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What is the point of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ playing with Super Hi Vision when they can't even produce a decent quality HD service. At the moment ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ transmits a sub standard 1440x1080 picture at very low bitrate. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has no plans to deliver 3D let alone Super Hi Vision to licence payers. This just seems to me to be a publicity stunt to try and steal the thunder from Sky who will be starting the first 3D in the UK tommorow.

There are 48 HD channels available in the UK and all the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ contributes is a one part time channel. Mark Thompsons recent speach has pages of discusion on technology in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ with not a single mention of HD.

For the Olympics it seems that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is planning to produce 3D and Super Hi Vision to deliver to foreign stations. This means that viewers in other countries will be able to watch in 3D and Super Hi Vision but licence payers will have to put up with sub-standard HD.

Beat me to it Trevor. Learn to crawl before you can walk, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD need to sort out broadcasting in proper 1920x1080 and have decent high bit rates before even attempting to move towards 3D and supervision. Please stop wasting the license payers money, and sort out the current ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD output first!

Let them experiment.
If something develops then, as long as they haven't been privatised, perhaps the UK licence-payer might benefit.

mr trevorjharris has a point or two, but remember how much HD material does SKY actually produce themselves?
They sell it on as a package. OK they do sport in HD, but some of the crews making the programmes are ex-³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ recently privatised. Possibly even (although I do not know this as a fact) using ex-³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ facilities!

Anyone can package someone else's material and sell it on and make you pay for the privilege.
Movies? HD- easy.
Sport? HD- easy.

To home-produce programmes using British actors, British artists, British musicians, British crews, British facilities from British Studios is a little more difficult, expensive, and takes a little more time to achieve.

As regards a sub-standard HD TV picture.... that's not what most experts think. It depends which 'blog' you read. Have you seen the German Version of their main two channels HD on their satellite channels?

If the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ run to form we can expect to see Super Hi Vision being rolled out to an enthusiastic response in about 2020, and then by 2022 it will have been reduced in resolution, squeezed, starved of bandwidth, put on to DTT with even further degredation, all whilst the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ maintain it is still as good as day one and the changes have made no impact on PQ...

As trevorharris points out in #1, the timing of this can only have been motivated by Sky's launch of 3DTV today.

Unfortunately, it is more than likely nowadays that Sky would be first to launch a commercial Super Hi vision service anyway, long before the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ...

#1-4, comments noted guys but I'm not going to knock this experiment (as I know you're not really doing either). It is just the kind of thing I think that ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D should be tinkering with, to show the management just what is achievable given the will. Like you I'm disappointed that on current showing the management, and its overseers the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Trust, don't seem to share these guys vision of what the public wants, or yearns for. But for my part I'm saying thank you Ant, thanks ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D, keep up the good work and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the future that you're trying to make becomes a reality!

I hear what you are saying Paul. I have alot of respect for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D they certainly have done some very good work. One issue is that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ have been cutting back on R&D. The problem is the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Management which has little respect for technical exellence and has differerent priorities. The fact that they have made Danielle Nagler head of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ 3D confirms this. Judging by what Dannielle has done with ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD we can expect very little from ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ 3D.

I still think this was a bit of a stunt as there is nothing new in what they have done. 8k cameras have been commercially available for ages as have high speed internet connections. In any case this was a cut down version of Super HD Vision as they only used 5.1 surround sound and not the full 22.2 required.

I still believe the reason for this stunt was to take away some of thunder from Sky who started thier 3D service yesterday. The difference between the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and Sky is that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ only talk about quality and Sky actually deliver it.

I hear what you're saying too trevorj; at this very moment I've got the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD Preview loop showing (a hangover from last night's very very late golf) - the Proms is showing and my room is filled with the most glorious surround sound, for 90 secs, abruptly cut-off to preview Him & Her and then some kiddies thing about Raggles & Rosie (for 90 secs each).

If only there was a choice of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD channels where I could choose what I prefer to watch, when I prefer to watch it, and then see the whole programme, from beginning to end - I wonder does $KY deliver that? If so, perhaps I need to rethink my options, and maybe start campaigning for an abolition of the licence fee.

Congratulations to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D. well done on your achievement.
-I'd love to see the SuperHI Vision picture, it must look fantastic.
Come to that- I'd love to see a standard 1920x1080 HD picture on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD.
So, it is hard to imagine how good a picture 16 times more detailed than standard HD will look.
roll on the next generation of HD

When will we get the 7.6K Super HiVision the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is taping on our TVs/displays? Will the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ be making this format available at full resolution in a consumer format (displays, and media format)? Does it need much less camera movement? Can you tell us more about the "full 3D" (ie. better than stereoscopic) recording you are doing?

Is 50p a high enough frame rate for Super-Hivision, or does it need a lot more really (since for HD it was said that a lot more than 50Hz is needed, and SHV is a lot more than normal HD)?.

What ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and EBU productions will be shot and made available in a consumer format in SHV format (or better)? Will the SHV, "full 3D" and surround vision be combined to one system?

Come on HD1080 you know this stunt was just a hoax. In fact I had to check it wasn't April 1st. Danielle has made it perfectly clear that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has no plans to deliver 3D let alone Super HD Vision or even 1080p50. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ will be the last public service broadcaster to provide an HD version of it's main channel. Infact ITV2 HD will be on air before ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ1 HD.

I fear this is playing with technology for technology's sake and is not for any practical domestic purpose. Great if you work in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's R&D department though.

There is clearly not enough bandwidth at present to transmit 'full HD' via satellite or terrestrial systems without impacting received quality. Unless there is some advance knowledge that significant additional bandwidth is going to become available in the medium term for TV transmissions (fibre optic links to everyone's home maybe?), or video compression technology is going to advance at unprecedented rates, this technology may never reach the consumer. Given that, I have to question whether this is acceptable use of the TV licence fee income.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

Various folk:

I don't think it's very fair to lump a long-term research project (one which, I think, has been going on for the past couple of years, with loads of planning leading up to this event) together with issues in the current production HD delivery system.

More to the point, should R&D not keep appraised of and be involved in next-generation broadcasting technology research? Would you rather they ignored it until it hit the shelves?

And, do you not think that work on efficiently shifting the massive amounts of data required to sling SHV halfway around the world might actually help in improving HD delivery in the shorter term?

Oh, and if this was just a smokescreen, it was exceptionally well-planned (my understanding of the timings might be wrong, but I remember hearing about ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ SHV research before any of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD picture quality debates kicked off), and it probably should have been publicised a little bit wider than the R&D blog if it's to distract people...

@Mo

I don't have any problem with ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D doing long term research. Sticking a single camera infront of a group singing a couple of songs and tranmiting it around the world has very little research value. Also the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ did publicised this on the News media but made no mention of Skys historic achievement.

As I said earler I have alot of respect for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D as they have done some very good work and contributed greatly to the development of broadcasting. The problem lies with the current ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ management who seem to have little or no technical knowledge. The lack of commitment to HD does make one question if there is a future for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D have been doing research into 3D but the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has stated that it has no plans to introduce a 3D service at all.

Hope to see a recording of this at IBC next year.

Personally I think the future of HDTV lies in high frame rate rather than absurdly high resolution, some DCinema types I've worked with claim that the difference between 2k & 4k is only detectable in their very largest Cinemas, never mind higher resolution still. The difference between 30fps, 60fps and 120fps is immediately apparent at SD resolutions and contributes more to the experience than super hi vision in my opinion. Yes I have seen SHV in the flesh.

I hope the very promising p300 and p600 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ research is still progressing, the glut of pseudo 200hz and above TVs suggests that real 1080p300 has a very promising future much nearer than super hi vision. Thanks to the stereo 3D fad 100hz and 120hz TV's are now readily available.

Would also like to know more about the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's own 3D projects, especially if as hinted they go beyond stereo vision 3D. How about a blog about it?

Nice to hear from you Paul G. Trust you are well.
Agree with Post 19, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D come up with some amazing stuff. But how much of it will ever be implemented to us is another question. Yes, the current ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Management are on deaf ears on the technical side, hence why HD is suffering at their hands.

@AndreNewman

The chance of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ producing anything above 1080i50 is zero. The Freeview HD specification does not even alow 1080p50 let alone anything higher. They seem to have problems producing anything in HD even the studio shots in the Commonwealth Games are upscalled SD.

Well they did try to get 1080p50 into the Freeview HD spec but too late I understand.

A great shame that there is such a gulf between what R&D are experimenting with and what we get to see at home. Everyone in the industry (who knows anything) agrees that 1080i is legacy HD and should be scrapped yet ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ are about to launch another 1080i channel, I know they have no real choice but...

That said unless R&D keep up the pressure we will never move forward, so keep at it guys.

Another technology R&D developed but was ignored by the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ management was MIMO. This could have doubled the bitrate capacity of a multiplex. It does require a new aerial but I think this is a small price to pay. We also have the example of DAB radio. ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D wanted to use a bitrate of 250kb/s but the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ management thought they knew better and reduced some stations to 64kb/s in mono!. Actually it does seem that R&D did under estimate the ammount of error correction that would be required. ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ management is still waisting hundreds of millions on DAB when it has been rejected by the rest of the world including the UK public.

I believe the real reason for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's interest in the new technologes is not for the benifit of UK licence payers but to be able to sell these services to foreign broadcasters.