The nine partners of the 4EVER project (for Enhanced Video Experience) aim of improving the video quality of Experience thanks to Ultra High Definition television (UHDTV) and the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard.
Two demonstrations that leverage these innovative formats have been presented at the 4EVER booth in the NAB Labs Futures Park.
The demonstration 1 combined two new technologies enabling UHDTV at home: DVB-T2 that augments the available terrestrial bandwidth and HEVC that reduces the bitrate required for UHDTV quality (3840×2160 pixels at 60 frames/s).
The Demonstration 2 focused on over-the-top (OTT) video browsing with HTML5, showing how bitrate adaptation can be smoothly handled thanks to HEVC codec and DASH adaptive streaming technology when network conditions cannot offer the bandwidth requested for UHDTV quality.
Thanks to their Premium Video Extensions, HTML5 browsers can play videos without any plugin. By providing simplicity for customers, HTML5 both increases the Quality of Experience and allows a reduction of infrastructure fragmentation (head-end, protocols, applications, players) thus providing an optimization of platform costs for broadcasters. Its native video profile adaptation (here with DASH) makes HTML5 specifically efficient for multi device OTT services. After their groundbreaking participation in the 2013 French Open at Roland-Garros where they experimented the first HD end-to-end HEVC live encoding-decoding chain, 4EVER partners have furthered their research. They have been working on improving the HEVC environment.
Besides improving the HEVC environment and tools, 4EVER partners are also very active in UHDTV format definition and standardization. They have performed subjective tests on UHDTV encoding and contributed some of the best UHDTV sequences to standardization bodies.
Through its work, 4EVER has proven to be an effective promoter of video Quality of Experience worldwide.
Since December 2013, 4EVER partners are focusing on the next generation of UHDTV, also known as phase2, aiming at providing once again early sample sequences that will be shared for the benefit of international communities. In their 2014 schedule, they have also planned to perform subjective tests for UHDTV phase 2 and to stage new trial events to demonstrate their work on HEVC and UHDTV to global audience.
