NHK delivers Ultra High Definition TV via satellite
Saturday, May 27th, 2006

Even as Sky HD dribbles its first set top boxes into the UK, the Science and Technical Research Laboratories of Japanese state broadcaster NHK have been trumpeting UHDTV (ultra-high definition TV), a proposed new television standard which claims 16 times the detail of current HD technology.

A number of reports have surfaced about Super HiVision over the past two years, all drooling over its specification.

The system offers an eye-popping 7680 x 4320 resolution (that's 32 million pixels) with progressive scanning at 60 frames per second and 22.2 channels of audio.

The big challenge has been how to deliver such a data hogging monster to the market. Now NHK says it has at least some new answers, following a series of demonstrations of virtual satellite delivery. Previous public displays have employed fiber optics.
While the data rate of the Super HiVision baseband signal is 24 Gbits per second, NHK boffins have managed to compress this to just 250 Mbits per second for transmission, using four MPEG-2 chipsets in tandem to do the number-crunching. Future Super HiVision compression techniques will be optimized for 300 Mbps signals. While the technology isn't likely to make it into anyone's home anytime soon, pundits suggest that the technology could well be developed as a replacement for IMAX.