A day after running its first-ever Super Bowl commercial touting its OLED TV technology (see 1602030044), LG Electronics priced its “signature” 65-inch 4K OLED TV at $7,999 and began taking pre-orders for shipments to begin in late March, the company said in a Monday announcement. Abt, Best Buy, Bjorn’s, BrandsMart, Fry’s, Nebraska Furniture Mart, P.C. Richard, Value Electronics and Video & Audio Center are taking part in a “display showcase” at the point of sale in select stores and where first shipments of the product will be sold, LG said.

SES and global content licensor Vivicast Media will launch a new 4K channel, UHD-1, for distribution through North American cable operators and telcos, the companies said in a Wednesday announcement. UHD-1 will be delivered over the SES-3 satellite, one of three satellites (SES-1, SES-3 and AMC-18) that make up SES's Ultra HD distribution infrastructure at the center “of the orbital arc over North America,” they said. UHD-1 is the fourth “unique” Ultra HD channel on SES's North American Ultra HD platform, after NASA TV UHD, Fashion One 4K and High 4K TV, SES said: "As consumers continue to add Ultra HD TVs into their homes, a robust channel offering is essential to meet their thirst for compelling high quality Ultra HD programming.”

Bell Fibe TV customers in Montréal, Ottawa, Québec City and Toronto can buy Bell's new 4K DVR for C$599 (about $413) with capacity to record up to 150 hours of 4K content and Bluetooth remote-control support, the Canadian telco said in a Monday announcement. The DVR will be "ready" for high dynamic range “as the next step in broadcast technology becomes available,” it said. By late February, availability of the DVR for purchase or rent will be expanded to all and new and existing Bell Fibe TV customers and to Bell Aliant FibreOP TV customers in Atlantic Canada, it said. With the new DVR and an Ultra HD TV, Fibe TV customers “can enjoy a growing range of 4K content from Bell Media and other providers,” including Wednesday’s TSN live telecast in 4K of the Toronto Raptors-Boston Celtics NBA game, it said. “Live 4K production is a bold new frontier for the TV industry, intensifying the live sports viewing experience with enhanced motion detail, increased screen pixel counts, and greater brightness range.”

Rogers Communications, which last week beamed the world’s first live NBA game in 4K (see 1601140002), will repeat that milestone for hockey Saturday when it shows the first-ever NHL game in 4K, it said in a Monday announcement. The first NHL 4K game will be a Hockey Night in Canada telecast produced by Sportsnet and available to Rogers customers with a NextBox 4K set-top on Channel 999 when the Toronto Maple Leafs face the Montreal Canadiens, live from Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, Rogers said. The 4K viewing “changes the game experience, drawing the fan onto the ice like never before,” it said. “Viewers can see the flex of the stick and the grooves in the ice,” while the live game producers can zoom in on key plays at up to 500 percent magnification “without motion blur,” it said. Saturday’s game is the first of a 20-game NHL 4K broadcast commitment by Rogers and Sportsnet in 2016, Rogers said.

“Subjective tests” using human viewers to verify the compression efficiency of Ultra HD’s H.265 codec that previously had been estimated using only “objective metrics” have found better than expected bit-rate savings compared with the older H.264 codec. So said BBC R&D Engineer Rajitha Weerakkody and BBC Video Coding Project Leader Marta Mrak in a Thursday blog post that summarized the findings in a just-published IEEE research paper they both helped author. The overall average bit-rate saving achieved with H.265 compared with H.264 “for the same subjective quality” was found to be 59 percent, versus the 44 percent efficiency gain shown with objective quality metrics, Weerakkody and Mrak said. The tests also found the bit rate savings for larger picture sizes were higher than for smaller picture sizes, “which is a very encouraging sign for future UHD deployments,” they said. In the subjective tests, they said, viewers were shown “a carefully selected set of coded video sequences” in four different formats -- Ultra HD (3840x2160 and 4096x2048), 1080p (1920x1080), 720p (1280x720) and 480p (832x480), at frame rates varying between 30 and 60 Hz. Many of the tests were conducted at the BBC R&D labs “under controlled viewing environments,” in conformity with ITU recommendations on “visual quality assessment,” they said.

Rogers Communications, in what it called a “global first,” beamed the first-ever live NBA game in 4K to customers with a NextBox 4K set-top when it aired the Toronto Raptors vs. Orlando Magic game Thursday from the O2 Arena in London. Rogers cable customers who tuned their NextBox 4K set-top to Channel 999 at 3 p.m. EST would be able to get the game “at four times the pixels of HD for stunning picture quality, higher resolution and improved motion video,” Rogers said in a Wednesday announcement. The production was in cooperation with BT Sport, which launched Europe's first live sports 4K channel, BT Sport Ultra HD, last year and also was to beam the game in 4K to customers in the U.K., Rogers said. Rogers claims to have made the largest commitment to live sports broadcasting in 4K in North America, with plans to do more than 100 live sporting events in 4K, including every 2016 Toronto Blue Jays home game, plus “marquee” NHL games, it said. In 2016, Rogers customers also will have access to stream 100 hours of 4K movies, series and TV shows through Netflix and other services, it said.

At a show awash with wireless technology, the HomeGrid Forum used CES to promote powerline technology as a “robust networking backbone” for the connected home. G.hn offers a single, widely supported standard for connected networked devices over existing wired infrastructure including powerline, coax and phone line, it said. The expansion of Ultra HD TV content and multiple screens in the average household has created the need for a “high throughput home networking backbone," said the forum. HomeGrid positioned powerline networking for “real homes” where obstacles such as surge protectors, appliances and network congestion can interfere with wireless networking. It showed Sigma Designs’ CG5321 and SMP8758 G.hn chipsets for its G-Connex entertainment and networking device that’s said to combine the features of a streaming device with the high transmission rates required by Ultra HD 4K. It also showed Sigma Designs’ Ultra HD-ready G.hn Prime that was selected by Zinwell for its Multi-Input, Multi-Output powerline communication home networking product line. Arris, Brightech, Comtrend and Wondertek also showed G.hn-based devices.

New and existing users of UltraFlix, which bills itself as having the world’s largest library of streaming 4K content, can reap substantial savings for renting multiple titles through Dec. 28, the service’s parent NanoTech Entertainment said Friday. For example, a package of 99 rentals costs $99.99, a savings of 90 percent from regular UltraFlix pricing, it said. UltraFlix is available on Samsung, Sony, Vizio, Roku 4 and Android devices, and soon will be available for Apple TV, NanoTech said.

Optoma will use the Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) conference in February to unveil “cutting-edge” Ultra HD projection technology for the consumer market, the supplier said in a Monday announcement. Until now, only “premium format cinema screens” have been capable of using Ultra HD projection technology, the company said. “We are the first DLP projector manufacturer bringing 4K technology to the home consumer market." ISE opens Feb. 9 at the RAI Exhibition Centre in Amsterdam for a four-day run.

The UHD Alliance has completed work on “premium specifications” for Ultra HD displays, content and distribution, and will disclose details on those specs at CES, along with a “consumer-facing certification logo” for compliant products, it said in a Tuesday announcement. “Advances in resolution, brightness, contrast, color and audio will enable certified displays and content to replicate the richness of life’s sights and sounds and allow in-home viewers to more fully and accurately experience the content creator’s vision,” the alliance said. Alliance President Hanno Basse, Fox corporate chief technology officer, promised at IFA in Berlin that his group would have “a lot of things to share” at CES, including perhaps details on a dual-logo program for compliant hardware products (see 1509080050). Tuesday’s announcement made no mention of dual logos, only that the specs “cover a combination of key features and consumer-tested benchmarks that will usher in a new era of in-home entertainment.”