4K has come on strong, especially in the last week at IBC in Amsterdam. Announcements about new 4K this and new 4K that have been flying fast and furious. But the biggest news may have come from Nanotech, creators of UltraFlix!
Nanotech announced that Sony would be bundling UltraFlix Network App to their 2014 4K UHD TV’s. With the constant clamor for 4K content this is big news. You see, UltraFlix has been quietly building the world’s largest library of 4K video on-demand content. “Sony has been instrumental in advancing the 4K industry and we’re very proud to partner with them,” said Aaron Taylor, NanoTech’s Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “Like Sony, we believe 4K is the Future of Television and look forward to a long and mutually rewarding relationship as we deliver the most exciting 4K technologies of tomorrow – today.” The Sony app, as well as other apps for other TV manufacturers, Will feature HEVC with MPEG-DASH and PlayReady. For those of you who think the servers are all Greek let me explain. HEVC is well on its way to becoming the new standard for MPEG encoding using H.265. H.265 gives us 4K quality images but compresses the video so that the size is not as gigantic as it would be with the old H.264 codec.
So,in a nutshell, smaller file sizes equals faster delivery to your TV. Which means you can watch 4K as long as you have a band width of somewhere around 8 to 10 Mbps.
MPEG-DASH, perhaps more commonly known as Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). What this does is enable us to receive high quality Streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional H TTP web servers.
Finally, PlayReady, is a content protection technology from Microsoft that offers encryption, output protection and Digital Rights Management (DRM).
Put all these together and what you have is a realistic way of delivering 4K to your home.
For those of you who don’t want to wait, UltraFlix has debuted a smartbox called the Nuvola NP-1, available now. While it is not HEVC yet, it will deliver AVC 4K with startlingly good image quality. I have just begun testing the unit and I am very impressed with the results I’ve seen so far.
The box has been developed using Nvidia Tegra Quad Core Mobile Processor. The specs include 2GB DDR3 RAM so the NP-1 has the necessary horsepower to decode them play for K content as well as stream content. One of the other interesting benefits is that it can also decode HD, ST and 3-D movies in addition to play state-of-the-art 3-D video games. This four-inch by four-inch little wonder box will be able to stream Netflix, Hulu plus, XPMC, Amazon instant and YouTube all of which are preinstalled.
Foxcon is building the boxes and there are still a few bugs here and there. But I’ve been assured that they are working on fixes that we will be seeing within the next 30 days. In addition adaptive Streaming is coming. I am waiting for release version 1.3 which will have additional performance and future updates as well as 50+ more titles.
As I said before, UltraFlix, will be adding more and more content with an additional 40 IMAX feature-length titles coming between November and December. This fall we will be seeing studio theatrical titles as well.
Al Caudullo, thru Digital Samurai, has been associated with UltraFlix by supplying 4K content. In fact, four trailers have been used for demo purposes even before the NP-1 debuted. Now our very own channel will be premiering soon. The Digital Samurai Channel will feature state of the art 4K productions including Treasures of Thailand & Muay Thai Madness.
In addition, I’ll be bringing you reviews of all the 4K content available thru UltraFlix.
Keep watching as I continue to bring you all the newest and best in 4K.