Advanced Television

Spain, France lead UHD adoption

October 23, 2024

By Chris Forrester

The annual 4K HDR Summit in Seville, Spain (November 11th-14th) will be asking whether there is likely to be any progress in the adoption of UHD transmissions other than those already happening in Spain and France.

Spain and France are leading the implementation of UHD in Europe, deploying terrestrial channels to bring it free to homes, while Germany and Italy have slowed down its deployment

Spain already has a national channel, La1 4K, which broadcasts the programming of La1 in UHD, and in 2025 other public and private channels may be added to consolidate Spanish leadership in this new technology in Europe

The French public broadcaster France Télévisions, with the collaboration of the multinational Ateme, launched the first UHD DTT channel in France broadcasting the France International Tennis Tournament and the Paris 2024 Olympic Games for the whole country.

Speakers at the event include European experts such as the Director of France Télévisions, Jacques Donat-Bouillud, and Mickaël Raulet, CTO of Ateme, the French company specialised in the development of technological solutions for the compression, transmission and distribution of high quality video, as well as the ARD (consortium of public broadcasters in Germany) and RAI (Italian public broadcaster), also representing the Ultra HD Forum Italy, among others.

Countries such as Germany and Italy continue with their development of UHD, although still without significant progress due to a “slowdown of work in this area because of the coronavirus”. This is the opinion of Stephan Heimbecher, head of production and infrastructure of the ARD Competence Center and chairman of the EBU’s ‘Intelligent Media Production’ Strategic Programme, who says that the development of UHD in Germany “has been a little parked”, although for some time now “efforts have been made to revitalise the subject”.

For its part, Italy will be represented by Tonio di Stefano, director of networks and platforms at RAI and president of the Ultra HD Forum Italy. Italy’s leading public broadcaster has been investing in the adoption of UHD as part of its strategy to improve the quality of its broadcasts and stay at the forefront of audiovisual technology, although it has not yet been able to launch a channel in UHD quality with DTT content broadcasts.

This is the 10th edition of the 4K HDR Summit and is organised by Medina Media Events.

Categories: Articles, Markets, Research, UHD, Ultra-HD/4K

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