Six months after introducing UHD support for some of its Prime Instant Video catalog, Amazon has announced that its Amazon Originals will be made available in High Dynamic Range (HDR) quality – adding additional information about the brightest light and the darkest blacks to the picture for compatible hardware to decode and display for a vastly improved picture.
This could be the beginning of a sea change in the OTT industry, which is still struggling to push 4K-sized files to the viewer due to constraints in the last-mile connection. As it stands, an HEVC stream from Netflix in 4K requires around 16Mbps – a speed that is simply unattainable for many households, in many markets.
HDR however offers the potential of a much-improved picture quality with only a marginal increase in the required bandwidth. Instead of retaining the same color depth and refresh rate as Full HD and simply increasing the resolution, as 4K does, HDR adds additional contrast information to the video that can be interpreted by compatible devices.
4K’s extra pixels don’t offer much in the way of picture quality improvements until the screen you are watching on gets to be upwards of 70-inches. At this point, there is fairly obvious visible pixilation in a 1080p video, which a 4K unit will overcome by applying some upscaling logic to the source to reinterpret the video at a 3840x2160p resolution.
But that process doesn’t increase the refresh rate, color depth or add any HDR information – all things that are added by the UHD specification. As such, 4K is something of a halfway house that is still struggling to gain market penetration, even in developed markets.
While the price of 4K and UHD is coming down, the speed of the last-mile connection that OTT services will use is not increasing fast enough to trigger a wave of 4K UHD adoption any time soon. However, new TVs (4K UHD or not) which support HDR seem like the much more viable short term option as the necessary HDR source material is much more manageable over the average connection speed adding around 25% to the native bandwidth.
Of course, the usual arguments about TV’s 7-year refresh cycle means that HDR penetration will be far from rapid, but if seen side-by-side, the difference between a 40-inch TV with a 1080p HDR video and a 40-inch 4K unit with a 4K picture should be enough to swing the purchase in HDR’s favor – as the regular-sized panel is way under the threshold for visible pixilation. The problem is that in almost every sophisticated high volume TV market, 4K TVs came first and are well ensconced in the minds of retail sales people – in other words getting retail to give HDR a chance is the last stumbling block.
4K could also face an onslaught from technologies that improve the physical performance of the TV itself, such as full-array LED backlighting and/or quantum dot films that enable improved color reproduction (see separate piece), and in combination with HDR, these would create a picture that would surpass the quality of native 4K content.
However, that combination probably won’t surpass native full UHD, thanks to its improved color gamut (Rec. 2020 instead of Full HD’s Rec. 709), HDR as standard (a decision that currently allows 3 options, but is still being finalized), and improved maximum framerate (up to 120fps, which will help with fast paced video).
Even if customers opt for a UHD TV, and there’s every reason to believe they can and will, given that the price of the units are approaching parity with Full HD units, the consumer can still benefit from HDR if their TV can take the 1080p HDR stream and upscale it to a 4K resolution – avoiding the leap in bandwidth required for 4K resolutions, but offering a selling point that can be used to differentiate.
Vizio has released the first UHD TVs that support Dolby Vision, Dolby’s implementation of HDR. The Vizio Reference Series will feature full-array LED backlighting, available in 65-inch and 120-inch screen sizes – rated at 800-nit, using 384 active local dimming zones.
The pair have announced that several UHD Dolby Vision titles will be available through Vudu (Walmart’s VoD service), and apps should allow it to support other OTT options – with HEVC support included.
Amazon officially launched “Ultra HD” (which it seems to think is interchangeable with 4K; it’s not) support in December last year, while Netflix launched 4K content in April, 2014.
“4K Ultra HD picture resolution was just the beginning – we’re excited that Prime members will soon be able to view movies and TV shows including Amazon Originals in HDR quality,” said Michael Paull, VP of Digital Video at Amazon. “HDR is the natural next step in our commitment to premium entertainment, and we can’t wait for customers to have even more choice in how they watch their favorite titles on Amazon Prime Instant Video.”