Records Are Meant to Be Broken: UHDTV’s Debut at the London Olympics

Taking a look at the stats, this summer’s Olympic Games in London promise to be the largest ever. An estimated 10,500 athletes from 202 countries will compete against each other in 26 sports. The media exposure, likewise, promises to break previous levels of coverage as well. The International Broadcast Centre in London’s Olympic Park is expected to serve as home-base for approximately 20,000 broadcasters, journalists, and official photographers. These in turn will relay the game to an estimated 4 billion people worldwide, around 60% of the Earth’s total population. 

Somewhere amid the star athletes, gold medals, and international rivalry that will deluge television screens worldwide, a new TV technology will quietly make its grand debut: UHDTV, which stands for ultra high-definition television. UHDTV is the anticipated next generation replacement for HDTV, a technology that only recently rendered standard definition televisions obsolete. With its 1920 x 1080p rating, HDTV offered picture resolution at six times the level of SDTV. But now, with the advent of UHDTV, that higher level of resolution will itself have been increased sixteen-fold. To put it in layman’s shorthand, UHDTV is to television what Michael Phelps was to swimming back in those ancient, HDTV-ridden days of 2008.

In short, we live in an era where world records – Olympic and otherwise – are broken almost as soon as they are achieved. More so than ever before in human history, the benchmarks for competitiveness are set ever higher in athletics, electronics, architecture, media exposure, industrial productivity... the list runs to the horizon. Whatever this year brings as far as new Olympic records set for gold medals, one score is for certain: the gold goes to UHDTV for 2012 in terms of visual quality.