720547Xylostream Ultra HD Development of Prototype Project (UHDDP)ClosedGRD Development of PrototypeInnovate UKXylostream’s Ultra High Definition Development of Prototype project (UHDDP) will create a fully functioning Ultra High Definition (UHD) video encoder prototype using the new High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. Encoding UHD is important because it is the missing link in the distribution chain from content creation to presentation on TVs in the home. Content is already being made in UHD and shops are selling UHD TVs. However, until hardware based real-time UHD encoders are available TV operators will not be able to extract full value from this content or provide viewers with the new capability that these TVs promise. UHD images are 3840x2160 pixels or 4x that of HD and optionally at higher frame rates and pixel depths. Scaling of today’s HD bit rates (~6Mbit/s for H.264) would result in a bandwidth of up to 60Mbit/s for UHD - too high to transmit via today’s TV networks. HEVC offers a potential doubling in coding efficiency over H.264. Depending on content genre and picture format used for UHD, we expect to see bandwidths of 12–30Mbit/s in HEVC, making UHD services viable. Without HEVC, UHDTV is unlikely to become an economic success. The UK media sector, which contributes 10% to total UK exports, will be a primary beneficiary of a new global market in UHD content, and so insuring HEVC is suited to UHD delivery is critical to the UK media industry. Xylostream (XTL) has invested in the development of HEVC algorithms focused on UHD over the last year. That has included a 6 month TSB proof of concept project (UHDPOC) the output of which was a set of algorithms partially ported to an HPC platform. Since the end of the UHDPOC XTL has carried on the development and are currently working on a Baseline Demonstrator to be released at IBC in September. The UHDDP project builds on that work to create a prototype product that can be used by operators to continue their testing of UHD and enable XTL to establish itself as the leader in HEVC compression for UHD.