The Resolution Will Be Televised: Introducing Ultra-High-Definition Visual Quality

Remember those bygone, medieval days of five years’ back when HD was the final word in video resolution? It may be that you won’t remember them for much longer. Companies near and far are starting to release products that go above and beyond – and then above and beyond some more for good measure – when it comes to resolution quality. Companies such as Sony, Canon, Red Epic, JVC, and Dalsa Origin have all gotten into the game of releasing 4k resolution technology that is employable both in digital television and digital cinematography.

“4k” is a sort of nickname that’s been given to the overall concept of ultra-high-definition, a reference to the approximate number of pixels contained in the horizontal resolution of the format (for accuracy’s sake the actual resolution of 4K UHD stands precisely at 3840 x 2160 pixels – a four-fold increase in graphic detail from high-definition). While most current digital television devices have no real need for such high resolution quality – let alone content that they can broadcast using this new system, one of the principal aims behind 4K is to allow for larger, movie-sized screens to have the same pictorial detail that home entertainment screens already possess. As has been discussed recently in other social media entries, the London Summer Olympics of 2012 saw the first widespread use of 4K UDTV by a major broadcaster: the BBC, the world’s largest broadcasting network, set up multiple 15m wide screens throughout the United Kingdom for the public to be able to “attend” the Games in a more convivial atmosphere than, say, a home entertainment theater.

The technology is widespread and promises longstanding market resiliency. We at Telairity would be amiss if we didn't develop the proper encoders to accommodate what promises to be the “going” visual format of the future. Being masters at SD, HD, and mobile visual formats, we are already perfecting encoders that will meet the needs of these new formats as they begin their widespread roll-out. The market has spoken. The ultra-high-definition revolution is upon us. Those companies who have the technology that’s flexible and capable enough of meeting the new resolution standards will be the ones left standing once the wave has hit. Count us among that select group.

Introducing the SES3200 from Telairity: the Final Word in Content and Communications

We’re looking forward with great excitement to this week’s Content and Communications World expo in New York, NY.  Everything that is right now making global headwinds in the realms of media, communications, and entertainment will be perusable under one roof from November 14-15 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Midtown Manhattan. Groundbreaking technologies such as 3D TV, IPTV, OTT, and U-HD, along with the greater integration of IP and satellite communications networks, will be on the table and up for discussion among the world’s leading technological movers and shakers.  Needless to say we at Telairity wouldn’t miss it for the world. The conference and tradeshow will afford us the perfect, transnational launching platform for our new SES32000 Scalable Encoding System, a “head-end in a box” technology that lets its users maximize their encoding densities – all the while keeping down their costs. It will be the first time our SES3200 has made its full public debut. We fully anticipate that broadcasters who seek a better means of administering their IPTV, OTT, WebTV, and mobile broadcast distribution networks will be keenly taking notes.

The SES3200 is the latest in Telairity’s long legacy of designing products that meet the threefold criterion of quality performance, flexible adaptability, and cost-effectiveness. The versatility of the platform is plain to behold: while its principle encoding technology is based in H.264/AVC formatting, the system is fully compatible with older 2G networks – in addition to being able to roll with new networks like 3GPP, 3GPP2, and the 3GPP multi-rate file format. Likewise and just as importantly, the SES3200’s high-grade mobile video technology is able to broadcast at extremely low bitrates, all the while maintaining breathtaking image quality. Finally, the sheer number of channels one can broadcast over – and do so seamlessly using multiple and various network configurations – comes out to a total of 32.

But all of this is just tip-of-the-iceberg preliminaries. Come visit our presentation at Content and Communications World to learn more about how Telairity continues to ride the wave of the future in a way that fewer and fewer encoder companies can lay claim to.

Gentlemen, Start Your (Fan)Visions: Telairity Takes on F1 Racing

The United States Grand Prix: it’s one of the oldest automotive races in the world, with a legacy that stretches back to 1908, when it was known as the “American Grand Prize”. Eventually subsumed into the Formula One World Championship series of motor races, the F1 United States Grand Prix became the legendary proving-ground for some of international racing’s top race car drivers. Last held at the Indianapolis Speedway in 2007, the U.S. Grand Prix is making its way this time to Austin, TX, where an estimated 150,000+ spectators are anticipated to descend on the state capital in quest of high-speed adrenaline.

Speaking of spectator sports and speaking of high-speeds, what better proving-ground for FanVision to create new believers? The game-changing technology has already enhanced the way that NFL and collegiate football are experienced across the United States, including at the University of Michigan’s Wolverine Stadium, the largest sports amphitheater in the Western Hemisphere. Attendees at the stadium can either rent or purchase FanVision controllers that allow them to experience the epic race from 8 respective on-board camera angles, in addition to receiving real-time racing updates, stats, and professional analysis from the best sportscasters in the business. Everything from head-to-head comparisons of where individual race cars stand in relation to one another, to instant replays, will be available through the platform.

And guess who provides the high bit-rate encoding? You guessed it: Telairity.

The only thing faster than the F1 cars barreling their way around the racetrack at Austin will be the bit processing of Telairity’s encoders. With Telairity at the wheel,  fans can easily log onto their FanVision controllers, channel surf, and keep up with all the action seamlessly – all the while enjoying HD quality visuals. Even in a jam-packed stadium, Telairity’s encoding technology condenses to such a degree that bandwidth overuse is never a concern. Each acceleration, pit-stop, and hairpin turn will be experienced in all its real-time, multidimensional glory with the help of FanVision – and us here at Telairity.

For Those Who Were Sleeping: Justifications for the Digital Age

Somewhere, online or in print, at any given hour of the day on any one of the settled continents, there is a headline blaring the catchphrase “digital age” somewhere in its midst.  It’s a phrase that has already lost any sense of novelty in speaking it or writing it – it just seems to come with the territory, a distant piece of primeval etymology. To say, “Digital age!” almost anywhere on Earth would be the equivalent of saying, “Cars and trucks!” in the middle of a freeway traffic jam. Yes, we all know how “information” has become “digitized” to the nth degree. But what are the advantages of this means of record-keeping over, say, the libraries that civilization has painstakingly accumulated over the course of hundreds of years? What are the practical gains of being able to record sounds and images “digitally” as opposed to the analog formats we all grew up with?

Is this a case of technology taking over by sheer force of traction and advertising? Is the digital age a “necessary” age?

Well, the short answer is that like it or not, the digital age is upon us. For those who choose to ignore the implications of its technological achievements, they stand to lose out against those who have dedicated their lives and careers towards “mastering” the new formats.

Binary code enabled us to enter the 'Digital Age,'
by breaking everything down into bits from the blogs we read
to the pictures we send friends. 

But there’s a longer and more logical answer as well. The digital age has standardized the flow of many different types of information – telephone calls, photographs, television sets, libraries, billboard advertising, and advanced communication – into a single flowing river of zeroes and ones. The images you take (via digital camera or smartphone) of your friends and family on vacation in Brazil are formed of the same “bits” that comprise the online blogs you read while bored at work, back in your New York cubicle. Unlike the Eastman Kodak photo albums of just a few years back, these images are easily printable – and furthermore erasable. Likewise, the graphic quality of digital images far surpasses the finest film developing facilities that America ever produced. The 8-megapixel camera on a $99 smartphone already is capable of displaying graphic resolutions that the human eye, for all its sharpness, fails at discerning.

The digital age has done for information what the industrial revolution did for material parts: information that would have been hard to find 20 years ago is now easily replicable. You can now balance libraries more extensive than the Library of Congress in your lap as you sip your latte at the “bookstore.”

Just like any other major technological revolution in human history, the digital age has its detractors and naysayers. But it is here to stay for the foreseeable time being, and should be welcomed – at the very least – out of sheer necessity.

How High Can Resolution Climb and Still Be Cost-Effective?

In a few, quick years - years that feel more like quantum leaps than years, at least in our industry - we have witnessed the transformation of SD picture quality into ever higher levels of resolution. Even the much-touted HDTV – with its 16.8 million approximate primary color variations (more gradations than the human eye is capable of detecting) – has begun to feel outdated in the face of new technology coming down the pipeline. As I write these words, there are 16-bit visual display platforms developed that can articulate upwards of 280 trillion possible shades of primary color, a number dwarfing what only a few years ago seemed like a pioneering achievement. We are a far, indiscernible cry away from the days of the SD pictorial quality we all grew up with watching on television. Given the current rate at which ever more sharp resolutions are being adapted for the market, we can only assume that the “resolution revolution” still has a ways to go before manufacturers and technicians realize that there is no need to proceed beyond the very high standards already set.

Simply put, the bit rate transmissions to sustain that level of resolution for broadband applications would cost ludicrous amounts of money. We’re still living in an age of transition, where encoding technology is desperately striving to keep pace with the platforms which it is expected to provide functionality to. While new and higher resolution video technologies will doubtless continue playing a key part in the ongoing digital revolution, encoding technology needs to sharpen its performance level to match the already-overtaxed needs of the system as it stands. Simply ladling more pixels into an already high-resolution visual framework may prove to be a case of “gilding the lily,” adding unnecessary resolution at a price not worth paying. After all, a higher pixel count equals a higher cost.

Not only is Telairity a thought-leader and advocator for encoding technology to “catch up” with the network systems already in place, but we’ve actually made good on our word by the products we’ve developed. We are neck-and-neck with current digital technology as it stands, and customers around the globe – from Silicon Valley to Sydney to Beijing to Dubai – are well aware of this. We will continue overcoming all future technological hurdles placed in our path. 

At the Olympics, Television Gets the Silver – But Online Takes the Gold

London’s 2012 Olympic Games mark the first occasion where online media has played such a large-scale, pivotal role in broadcasting the Olympics to a worldwide audience. Already we’ve experienced political revolutions around the world fueled by Facebook or by Twitter. If these revolutions have been characterized as “Facebook Revolutions”, or “Twitter Revolutions,” then the “Twitter Olympics” may well be an apt title for describing how these games were experienced throughout the increasingly digitized world.

Viewers who opted to experience the Olympics digitally found their ability to personalize which games they watched, and which athletes or countries they followed, enhanced enormously. There was an “instant gratification” factor, noted one commentator in Time Magazine, how he was able to watch “Ryan Lochte fail to medal in the day’s most anticipated race while NBC’s viewers watched… water polo.” Coupled with the tape delays associated with a major broadcasting network, and how these delays were in contrast to the instantaneous, second-by-second ability of digital viewers to watch the Games time-wise sans filter or hiccup, and you can see why the world is quickly adopting digital media as the “Gold Standard” for how it experiences broadcasting.

With several important digital media platforms slated to likely roll out later this year – including the much-anticipated Apple TV device – the Olympics shows just how easily digital media outpaces traditional means of broadcast distribution. While NBC covered the games very well (and earns from us a Silver medal), we at Telairity – and viewers around the globe – have to hand the Gold over to where it belongs: with digital viewing.

Records Are Meant to Be Broken: UHDTV’s Debut at the London Olympics

Taking a look at the stats, this summer’s Olympic Games in London promise to be the largest ever. An estimated 10,500 athletes from 202 countries will compete against each other in 26 sports. The media exposure, likewise, promises to break previous levels of coverage as well. The International Broadcast Centre in London’s Olympic Park is expected to serve as home-base for approximately 20,000 broadcasters, journalists, and official photographers. These in turn will relay the game to an estimated 4 billion people worldwide, around 60% of the Earth’s total population. 

Somewhere amid the star athletes, gold medals, and international rivalry that will deluge television screens worldwide, a new TV technology will quietly make its grand debut: UHDTV, which stands for ultra high-definition television. UHDTV is the anticipated next generation replacement for HDTV, a technology that only recently rendered standard definition televisions obsolete. With its 1920 x 1080p rating, HDTV offered picture resolution at six times the level of SDTV. But now, with the advent of UHDTV, that higher level of resolution will itself have been increased sixteen-fold. To put it in layman’s shorthand, UHDTV is to television what Michael Phelps was to swimming back in those ancient, HDTV-ridden days of 2008.

In short, we live in an era where world records – Olympic and otherwise – are broken almost as soon as they are achieved. More so than ever before in human history, the benchmarks for competitiveness are set ever higher in athletics, electronics, architecture, media exposure, industrial productivity... the list runs to the horizon. Whatever this year brings as far as new Olympic records set for gold medals, one score is for certain: the gold goes to UHDTV for 2012 in terms of visual quality.

From Science Fiction to (Virtual) Reality: the Growing Trend towards Digital Cinema

In 2002, George Lucas, the founding father of the sci-fi blockbuster, did something that many in cinema at the time viewed as being – well – a little bit “out there”. He shot the entirety of his fifth “Star Wars” movie with a digital camera that presented images at the rate of 48 frames-per-second. In other words, he’d abandoned the 35 mm, 24 frame-per-second show reel that had served as film’s metric since time immemorial. Fine and good, but the trouble was there were only two movie-houses in the United States – one in Los Angeles and one in Paramus, NJ – that were actually fitted to show digital pictures, and only because Lucas had specifically equipped them to do so. While many critics saw the potential advantages of digital film – the more “lifelike” picture quality, the potential for rapid global distribution (rather than the usual targeted release) – many more concluded that the technology was as eccentric as the Stars Wars universe. Leave it to the inventor of Eewoks and Jedi to fly off the deep end, went the going commonsense of that year.

Big ideas have a long history of not catching on till there’s enough critical momentum to propel them forward into the mainstream market. Fast-forward a decade later, and digital cameras – and digital cinema-houses – are more ubiquitous than ever. Indeed, this summer, another guaranteed smash-hit blockbuster movie, The Hobbit, is being released in digital by Peter Jackson. Jackson claims the more realistic quality of 48 fps provides a good “balance” to the “fantastic” nature of the story he’s telling.

But aesthetical arguments are only the half of it. With digital cameras ensconced in the world of television, as well as indie film, it can only be a matter of years before mainstream Hollywood follows suit. After all, film reel is expensive. Having a digital camera aboard your production saves you, quite literally, millions of dollars. In an industry that knows a thing or two about overblown budgets, digital technology can serve as a great democratic equalizer, allowing films to be shot in high-quality resolution for a minimal price. All signs seem to be pointing towards digital encoding. Strange to admit, but the creator of C3PO seems to have been right all along.

All About Megapixel Ratings

It’s no stretch in saying that the digital encoders we design and manufacture at Telairity are some of the most competitively trailblazing products of their kind on the market today. The bit rate speed, high resolution, platform versatility, and cost-effectiveness of our encoders, decoders, and mobile encoders all attest to this, as do our sales-figures in any number of key international markets. But while our products are certainly innovative in the way they perform (and outperform), there isn’t any reason why the basic concepts behind the technology should remain mysterious to the curious bystander. 

In other words, you don’t have to be a “techie” to understand the basic rocket science.

Take the key concept of megapixel rating, for instance – a quality our encoders are rightfully known for, and also one of the driving selling-points behind new commercial technologies like the 4G network. Just why – exactly – is it a “good thing” to have a high megapixel rating? 

Well, for starters, having a high pixel rating results in the production of a higher quality digital image – one which, if brought into closer resolution, the quality wouldn’t blur or distort. The trick to having a high pixel rating – and thereby a high-resolution image - isn’t in the sheer number of pixels involved in producing the image, but rather the size of each individual pixel within a given, constrained amount of space. 

The more pixels per square inch (ppi), the better, and here’s why: since the resolution limit for the unaided human eye is around 0.1 mm, any pixel that’s smaller than 0.1 mm in diameter will translate as “seamless” when zoomed into higher focus. That’s the whole working concept behind the iPhone 4: with 960 x 640 pixels squeezed into a 3.5 inch diagonal screen, the iPhone 4’s graphics more than exceed the natural boundaries imposed by human vision: with 326 ppi on the iPhone 4’s screen display, every image appears un-blurred no matter how closely you zoom.  

Telairity has developed the encoding technology that not only reduces drastically the cost, speed, and bandwidth by which digital information gets relayed, but also places a high emphasis on high-ppi graphics. As the commercial digital world continues to trend towards the ever faster, ever more visually precise consumer experience, Telairity is flying at the forefront of the wave.

Telairity Comes to Dubai

It was only a matter of time before Telairity made it to Dubai. Despite the global recession, the city-state continues building, populating, and developing its infrastructure at a staggering clip. In 2012 alone, Dubai’s global trade is projected to grow by 20%, thereby increasing the overall U.A.E. economy by 3.5%. Additionally, Dubai ranks ninth among the top 20 visitor destination cities on the planet, making the tabloid stories of panicky ex-pats fleeing the city in droves seem grossly exaggerated.

Finally, and most importantly, Dubai continues to plan for its long-term future. The city is presenting a strong bid for the 2020 World Expo. Historically at these six-month long events, new technological game-changers have made their debuts to a global audience: the “elevator” first made its appearance at the Dublin Expo; the “telephone” was first brought to a wider audience at the Expo in Philadelphia; and more recently, “green building techniques” were unveiled in Aichi. In the words of Reem Al Hashimy, Dubai’s Minister of State, “Ideas are planted, tested, experimented and a global dialogue begins to take shape and influence future trends.”

These are the sorts of words Telairity lives by. Being that we are one of the foremost digital encoder providers for the Asian market, with strong performance in countries like China, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, it became obvious that we needed to develop our business relations in the Middle East. As a result, we recently introduced our encoding technology at CABSAT, the largest cable and satellite showcase in the Middle East and Africa. We came away from the conference and exhibit with heavy-hitting new connections and strategic partners for future business throughout the Arabian Peninsula.

As an exponentially growing company, we view CABSAT as just a stepping-stone towards eventually providing quality service throughout the entire Middle East. Like the city of Dubai itself, we value the principle and challenge of exponential undertaking, and we plan our course accordingly. Here’s to a successful bid for the 2020 World Expo in Dubai. Our company – and its groundbreaking technology – will most certainly be in attendance.

Telairity’s NAB Show

We’re heading back to the NAB Show next weekend in Vegas. We certainly mean it to seem like a victory lap, but it was only last year we emerged from the same event as the reigning, award-winning champion innovators. Our SES3200 encoder, then only in prototype, transfixed more than one set of eyebrows with its high-performing speed, pictorial quality, and extraordinarily high compression. Built on the ATCA chassis, a container application intended for the Telecommunications industry, and using a 48V power supply, the digital encoder was revolutionary in its cost-effectiveness, reliability, and performance quality, and rightfully garnered TV Technology’s NAB 2011 STAR“Prestigious Technology” award. Even at the prototype level, experts in the field recognized the SES3200 for what it was – a game-changer for digital compression.

With the advent of bandwidth-hogging, high-quality multimedia wireless devices such as Google Android and Apple’s iPhone, the battle for high-speed bandwidth has grown intense, with many powerful computer, telecommunications, and media broadcasting companies vying for a limited amount of bandwidth. While the largest companies in the industry have sought to buy up as much bandwidth from smaller companies (as well as from lucrative government bandwidth auctions), there is still an ever-growing need to meet the inevitable constraints on capacity. The only solution to get beyond those constraints is to reduce the bit rate of digital encoders while still maintaining the quality.

That’s exactly what we managed to pull off last year in Vegas, and that was only with a prototype. Now that our SES3200 encoders are set to hit the market, we’re convinced the technology will revolutionize (in a very practical manner) the means by which encoding gets implemented. The fact is, we managed to build HDTV encoders that have the in-built high-quality broadcasting standards of the telecommunications industry. Just like the telco industry, our ATCA chassis-based encoders have a 99.999% of connectivity. That’s a high rate of success. That’s the rate of success we plan on distributing worldwide. Here’s to another great year for Telairity at NAB.