Early 8K adopters can combine four UHD satellite contribution links, but this involves interoperability challenges and can introduce quality impact with quadrant borders becoming visible. Transponder bonding can also be considered, but DVB-S2X modulation allows significant capacity gains over previous generation, which can be leveraged for 8K transmission on a single transponder.
Around 200Mbps are available and using that capacity for an HEVC 8K 4:2:2 contribution encode is already possible today. As a reference point on an adjacent use case, 8K satellite distribution by NHK in Japan has been a reality since 2018. Doing this monopolizes a full satellite transponder for a single channel. However, while possible for some initial services, is not very scalable economically. Being able to transition over time to a new generation codec like VVC to drive bitrate down and free up transponder space appears to be an elegant solution to this problem.
Around 200Mbps are available and using that capacity for an HEVC 8K 4:2:2 contribution encode is already possible today. As a reference point on an adjacent use case, 8K satellite distribution by NHK in Japan has been a reality since 2018. Doing this monopolizes a full satellite transponder for a single channel. However, while possible for some initial services, is not very scalable economically. Being able to transition over time to a new generation codec like VVC to drive bitrate down and free up transponder space appears to be an elegant solution to this problem.
