Gaurav Arora, the company's Senior Technical Director of its Smart Home Business Division, had a great deal of expectations to share with the audience. Gaurav is the lead solutions architect and technologist for one of the leading divisions of MediaTek who is collaborating with key technology vendors headquartered in North America, including Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix.
Gaurav was speaking during a panel on smart home predictions for 2016 and beyond. Futursource consulting shared with an audience of 100 that it expects to see around 97 million 4K Ultra HD TV units shipping in 2016. Further more, Futuresource expects to see 8.6 million set-top boxes shipping in 2016. This looks like a rather good start and obviously these numbers will increase in 2017.
“There are many flavors of HDR,” Gaurav said during the panel. “When thinking about Ultra High Definition (UHD), think two things:
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Resolution – more pixels don’t always imply better quality because there is a human visual limitation. This depends on a viewer's distance from the screen and the size of the display
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Contrast/Brightness and Color – Users usually notice this more than resolution. We must ensure many colors can be reproduced on a screen by putting the right circuitry in place. A combination of both color accuracy and proper circuitry provides a much better experience. As a technology supplier, MediaTek, supports multiple HDR flavors so our partners can build future proof products.”
When asked about 4K uptake, Gaurav said,
“Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube are leading the charge with distributing (streaming) UHD content. Their cap-ex is limited compared to Pay-TV providers, so they are first out of the gate. We are seeing good demand for 4K Smart-TV and OTT (over-the-top) chipsets. We saw it start with TV’s then demand came from streaming adapters from the likes of Amazon. And now we expect demand for 4K Blu-ray Disc chipsets to take off. MediaTek has heavily promoted both our TV and OTT/BD chipsets and believe we are able to drive 4K growth given our deep expertise in the media playback.”
Fudzilla sees the importance of 4K and HDR and we believe that Netflix, Amazon Prime video and YouTube will help speed up adoption rates of 4K and HDR (High Dynamic Range), as both technologies combined do create a better viewing experience.
