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.

From Science Fiction to (Virtual) Reality: the Growing Trend towards Digital Cinema

In 2002, George Lucas, the founding father of the sci-fi blockbuster, did something that many in cinema at the time viewed as being – well – a little bit “out there”. He shot the entirety of his fifth “Star Wars” movie with a digital camera that presented images at the rate of 48 frames-per-second. In other words, he’d abandoned the 35 mm, 24 frame-per-second show reel that had served as film’s metric since time immemorial. Fine and good, but the trouble was there were only two movie-houses in the United States – one in Los Angeles and one in Paramus, NJ – that were actually fitted to show digital pictures, and only because Lucas had specifically equipped them to do so. While many critics saw the potential advantages of digital film – the more “lifelike” picture quality, the potential for rapid global distribution (rather than the usual targeted release) – many more concluded that the technology was as eccentric as the Stars Wars universe. Leave it to the inventor of Eewoks and Jedi to fly off the deep end, went the going commonsense of that year.

Big ideas have a long history of not catching on till there’s enough critical momentum to propel them forward into the mainstream market. Fast-forward a decade later, and digital cameras – and digital cinema-houses – are more ubiquitous than ever. Indeed, this summer, another guaranteed smash-hit blockbuster movie, The Hobbit, is being released in digital by Peter Jackson. Jackson claims the more realistic quality of 48 fps provides a good “balance” to the “fantastic” nature of the story he’s telling.

But aesthetical arguments are only the half of it. With digital cameras ensconced in the world of television, as well as indie film, it can only be a matter of years before mainstream Hollywood follows suit. After all, film reel is expensive. Having a digital camera aboard your production saves you, quite literally, millions of dollars. In an industry that knows a thing or two about overblown budgets, digital technology can serve as a great democratic equalizer, allowing films to be shot in high-quality resolution for a minimal price. All signs seem to be pointing towards digital encoding. Strange to admit, but the creator of C3PO seems to have been right all along.

All About Megapixel Ratings

It’s no stretch in saying that the digital encoders we design and manufacture at Telairity are some of the most competitively trailblazing products of their kind on the market today. The bit rate speed, high resolution, platform versatility, and cost-effectiveness of our encoders, decoders, and mobile encoders all attest to this, as do our sales-figures in any number of key international markets. But while our products are certainly innovative in the way they perform (and outperform), there isn’t any reason why the basic concepts behind the technology should remain mysterious to the curious bystander. 

In other words, you don’t have to be a “techie” to understand the basic rocket science.

Take the key concept of megapixel rating, for instance – a quality our encoders are rightfully known for, and also one of the driving selling-points behind new commercial technologies like the 4G network. Just why – exactly – is it a “good thing” to have a high megapixel rating? 

Well, for starters, having a high pixel rating results in the production of a higher quality digital image – one which, if brought into closer resolution, the quality wouldn’t blur or distort. The trick to having a high pixel rating – and thereby a high-resolution image - isn’t in the sheer number of pixels involved in producing the image, but rather the size of each individual pixel within a given, constrained amount of space. 

The more pixels per square inch (ppi), the better, and here’s why: since the resolution limit for the unaided human eye is around 0.1 mm, any pixel that’s smaller than 0.1 mm in diameter will translate as “seamless” when zoomed into higher focus. That’s the whole working concept behind the iPhone 4: with 960 x 640 pixels squeezed into a 3.5 inch diagonal screen, the iPhone 4’s graphics more than exceed the natural boundaries imposed by human vision: with 326 ppi on the iPhone 4’s screen display, every image appears un-blurred no matter how closely you zoom.  

Telairity has developed the encoding technology that not only reduces drastically the cost, speed, and bandwidth by which digital information gets relayed, but also places a high emphasis on high-ppi graphics. As the commercial digital world continues to trend towards the ever faster, ever more visually precise consumer experience, Telairity is flying at the forefront of the wave.

Telairity Comes to Dubai

It was only a matter of time before Telairity made it to Dubai. Despite the global recession, the city-state continues building, populating, and developing its infrastructure at a staggering clip. In 2012 alone, Dubai’s global trade is projected to grow by 20%, thereby increasing the overall U.A.E. economy by 3.5%. Additionally, Dubai ranks ninth among the top 20 visitor destination cities on the planet, making the tabloid stories of panicky ex-pats fleeing the city in droves seem grossly exaggerated.

Finally, and most importantly, Dubai continues to plan for its long-term future. The city is presenting a strong bid for the 2020 World Expo. Historically at these six-month long events, new technological game-changers have made their debuts to a global audience: the “elevator” first made its appearance at the Dublin Expo; the “telephone” was first brought to a wider audience at the Expo in Philadelphia; and more recently, “green building techniques” were unveiled in Aichi. In the words of Reem Al Hashimy, Dubai’s Minister of State, “Ideas are planted, tested, experimented and a global dialogue begins to take shape and influence future trends.”

These are the sorts of words Telairity lives by. Being that we are one of the foremost digital encoder providers for the Asian market, with strong performance in countries like China, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, it became obvious that we needed to develop our business relations in the Middle East. As a result, we recently introduced our encoding technology at CABSAT, the largest cable and satellite showcase in the Middle East and Africa. We came away from the conference and exhibit with heavy-hitting new connections and strategic partners for future business throughout the Arabian Peninsula.

As an exponentially growing company, we view CABSAT as just a stepping-stone towards eventually providing quality service throughout the entire Middle East. Like the city of Dubai itself, we value the principle and challenge of exponential undertaking, and we plan our course accordingly. Here’s to a successful bid for the 2020 World Expo in Dubai. Our company – and its groundbreaking technology – will most certainly be in attendance.

Telairity’s NAB Show

We’re heading back to the NAB Show next weekend in Vegas. We certainly mean it to seem like a victory lap, but it was only last year we emerged from the same event as the reigning, award-winning champion innovators. Our SES3200 encoder, then only in prototype, transfixed more than one set of eyebrows with its high-performing speed, pictorial quality, and extraordinarily high compression. Built on the ATCA chassis, a container application intended for the Telecommunications industry, and using a 48V power supply, the digital encoder was revolutionary in its cost-effectiveness, reliability, and performance quality, and rightfully garnered TV Technology’s NAB 2011 STAR“Prestigious Technology” award. Even at the prototype level, experts in the field recognized the SES3200 for what it was – a game-changer for digital compression.

With the advent of bandwidth-hogging, high-quality multimedia wireless devices such as Google Android and Apple’s iPhone, the battle for high-speed bandwidth has grown intense, with many powerful computer, telecommunications, and media broadcasting companies vying for a limited amount of bandwidth. While the largest companies in the industry have sought to buy up as much bandwidth from smaller companies (as well as from lucrative government bandwidth auctions), there is still an ever-growing need to meet the inevitable constraints on capacity. The only solution to get beyond those constraints is to reduce the bit rate of digital encoders while still maintaining the quality.

That’s exactly what we managed to pull off last year in Vegas, and that was only with a prototype. Now that our SES3200 encoders are set to hit the market, we’re convinced the technology will revolutionize (in a very practical manner) the means by which encoding gets implemented. The fact is, we managed to build HDTV encoders that have the in-built high-quality broadcasting standards of the telecommunications industry. Just like the telco industry, our ATCA chassis-based encoders have a 99.999% of connectivity. That’s a high rate of success. That’s the rate of success we plan on distributing worldwide. Here’s to another great year for Telairity at NAB.

Setting the Agenda in Santa Clara: We’re Helping Sponsor the 3rd Annual OTT Con

Over-the-top television (or OTT TV for short) is a technology that’s been heralded as a game-changer for home entertainment media. OTT TV is a television which, by using its own built-in wireless router, can plug into an already extant wireless network to deliver online content to your big-screen home theater. The marriage of television with broadband wireless technology allows for possibilities that make today’s HD cable television systems (systems that were only rolled out in the early 00’s) already seem outdated. By delivering video over the Internet not affiliated with the name-brand carrier, OTT TV has the potential of allowing for an infinite number of broadcast options. Imagine a high-definition satellite television network with the nearly limitless number of channels as YouTube, and you can get a better sense of the scale of entertainment possibilities. 

Over-the-top television is set to outpace the old cable networks; it’s a question not of if, but of when. Nevertheless, OTT TV is a young, upstart industry, with Apple and Google acting as some of the principal powers. There’s an overall need for OTT TV developers to educate the greater broadcast media on the new technology’s works and ways. 

To that end, the third annual Over-the-Top TV Conference will be held in Santa Clara this year. Questions that will be addressed include identifying the major players in the industry, as well as the opportunities and hurdles presented for others in dealing with these major players. Other items on the agenda will be helping determine which OTT TV operators and aggregators are poised to become the first major content providers for the technology, in addition to discussing new means of advertising and addressing one’s customer base.

We at Telairity are proud to be among the sponsors of OTT CON 2012. With our encoding technology already being used in many different OTT TV systems worldwide, we are keen on ushering in this new era of limitless entertainment and variety.