By Ron Hendrickson
Probably the biggest tech buzz at last week's NAB show in Las Vegas surrounded HEVC/H.265, with numerous vendors showing products and running demos; it seemed like just about everybody had some sort of HEVC something.
The compression standard, ratified by the ITU in January, has clear appeal, promising bitrate reductions of 50% compared to H.264. In other words, in a given bandwidth, you can double the content sent or significantly improve the quality of the original quantity of content. Thus, HEVC is a natural for such bandwidth hogs as Ultra HD, 4K and 8K video - which also got lots of play at the show.
Ultra HD and the other uber-HD technologies are still a year or more away from wide deployment, mainly because of high prices for the TV sets themselves and lack of content to watch on them. Interestingly, HEVC could follow about the same timetable, at least in cable.
The trick with HEVC is working it into the rest of the network. Remember, HEVC is a subset of MPEG-4, and cable ops still have a large legacy base of MPEG-2 gear deployed.
Moreover, Yuval Fisher, CTO of RGB Networks, said the new standard still has some underspecified areas, specifically support for interlaced content encoding and support for adaptive bitrate streaming. Fisher said the adaptive streaming hole is easy to fix, but getting support for interlaced encoding could take another year to finalize.
Even Motorola, which participated in HEVC's development, seems to think it's more likely to be used for wireless video than cable networks in the near term.
Bottom line: HEVC is less about what it is today - basically a Ferrari on a dirt road - than what it'll be able to do once rest of the network catches up.
Ron Hendrickson is BTR's managing editor. Reach him at [email protected].