Intelsat and Harmonic are jointly launching HVN Intelsat UHD, a linear Ultra HD demonstration channel for North American TV markets, Intelsat said in a Tuesday news release. Broadcast by Intelsat's Galaxy 13 satellite, the channel is aimed at multichannel video programming distributors interested in preparing and testing their own Ultra HD transmissions. The two companies plan to demonstrate HVN Intelsat UHD channel content later this month at the IBC 2015 Conference in the Netherlands. That test signal will use teleport stream servers at Intelsat's teleport facility in Atlanta and Harmonic's ProMedia Xpress multiscreen decoder and packager for precompression of the UHD video loop. The companies said Harmonic will use its MediaGrid shared storage system, Polaris playout management suite, Spectrum X advanced media server system and Electra X3 advanced media processor for full Ultra HD channel production and transmission later this year.

The Fashion One TV network began the world’s first global Ultra HD channel, Fashion One 4K, using a SES satellite to deliver the free-to-air channel to North America, South America and Europe, SES said in a Wednesday announcement. Fashion One 4K has a “technical reach” of 100 million homes in North America via SES’s Ultra HD platform on the SES-3 satellite at 103 degrees West and 23 million households in South America on the NSS-806 satellite at 47.5 degrees West, SES said. In Europe, the channel, broadcast under the brand Fashion 4K, reaches more than 116 million households via SES’ prime orbital position at 19.2 degrees East, SES said. Since last year, Fashion One has been upgrading its production format to Ultra HD and now owns “an extensive library” of Ultra HD content with all the content rights, SES said.

Toshiba announced a 2-in-1 laptop with a 4K Ultra HD display due in Q4. The Satellite Radius 12 has been certified by Technicolor that color accuracy delivers “color faithful to the intention of all content creators for viewing and enjoying digital content,” said Toshiba Wednesday. The Radius 12.5-inch convertible laptop has sixth-generation Intel Core processors and a wide gamut RGB display that supports 100 percent of the Adobe RGB color space, said Toshiba.The 2.9-pound laptop is reinforced with Gorilla Glass NBT, said the company.

TCL and its China Star Optoelectronics Technology subsidiary collaborated with quantum dots supplier QD Vision on a prototype TV that reproduces more than 90 percent of the BT.2020 color gamut, and will showcase the prototype at this week’s IFA show in Berlin, the companies said in a Tuesday announcement. Though there currently are no commercial displays capable of displaying the full BT.2020 color space, QD Vision views quantum dot technology as “the only commercially available path” to achieving full BT.2020 colorimetry in a TV, it said. TCL scheduled an IFA news conference Friday where it’s expected to discuss the collaboration with QD Vision and the strides it’s making on high-dynamic-range Dolby Vision TVs.

Zigen said it tested and released HDCP 2.2 cards for its line of modular 4K UHD matrix switches, which will enable custom integrators, for the first time, to distribute HDCP 2.2 content from home theater PCs, 4K media players such as the Sony FMP-X10, DirecTV’s Genie set-top box and upcoming Ultra HD Blu-ray players. Until now, dealers haven’t been able to integrate HDCP 2.2-compliant 4K video into their distribution systems, “leading to frustration from some 10 million consumers who picked up 4K UHD TVs as early adopters,” said the company Tuesday. The Zigen 2K/4K modular HDMI to HDBaseT matrix switch is field upgradable from 2x2 to 16x16 configurations, it said. Available two-port cards (two inputs and two outputs) include 70m and 100m HDBaseT along with HDMI to HDMI cards, and all new switches will be loaded with HDCP 2.2 cards that are backward-compatible with previous versions of HDCP, it said. Drivers are available for control systems from AMX, Bitwise, Crestron, Control4, RTI, Savant and URC.

Videotron is Canada’s first telecom provider to release an Ultra HD set-top box across its entire service area, the company said in a Tuesday announcement. Videotron plans to launch an Ultra HD content service by the end of the summer, it said. Videotron hopes its move into Ultra HD will serve as a “catalyst” for the development of an Ultra HD “ecosystem” in Canada “and spur all the players in the distribution chain to follow suit, from the movie studios and post-production facilities to the broadcasters," it said.

Licensing of the next-gen Ultra HD Blu-ray format will formally launch Aug. 24, the Blu-ray Disc Association said in a Wednesday announcement. The start of licensing comes roughly three months after the BDA announced that work on the Ultra HD Blu-ray spec was completed (see 1505120025). The delay between the spec's completion and the start of licensing activities was to allow enough time for licensing documents to be drawn up, the BDA said. But availability of the specs in mid-May gave manufacturers the green light to begin designing products to those specs, to introduce goods in time for the holiday selling season, it said. Ultra HD Blu-ray “will enable consistent and reliable delivery of Ultra HD content” to Ultra HD TV homes, which are expected to grow to 95.6 million globally in 2019 from 11.7 million in 2014, the BDA said, citing IHS projections. The BDA is confident the next-gen format “will set the standard for Ultra HD entertainment,” much as Blu-ray did for HD viewing, said Victor Matsuda, the Sony executive who chairs the BDA’s global promotions committee.

Western Digital announced the My Passport Cinema storage drive Tuesday, a 4K Ultra HD and high-dynamic-range-ready movie storage device compatible with Vidity-enabled devices. Vidity is the brand name of the secure 4K content platform devised by the Secure Content Storage Association (see 1505200049), with founding members Fox Home Entertainment, SanDisk, Warner Home Entertainment and Western Digital. Samsung, a contributing SCSA member, is bundling the $89 Western Digital drive with its flagship SUHD TVs, models JS9000, JS9100 and JS9500, from Aug. 16 through June 30, “so consumers can enjoy 4K UHD content immediately,” Western Digital and Samsung said. That is only for consumers who bought 2015 Vidity-compliant 4K TVs. A disclaimer on the Western Digital website said: “Exodus: Gods and Kings and The Maze Runner will play in 4K UHD on Samsung 2015 TVs. The Samsung 2014 TVs will only play these two movies in HD.” Eight movies from Fox are preloaded on the device, and consumers get two free with the Samsung promotion. Consumers can unlock the additional movies through purchase: X-Men: Days of the Future Past, The Wolverine, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Fault in Our Stars, Let's Be Cops and The Other Woman. Users can download additional titles via M-GO or other Vidity retailers, said the companies.

Video technology supplier Harmonic saw “increased Ultra HD and HEVC compression activity breaking loose” in Q2, CEO Patrick Harshman said on a Monday earnings call. During the quarter, Harmonic “passed our key milestone” by shipping the industry's first Ultra HD encoders with high dynamic range, “enabling the significantly wider color range and enhanced luminance levels that many of our customers now believe is vital to the commercial success of Ultra HD,” Harshman said. Bolstering Ultra HD adoption are growing TV sales and consumer interest, “a gradually maturing ecosystem, new test channel launches and continuous innovation in video quality and bandwidth efficiencies,” he said. There’s also “growing market interest” in HEVC compression, he said: “Many of the world's leading media and telecom companies are now actively considering leveraging HEVC to recompress existing services to dramatically expand reach and reduce distribution costs.” Harshman thinks it’s “an interesting dynamic” that more and more broadcast and media companies are “looking to use HEVC in the near term for traditional HD and even SD content as they look to drive better efficiencies in their mobile networks in their streaming infrastructure,” he said in Q&A. “We've had a couple of announced customers using HEVC technology for those services, and so we do have a view now that HEVC will be more of a near term driver even before Ultra HD really kicks out,” he said.

Ultra HD Blu-ray will support one open and mandatory high-dynamic-range standard in SMPTE ST 2084, but also the proprietary Dolby and Philips HDR systems as options, Victor Matsuda, chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association’s global promotions committee, texted Thursday in the Q&A portion of a BDA “virtual roundtable” held to summarize features of the next-gen format. BDA went to one mandatory and two proprietary HDR standards because, “much like we've done in the past, the format specification is meant to establish consistency for the consumer as well as serve as a toolbox for hardware manufacturers and content creators,” Matsuda said. “The BDA determined that the open HDR technology mandated in the format would provide a fantastic consumer experience but we also wanted to give manufacturers the flexibility to use other proprietary HDR technologies.” BDA thinks Ultra HD Blu-ray “provides a consistent, repeatable experience that is not subject to bandwidth constraints or other external factors that can impact picture quality,” Matsuda said in response to a question about what sets the new format apart from other forms of Ultra HD content delivery. “The bitrates and data throughput that can be achieved with disc surpass those currently available to other delivery platforms,” he said. Ultra HD Blu-ray will have a “digital bridge” function that will be the subject of BDA webinars later this year, Matsuda said. “There are two digital bridge features, copy and export,” he said. “Copy permits a bit for bit copy to be stored on an authorized attached media drive. Export allows files to be transferred to an authorized mobile device. It is up to individual manufacturers to determine how broadly they wish to deploy digital bridge in their products.”