NanoTech Entertainment Inc (NTEK)

[NummyNums]

Nanotech: Three Levels of UHD Upconversion

The Online Reporter
Digital Media & Broadband Industry News, Research and Insight
Nanotech: Three Levels of UHD Upconversion
Monday, July 28th, 2014

We can say with certainty, having owned two UHD TVs, that upconversion is absolutely necessary in the current universe of 1080p HD content and that there are major differences in set makers’ upconversion technology.

Upconverting 1080p HD to near-UHD quality can be done in the consumer’s hardware — TV set, Blu-ray player or a separately attached net-top box. Makers of those devices say their upconversion technology is the best so we asked Nanotech how it does upconversion in its Nuvola media player net-top box and, because all UHD TVs have upconversion technology, why is it necessary? Its representative Andy Marken responded by saying:

“Upcoversion can be done prior to it being sent to the consumer or in the consumers’ hardware. Nanotech does both. Nanotech’s subsidiary 4K Studios is repurposing. It takes HD content, breaks it down by unassembling the various components and rebuilding the content in higher resolution — cleaning up everything in the process. Some studios with their own upconversion facilities are doing the same. There are other studios that simply upconvert by using ‘scalers’ to convert a signal from a lower resolution to a higher resolution.

“Nuvola will stream the content at the highest quality, bandwidth possible. It will also ‘talk’ to the TV set and say either: ‘We’ve improved it by X, you have upconverting capability and can improve X to X+5; or it can tell the UHD TV set this is true 4K content at the right speed so just leave it alone.

“We are in agreement with Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE) that all of the heavy lifting shouldn’t be dumped on the TV set, which is what pay TV folks say. They want most of the conversion done at the front-end and streamed at the best that’s possible to a device in front of the set that takes the content the last 10-inches or so.

“Nanotech sees two or three categories of UHD TV sets available now and evolving — not unlike the days we were involved with MPEG 2 hardware because computers didn’t have enough power to do it in software — that changed over time, of course.

“In this case we’ll have companies such as Samsung, Sony and LG with robust upconversion technology in their sets. That’s also true of Vizio, whose overall quality has been increasing and whose UHD sets won an award at CES for quality and design.

“There’ll be middle TV sets with so/so processor units and at the bottom will be budget sets from the likes of Seiki, TCL and Skyworth that use cheap processors. The last group will always need an external unit to help them deliver quality content.

“Nanotech thinks the top category will pretty quickly have all the power they need to handle the workload. Then the external box, the Nuvola in our case, will be one fantastic game system to enjoy all the Android and PC games out there. For these, there will be Nanotech’s UltraFlix OTT service, which is totally 4K and with genre type categories to choose.

“The answers to your question are and will probably always be: yes, no, maybe.”
Nanotech’s EVP of sales and marketing Aaron Taylor said the company has three levels of 4K:

1. 4K Platinum: 100% native 4K from shoot to edit and output.
2. 4K Gold: 35mm film scanning with Nanotech’s set of Laser Graphic Film Scanners — 10-shots per frame, 3-levels of RGB and 1-white. Post-Process is for clean-up, color-correction and audio.
3. 4K Silver: 1080p proprietary up-scale. The most sophisticated and HQ up scaling techniques available today. It’s an off- line process so it’s done before the content is streamed.
He said most of Nanotech’s content is number one.

Taylor previously ran the commercial division of Roku where he helped build the company from a start-up to a $40 million a year business and the market leader in digital signage media players.
Marken said…

http://www.onlinereporter.com/2014/07/28/nanotech-three-levels-of-uhd-upconversion/