Wiring the Home for 3DTV

The movement of 3DTV into the home got a big push last summer, when standards group HDMI Licensing included rules for the delivery of stereoscopic television formats in its new 1.4 specification. In a lengthy interview with Multichannel News contributor George Winslow, president Steve Venuti talked about HDMI's decision to upgrade the spec's 3D portion and make it available as a free Internet download.

Why did you decide to make the 3D part of the 1.4 HDMI spec available as an Internet download?
With the launch of 1.4 back in June [of 2009], we made the specification proprietary to protect the IP [intellectual-property rights]. We had some issues with unlawful distribution of the spec and getting outside our licensees' hands because it was downloaded easily on the Web. So we decided to make it confidential and available only for our licensees.

But it became very clear with 3D that the HDMI consortium was leading the industry by putting a stake in the sand and saying this is the way that 3D is going to be delivered to the home over HDMI. You can do 3D in many ways, but to ensure interoperability and to ensure that devices can handle 3D with a level of assurance, we said that you've got to do certain things this way. That enabled everyone in the 3D ecosystem to rally around a way to launch this in the home.

Having done that, the 3D portion of the specification became very desired by many people who are not licensees but are critical in the development of the 3D ecosystem. That would include, for example, broadcasters. They are not building boxes. They aren't building HDMI-enabled devices. They are not licensees. But they need to know how to send this stuff down the pipe.

So broadcasters, content guys, standards organizations, cable and satellite operators and other people that were trying to get their arms around how 3D is going to be delivered clearly needed to reference our specification and understand it. So we were really pushed into letting this information out to everyone. It was our obligation to make sure that this is done as seamlessly as possible.

It doesn't mean that people can build a product with the information, but it does mean that they can do their planning and understand the formats and to rollout 3D in more coordinated way.

You are also updating the 3D portion with a HDMI 1.4a specification?
Yes. HDMI 1.4a is going to be completely devoted to updating the 3D portion. We are not trying to do anything else [to the] spec.

When we launched 1.4 in June, we were pretty clear on understanding on how movies would be delivered in 3D and we were pretty clear on how it would work in the gaming industry so that it would be interoperable. But we were not so clear in broadcast. At that time, broadcasters were still evaluating how quickly they would get behind it and start trials and announce channels. So, when we launched 1.4 we did not mandate a format for broadcast content because we were not sure where broadcast would go.

But broadcast very quickly came up to speed and you've seen all the announcements for channels. In 1.4a, we're committed to specify a broadcast format so that the broadcasters and especially the set-top box guys and cable and satellite folks can enable their devices to be 3D-ready over HDMI and compliant with the specification in way that suits their business needs.

How soon will 1.4a be available?
I can't give you a specific date. We've said that we would come up with a general direction at our technical meeting in late January and that we would soon thereafter, very quickly, publish the specification ... We are in the process now of essentially writing [the broadcast format] into the specification and then we'll review it and publish it.

CableLabs has been very actively in looking at how 3D content can be delivered over the cable plant. Will the specification allow 3D content to be delivered in a frame-compatible format over the existing cable infrastructure?
Absolutely. Everyone in the cable and satellite industry has told us that they need to a way to deliver this in a way that uses their legacy infrastructure. That why we actually eased up some of our restrictions so that they could do what they needed to do, so they can quickly start giving their customers a flavor of 3D content and programming.

How well-equipped is HDMI to handle the increased bandwidth requirements for both 3D and some of the higher-resolution HD formats that will be coming into the market in upcoming years?
When we launched the 1.3 version nearly four years ago, the specification had a bandwidth ceiling of 10.2 Gigabytes per second. So far, there has not been much use of that bandwidth.

The highest resolution people are getting today is mainly 1080p and with 10.2 Gbps, we have more than twice the bandwidth needed for 1080p. That means that it can handle 3D HD signals [with two 1080p signals, one for each eye] or even higher-resolution HD formats like 4K.

Those are clearly future applications, but we can see them coming along in the next year or two. Beyond that, we are going to have to do what we do all the time, which is to look at increasing bandwidth. But really, for the last four years, we've had the bandwidth for 3D, increased color bit depth, or perhaps 4K.

What are some of things that you might address in a future HDMI specification?
I can't be specific because we haven't had that discussion formally as a group. We have been so focused on 3D that we haven't talked about what comes after 1.4. But, without making any commitments, there are some trends in the market that we'll have to look at. One is what we just talked about. The bandwidth requirements never stop and we have to look at that.

It is also increasingly clear to us that the world will become more of a networked world. Devices will be delivering content in new ways and they will be connected to the outside world. HDMI 1.4 has an Ethernet channel [and looking forward] we will have to think about a world where these devices are doing things they haven't done before and being connected in different ways to each other.

I think we also need to look at the fact that HDMI has quickly grown from being a traditional home theater technology that was a way to connect the set-top box, or game console or AV receiver or TV to each other. We started to see that change with digital cameras and video camcorders and now we are seeing cellphones with smaller connectors.

So, the sources for HD are changing. It is not just a Blu-ray player or set-top box that is going to deliver HD content; there are devices that are never been associated with the home-theater system that are going to deliver HD and there new places where you are going to view HD content. So the presence of HDMI in all sorts of devices that are not traditionally associated with the home theater is another trend.

I also think we will see many more commercial applications adopt HDMI, which was really created for the home. You will see it more often in commercial applications in bars, restaurants, airports, retail signage and hotels. You will see more HDMI in business-to-business application and products designed for that.

Another thing I think we will need to address is complexity. When we start networking these devices, and they start talking to each other, that creates all sorts of benefits but it also makes things more complex. So I think there will be a need for device command and control that simplifies and manages the whole system in a way that is more user-friendly.

By George Winslow, Multichannel News