20th Century Fox, Panasonic and Samsung Forge New Partnership to Deliver HDR10+ Technology

28 Aug, 2017 By: Stephanie Prange

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Panasonic Corp., Samsung Electronics and 20th Century Fox Aug. 28 announced a new partnership to create an open, royalty-free dynamic metadata platform for high dynamic range through a certification and logo program, tentatively called HDR10+, according to a press release.

Together, the three companies will form a licensing entity that will begin licensing the HDR10+ platform in January 2018. The entity will license the metadata broadly to content companies, ultra-high definition TVs, Blu-ray disc players/recorders and set-top box manufacturers, as well as SoC vendors — royalty-free with only a nominal administrative fee.

“As leaders in home entertainment content and hardware, the three companies are ideal partners for bringing HDR10+ into the homes of consumers everywhere,” said Jongsuk Chu, SVP of the visual display business at Samsung Electronics. “We are committed to making the latest technology available in our TVs and are confident that HDR10+ will deliver premium quality content and enhance the way you experience television programs and movies in the home.”

“HDR10+ provides unprecedented picture quality on all displays with brightness, color, and contrast automatically optimized for each scene,” according to the statement. “In previous iterations, static tone mapping applied a fixed enhancement across an entire piece of content. With HDR10+ dynamic tone mapping, every scene is individually enhanced to bring to life vibrant visuals and achieve unprecedented picture quality. This new enhanced visual experience will allow consumers to see pictures that match the intention of filmmakers.”

The announcement about HDR10+ comes as DolbyVision — another enhanced HDR platform from Dolby that requires a licensing fee and purports to provide similar scene-by-scene optimization — has gained ground in the hardware and software realm.

“HDR10+ is a technological step forward that optimizes picture quality for next-generation displays,” said Danny Kaye, EVP at 20th Century Fox and managing director of the Fox Innovation Lab. “HDR10+ provides dynamic metadata, which precisely describes every scene to deliver unprecedented picture quality. Working in partnership with Panasonic and Samsung through the Fox Innovation Lab, we are able to bring new platforms like HDR10+ to the market that more accurately realize the vision of our filmmakers beyond the theater.”

Key benefits of HDR10+, according to the release, are that it offers system flexibility, allowing a variety of partners, including content creators, content distributors, TV manufacturers and device makers, to incorporate this platform and improve the viewing experience for audiences, and that it was designed to allow for future development and innovation in order to deliver a more powerful technology in the years to come.

“Panasonic has a long history of working with industry leaders to develop lasting technical formats,” said Yuki Kusumi, executive officer at Panasonic. “We are delighted to work together with 20th Century Fox and Samsung to develop a new HDR format, which will bring consumers so many benefits. By offering considerable HDR picture quality improvements across a wider range of TVs while accelerating the amount of premium HDR content available, we expect HDR10+ to quickly become the defacto HDR format.”

Panasonic, Samsung and 20th Century Fox will announce further details on the license program along with a demonstration of HDR10+ technology at CES 2018, according to the press release.

 

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