How to break the 4K bottleneck and bring super duper ultra HD to homes

There’s no doubt that TV makers are excited about 4K television. The sets, which offer four times the detail of today’s high-definition sets, are appearing in increasing numbers and consumers too seem convinced by the technology, which must be a relief to the industry after the cool reception that 3D TV got a few years ago.

The most obvious barrier to wider 4K adoption is price—the sets cost thousands of dollars more than high-definition TVs—but it’s not the only problem. Among the cables and interfaces on the back of the new TV is an equally important problem: how to get 4K content into the TV sets.

At this week’s IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, TV and video equipment makers are showing prototypes of several new technologies that will bring 4K content into the home and transport it between devices.

Martyn WilliamsOne of the many 4K sets unveiled at this year's IFA using the HEVC codec.

One of the biggest steps was the launch of HDMI 2.0, a new version of the “high-definition multimedia interface” standard that is the de-facto method of sending HD video between devices.

HDMI 2.0 doubles the maximum bit rate to 20 gigabits per second, allowing 4K video at up to 60 frames per second, and should start appearing in 4K products later this year or early next year.

This could be especially important to the short-term success of 4K because initially consumers will be restricted to watching prerecorded content streamed from players alongside the TV.

Getting a live 4K signal into the living room is a more complex task, not least because it requires broadcasters to replace their production systems. Many have only just completed multi-million dollar upgrades to high-definition so they won’t be looking to scrap the equipment any time soon.

To date, the only regular 4K broadcasting in the world is taking place on a promotional channel via the Eutelsat 10A satellite in Europe. Run by satellite operator Eutelsat, the channel demonstrates the stunning picture quality possible with 4K and also the current problems faced by broadcasters.

Martyn WilliamsThematic channels may be the first dedicated 4K channels.

4K signals, by definition, carry a lot of data and getting that compressed, transmitted and decompressed in real time requires a lot of processing power.

Eutelsat has got around this problem by splitting the 4K signal into quarters, each equivalent to a conventional HD channel, and sending them simultaneously over satellite to four receivers that decode them and stitch the signal back together.

While it works, it’s not the future of 4K broadcasting.

Instead, broadcasters are planning on using HEVC, a new video codec that can compress a video signal much more efficiently than the H.264 codec used in much of today’s high-definition broadcasting.

At IFA, satellite operator Astra and pay TV operator Sky Deutschland were demonstrating a 4K stream encoded in HEVC and sent over an Astra satellite. The stream had been encoded in advance—real-time encoding still is very difficult—but it was being decoded in real time in a set-top box from Technicolor.

No broadcaster has yet committed to 4K, but industry insiders at IFA were generally agreed that the first steps in 4K broadcasting would probably be on a small number of thematic channels or events. Feature films are an obvious candidate because many are already shot at 4K and the technology is likely to be employed in major sporting events, such as the World Cup and Formula One.

Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service.
More by Martyn Williams, IDG News Service

View the original article here

Amazon Teams with Android Developers to Bring One-Click Shopping to Consumers

[This sponsored article was written by IDG Creative Lab, a partner of Qualcomm.]

The line between e-commerce and entertainment is blurring again: Amazon today is launching a system that lets developers sell physical products through third-party Android apps. To put it another way, consumers will be able to buy stuff from Amazon from within an app on their Android phone without taking the trouble to visit Amazon’s storefront.

Although it’s early days, Amazon’s developer partners already have a few apps ready to go. The BabyBump app, for example, has everything you’d expect from a pregnancy app, including a weekly journal, information about the pre- and post-natal process, and a social network. And of course, BabyBump will allow users to buy pregnancy- and baby-related products.

Amazon has made the development process as simple as possible for developers and has already signed up nearly two dozen. Using the Amazon API greatly simplifies the sales and development process; there’s just one vendor to deal with and one piece of code to deploy.

The system also lets sellers of physical merchandise bundle digital content alongside it at the point of sale. For example, if you buy a certain version of the board game Ticket to Ride, you’ll now be able to get the digital version of the game for free via an app which uses the API.

To use the system, customers will initiate a purchase within a third-party app, and a dialog box will pop up with product details and pricing. The familiar “1-Click” system lets the buyer complete the transaction. Developers who sell products through the new API will earn up to a six percent commission on sales, which is added to their earnings from distribution of the app.

The new APIs are platform agnostic and will work across all Android devices, including the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered smart phones. Because the system will be embedded into existing apps, users won’t need to download anything new (aside from updating their apps) in order to start seeing the Amazon sales offers.

For app developers looking for better ways to generate income from their apps, this could be dramatic and welcome news. In-app advertising has not been terribly successful at driving revenues for developers, which has left them with only two other revenue stream possibilities: Selling their app for cash up front (which is always difficult, especially for an untested brand), and selling in-app upgrades (which aren’t always an option for every type of app).

The ability to sell physical merchandise easily means that just about any developer will be able to add a new and much-needed revenue stream to their app. Now a cooking app can sell kitchen knives and artisanal olive oil. Or a travel app can sell offline guidebooks with just a couple of taps.

For consumers, the picture may be about to change just as dramatically. While users have become accustomed to the come-ons of advertising crawls and pop-ups, these could very well be replaced by promotional sales links instead. The endgame is the possibility that every product you see mentioned in an app could eventually become available to buy. Better watch where you tap.

View the original article here

What Does iOS 7 Bring to the BYOD Party?

CIO - Apple doesn't promote enterprise features in its products, instead choosing to be seen as the consumer's champion-but this doesn't mean it doesn't have any.

In fact, Apple's upcoming mobile iOS 7, scheduled to be released to the general public this fall, is chock-full of great stuff for companies. The release will surely please the growing mass of BYOD employees who will be able to enjoy the native iPhone experience whether they're using the phone for personal or business use.

"There is so much for the enterprise in this release, across lines of business, in education, healthcare and retail scenarios," says Blake Brannon, senior product engineer at AirWatch, a mobile device management (MDM) vendor. "It's as innovative as we've seen from Apple since the original MDM in iOS 4. It opens up ways of using these devices that previously were just not possible."

Slideshow: 10 BYOD Worker Types

The reason for Brannon's high praise for iOS 7 ranges from new technical features to enhancements to volume-purchasing policies. It's also a strategic change from Android's containerization model for serving the BYOD crowd, he says.

CIO.com sat down with Brannon to get his take on iOS 7 in the enterprise:

CIO.com: What features are you most excited about?

Blake Brannon: On the BYOD front, there are things like per-app-VPN and "Open in" management, which helps you leverage native apps to get a native, user-rich experience [for your app], but gives you the BYOD kind of protection and privacy that you need to restrict and separate work from play.

It provides the industry with a new way of thinking about containerization and separation of work and personal data. In the past 12 months, the industry has been shifting towards containerization. But iOS 7 is a different perspective that gives what the enterprise wants, in terms of protection of data, and what the employee wants, which is the native experience.

The streamline enrollment process changes the out-of-box experience for setting up and managing these devices. It allows you to not have to build processes around staging and provisioning these devices, because you can really push it out to the end users to do themselves. Resetting the device to reuse it is as simple as issuing a wipe command from the Airwatch MDM tool.

In addition, the volume-purchase program changes how licensing works for mobile apps. Companies have been struggling for the past few years with the model that's been in place, because of tax reasons, legal reasons, buying in different countries.

CIO.com: What are those changes?

Brannon: It's basically around the ability to issue application licenses to the devices and for the company to continue to own those.

The model in the past has been pushing apps to a user's device, in conjunction with pushing that license to the employee-and the employee kept and retained that license. If the employee left the organization as part of the BYOD, they would keep that software, which brought forth tax implications, in terms of gifting software to people and things like that. It was just a little bit of a nightmare.

Blake Brannon, senior product engineer at AirWatch

The new model allows the company to retain ownership of that license and to remove it from the employee's personal phone when they leave the organization.

CIO.com: Any BYOD features in iOS 7 flying under the radar?

Brannon: There's a ton around what Apple calls "supervised devices." There are several advanced features that allow you to have more robust control over devices. These primarily work more for corporate-owned devices than BYOD.

I am under [non-disclosure agreement], so I'm trying to be cautious about what information is public and what is not. A new feature is setting up things like printers or airplane destinations for the device. So, for example, you can lock down a device so that it mirrors to a certain Apple TV in a retail store or a student in a classroom. It allows you to deploy those devices, but still have the control to prevent tampering or use outside of the role they're intended to be used for.

CIO.com: Is there anything missing in iOS 7?

Brannon: There are always features on the [wish list]. The one that sometimes comes up is around operating system control. In the grand scheme of things, it's not really a feature you're going to use, especially in BYOD. But being able to prevent or enforce the OS version sometimes is a scenario for line-of-business devices. That's not necessarily something we saw in iOS 7.

CIO.com: Does iOS 7 reduce Airwatch's value proposition?

Brannon: I get this question a lot. Absolutely not. [What] Apple builds around these features are really APIs that are dependent upon MDM to enable. Just because they create an API that allows you to control "open with" doesn't mean that the feature is turned on without a management tool. If anything, all of these new features grow our business and expand our market scope, in terms of the ability to manage different devices for different scenarios.

CIO.com: Is iOS 7 way ahead of the game, in comparison to Android?

Brannon: iOS 7 allows you to do BYOD in more of a native experience on the device, whereas the Android path is built around doing BYOD in a containerized way.

There are absolutely manufacturer-specific APIs that allow you to do native mail client, native policies on select manufactured Samsung HTC, Motorola-type devices. But as a whole on the Android front, you're seeing a little more adoption around BYOD containerization.

It's a philosophical divide in some scenarios. In some cases, people want [containerization] because it feels more separate, more isolated. Other people feel it's hindering and makes them less productive. They'd rather see work and personal calendars and contacts integrated.

Slideshow: 12 BYOD Disaster Scenarios

On the technology side, the Android operating system doesn't have an MDM engine and containerization logic built into the OS the way that iOS does. Vendors like Airwatch have been able to build MDM logic and containerization through application-level configurations and specific APIs to the operating system that they've gotten from specific manufacturers.

Tom Kaneshige covers Apple, BYOD and Consumerization of IT for CIO.com. Follow Tom on Twitter @kaneshige. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn. Email Tom at tkaneshige@cio.com

Read more about ios in CIO's iOS Drilldown.

This story is reprinted from CIO.com, an online resource for information executives. Story Copyright CXO Media Inc., 2012. All rights reserved.

View the original article here

Samsung's Galaxy Gear smartwatch could bring further separation from Google

As the likely launch date for Samsung's smartwatch draws closer, details on the wearable gadget are coming into focus.

GigaOm is now reporting hardware specs and software details for the smartwatch, citing “sources who are familiar with Samsung's plans.” This follows a report by Bloomberg that said the so-called Galaxy Gear smartwatch will debut on September 4.

The specs, if accurate, seem more powerful than other smartwatches, with a dual-core processor, a built-in camera, NFC capabilities and small speakers on the clasp of the watch. A built-in accelerometer may allow users to turn on the screen by moving their wrists toward their eyes.

The OLED touch screen will reportedly be square-shaped and measure roughly 2.5 inches diagonally, and the entire frame will measure 3 inches diagonally. If true, this would make Samsung's smartwatch larger than the Pebble. Despite the more powerful specs and large color display, GigaOm says battery life should be “pretty decent.”

The cost of entry for the Galaxy Gear smartwatch?

The most interesting tidbit, perhaps, is the claim that Samsung will use its own app store to take advantage of the watch hardware. “That likely means if you want a Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch, you’ll need a Samsung Galaxy phone or tablet,” Om Malik writes.

Samsung has dabbled in its own Galaxy-specific services before. With Samsung Wallet, for example, the company basically cloned Apple's Passbook service instead of relying on Google Wallet. The company's S Voice assistant competes with Google's own voice search for users' attention on Galaxy phones.

But until now, Samsung's phones and tablets have worked in peace and harmony with other Android devices. Although Samsung has its own app store already, it's not very popular compared to Google Play. The unified ecosystem for Android apps allows users to easily move between phones and tablets regardless of brand.

If Samsung does require the use of its own app store for the Galaxy Gear, it'll be the company's biggest attempt yet to take control of Android. And that's something only Samsung can pull off, as the largest Android device maker by far. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, Samsung is holding its own developer conference in October.

Note: Main image is an unofficial concept design by Johan Loekito from 2009

View the original article here

China to bring gigabit Internet speeds to key cities by 2020

China plans to bring gigabit Internet speeds to its major cities by 2020, part of its effort to expand broadband among households in the nation.

The Chinese government set out the target in its new broadband strategy announced on Saturday. By 2020, Internet speeds will need to reach 50 Mbps (mega bits per second) in the country's cities, and 12 Mbps in China's rural areas.

In addition, gigabit Internet service, which can reach 1000 Mbps, will be available in the country's more developed cities, according to the government.

China has the world's largest Internet populace at close to 600 million. But average Internet speeds in the country currently reach 1.7 Mbps, putting China far behind many of its peers in Asia, according to a report from Akamai Technologies, a content delivery and cloud infrastructure services network.

South Korea, for example, has speeds of 14.2 Mbps, while Japan's Internet reaches 11.7 Mbps. In the U.S. Internet speeds average at 8.6 Mbps.

China aims to change this by delivering broadband to 400 million households by 2020. The nation also wants to bring 3G and 4G mobile use to 85 percent of the population. Currently, only about 27 percent of China's mobile phone customers use the faster 3G networks.

China announced its broadband strategy after the government announced it would launch a stimulus program to further develop its IT industry. The program may not only boost domestic sales of smartphones and PCs, but also drive more investment to IT companies in the nation.

At the same time, the country is also planning to issue licenses for commercial 4G networks later this year. The upcoming 4G networks are expected to have speeds of over 100 Mbps.

China has previously set out goals to increase Internet speeds in the nation. In 2011, the authorities also launched an anti-monopoly investigation against state-controlled broadband providers China Telecom and China Unicom for keeping prices for Internet access high. In response, the two companies have pledged to raise Internet speeds for their customers, while keeping prices low.

View the original article here