Ultra HD Forum releases guidelines for UHD content

The Ultra HD Forum has released its first phase of industry guidelines on end-to-end workflows for creating and delivering live and pre-recorded UHD content.

The guidelines are designed to help members of the Forum target deployments in 2016 and address technical and commercial challenges – such as production, distribution and consumer decoding of UHD programing with both SDR and HDR content.

The take into account the challenge of backward compatibility constraints and a future release will target 2017 and beyond.

“We are proud of this collective work synthesising contributions from content providers, broadcasters, service providers, professional equipment manufacturers, technology solution providers, CDNs, chip-makers and device manufacturers,” said Thierry Fautier, president of the Ultra HD Forum.

“This would not have been possible without close collaboration with our colleagues at MPEG, DVB, DASH-IF, ATSC, SCTE, SMPTE, CableLabs, NAB and the UHD Alliance, with whom strong liaisons are being built.”

The Ultra HD Forum is a global organisation that aims to define industry best practices for the introduction of technologies that will facilitate the ultra high definition viewing experience.

The Forum now has 46 members following the recent addition of companies including Comcast, Fox, MovieLabs, Deutsche TV Platform, Sky and Technicolor.

A summary of the guidelines can be found here, though the full document is only available to Ultra HD Forum members.