DIRECTV Launches 4K VOD

DIRECTV has launched a new 4K video-on-demand (VOD) service, making it the first multi-channel video provider to offer commercial 4K Ultra HD programming direct to TVs.

DIRECTV is a provider of digital television entertainment services, delivering to over 32m customers in the U.S. and Latin America. Through DIRECTV's new 4K VOD service, subscribers are able to choose among nearly 30 titles from Paramount Pictures' and K2 Communications.

DIRECTV selected Elemental video processing for the service. Elemental Server, a file-based transcoding solution, is used by DIRECTV to prepare 4K Ultra HD VOD content for delivery to customers who have DIRECTV Genie HD DVRs and supporting 2014 Samsung UHD TVs.

Elemental and DIRECTV have secured the use of HEVC, a video compression standard that halves the required bandwidth compared to earlier codecs, as well as 10-bit colour depth to eliminate visible contouring and posterization effects.

"From our perspective, as Ultra HD content gains a foothold in mainstream programming, a software-based approach to implementing video infrastructure ensures content providers such as DIRECTV can quickly scale to expand their 4K offers to include linear 4K channels and 4K streaming services," a statement said.

"With software-defined video solutions from Elemental, DIRECTV has the ability to adapt to a rapidly evolving market, meet consumer demand for superior video quality and an immersive viewing experience and fundamentally change the way people watch TV."

Elemental will be discussing the revelations on December 17 in a live webcast focused on file-based video processing used by customers like DIRECTV, Warner Bros. and HBO for 4K encoding, large-scale library content conversion, live-to-VOD applications and cloud-based transcoding.

Register for the event here.

(IT/JP)