde & Schwarz, Canon, Sapec, AEQ, Gsertel, Hurí and UHD Spain, among others.