NHK demos Hybridcast streaming, teams up internet and cable TV for superior 3D delivery

With all the hubbub surrounding competing 3DTV technology, it's easy to forget the all important delivery process: how is your TV getting its content, and what does it mean for the viewer? It may seem trivial, but the answer is all-too important to the folks at NHK, who are hoping to facilitate Full HD delivery for 3D content using a new hybrid broadcast system. Think you already have Full HD 3D? Think again: most broadcast 3D content is delivered via side by side transmission, forcing two images (one for each eye) into a single 1080p frame. This allows 3D content to pipe through existing HD channels, but when the separate images are reconstituted and upscaled, resolution and picture quality suffer. NHK hopes to resolve this by fusing broadcast transmission with broadband streaming, what it calls Hybridcast. In a recent dual-stream demo, NHK sent the image for one eye over standard HD TV broadcast pipes, and the other through those wondrous internet tubes, eventually reassembling the two streams into a single, Full HD image, ready for your hungry eyeballs. This prototype delivery system is little more than a demo right now, but with any luck, it'll be giving us a whole new reason to freak out about broadband bandwidth caps in the near future.

Tech-On

NHK (pdf)

NHK's flexible OLED is both literally and figuratively green

When it's not pushing Super Hi-Vision, the hopeful 7,680 x 4,320 successor to HD, NHK also dabbles in small, flexible OLED panels. The Japanese public broadcaster recently showed off a 5-inch prototype display that, while bearing a heavy green tint and very noticeable rows of dead pixels, was still a significant improvement over a similar screen it demoed in 2009. Sure, it's not quite as flexible or vibrant as Sony's rollable OLED from last year, but it does seem to suffer from fewer bad pixels -- an important step towards maturation. Don't miss the video after the break which offers some pretty nifty glimpses at a number of bendable OLEDs. It's clear the tech is still a little wet behind the ears, but we're definitely getting closer to a future populated with TVs that roll up for storage and e-readers that fold like a paperback.

Computerworld

Sharp shows off the world's first Super Hi-Vision LCD with 16x more detail than 1080p

While Japan's NHK has been working on the successor to HDTV, Super Hi-Vision, for years, there haven't been any direct-view HDTVs capable of showing its full 7,680 x 4,320 pixel resolution until this prototype unveiled today by Sharp. Its 103 pixels per inch may be just a fraction of those found in some of the pocket displays we've seen at SID this week, but that's still far more than the 36ppi of a 60-inch 1080p HDTV. If estimates are correct, we'll still be waiting until around 2020 for that 33MP video and 22.2 channel sound to actually be broadcast, although there's a possibility of some demonstrations happening during the 2012 Olympics. Skip past the break for the available specs and a video demonstration, or just head over to the NHK's Science & Technology Research Laboratories in Tokyo between the 26th and 29th of this month.

Sharp