8K Satellite News

[Houston Rockets]

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.

 

[VictoriaFTA]

We can't even get them to move past 1080i satellite TV broadcasting here in the U.S. -- what makes you think they're going to do 8K broadcasts? Japan has been broadcasting NHK BSP4K & BS8K via satellite for over seven years now, and there are many 4K TV channels in Europe & Asia now via satellite. Here in the Americas however, it's only in the past few years they've started backhauling more events via satellite at 1080p resolution. But most is still stuck backhauled at 1080i. And 4K, you can forget about. 4K backhauls are rarer than a unicorn.

The U.S. is so far behind the rest of the world it isn't even funny. I have to source 8K content for my 8K OLED TV from NHK's BS8K TV channel because the U.S. is playing in the mud and living in stick houses while the Japanese are building skyscrapers.