ITU readies ultra HD TV standard

The International Telecommunications Union's Study Group on Broadcasting Service has agreed to technical aspects for the new TV standard Ultra High-definition Television, or UHDTV, Home Media Magazine reports.

The group also announced that Japanese public service broadcaster, NHK provided it with a demonstration of UHDTV earlier this month; and in September, a trial UHDTV broadcast was undertaken between London and Amsterdam. If all goes according to plan, parts of the 2012 London Olympic Games could be shown in UHDTV.

According to DSLReports.com, most estimates suggest that the commercial market won't see any UHDTV sets for at least five years. However, with many carriers only just upgrading networks to support significant (and often highly compressed) HD channel counts, it could be even longer before most networks have the bandwidth needed to support the standard.

“The 'relationship' that a viewer has with television viewing is linked to the overall experience of the picture and quality of sound,” Gadgets and Gizmos quotes David Wood, chairman of the ITU Working Party in the Broadcasting Service Study Group, as saying.

“The extremely high quality of UHDTV will have a definite impact on our lifestyle and on our engagement with the programmes we watch.”