MONTREAL – Videotron CEO Manon Brouillette said Tuesday that “it’s our job to be there at each wave” of technological evolution. And that mindset is a big reason why Videotron is the first TV provider in Canada to offer an Ultra High Definition PVR.
The new terminal, unveiled Tuesday, will be available in stores by late August or early September for $399, the same price as the company’s existing high-end PVR, the eight-tuner X8. Manufactured by Samsung, the UHD PVR is capable of receiving UHD signals of 3840 by 2160 pixels plus has eight tuners, of which two can record UHD channels. And with a 2TB hard drive, it can record 115 hours of UHD content or 320 hours of HD.
But that UHD content, though, will be minimal to start off with, mainly video-on-demand titles such as Hunger Games: Catching Fire and documentaries like Journey to Space and The Last Reef. However, at least one television series has already been planned for UHD broadcast. A new reality show about Montreal firefighters, Alerte 5, is being produced for Quebecor’s TVA network in UHD and will be broadcast on a special channel in UHD simultaneously with its TVA debut. Videotron said that live UHD comes at no additional fee, but UHD movies on demand will be $7.99 versus $6.99 for HD titles.
Broadcasters aren’t expected to jump on the UHD bandwagon very quickly. For one thing, most of them just finished upgrading to HD, an expensive process for everything from studio equipment to over-the-air transmitters. But Videotron said it expects that the amount of available UHD content to grow steadily, much as it did when high definition first came out.
Brouillette brushed off the inevitable comparisons with 3D television, especially since Videotron’s cable system just shut down its 3D channel. She said that this terminal is backwards compatible with HD screens and the illico whole-home ecosystem, so it’s useful even for viewers who aren’t using UHD TVs yet. In addition, after spending 12 months working on this project, Videotron is beginning to acquire only this terminal, which will eventually replace its existing models.
UHD 4K, which has the same resolution as four 1080p HD screens arranged in a square, naturally requires much a much higher bitrate, but with enhancements in encoding and compression technology, a UHD signal now uses about the same bitrate as HD signals did when they were first added to the system – about 25 Mbit/s using the best encoding, or between 32 and 36 Mbit/s using live encoding. That’s enough to fit into a single 6 MHz QAM channel, explained Pierre Roy, VP of engineering, research and development.
So far, one part-time special event channel is all they’ll need for live TV. But Roy is confident that network capacity won’t be an issue if live UHD takes off. Videotron is continuing to dismantle its analog TV network, opening up hundreds of megabits of space, and is expanding its use of switched digital video for less popular channels, using bandwidth at the neighbourhood level only when needed.
“For us, there’s no lack of future capacity in hybrid fibre,” Roy said.
And for those worried that network congestion may tempt Videotron to compress UHD to the point where the quality suffers, Roy is reassuring: "I don’t see congestion. I don’t see us putting multiple UHD channels in the same QAM. It’s not in our DNA."
In photo, from left: Pierre Roy, vice-president, engineering, research and development; Manon Brouillette, president and CEO of Videotron; and Jean-Pierre Lévesque Gauvin, senior manager product development, television and entertainment, consumer marketing.
