Picture quality a key to enriched viewing says TV executive

The evolution of picture quality will keep the TV industry moving, according to one of Asia’s most senior television executives.

Mr Naoji Ono, Executive Vice-President of NHK-Japan and Vice-President of the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union, told the recent ABU General Assembly in Korea that exciting developments in content creation were taking television to a higher level.

In a super panel on Beyond the Digital Wave, Mr Ono said Super Hi-Vision providing picture quality 16 times higher than High Definition, together with developments such as high speed and high frame-rate cameras could show viewers things in ways they would never otherwise be able to see.

He said the switch-over to digital television in Japan last year had given rise to many more services being offered to the public including data broadcasting and digital TV broadcasting on mobile devices such as smartphones. 

He said Internet delivery complemented the mainstay services of NHK, which hosted more than 1,000 websites providing programming and news, including a News Web 24 news service that was interactive using Twitter to receive and respond to comments from viewers.

Mr Ono said that among a favourite example of hybrid-casting (combining broadcasting and the Internet) was providing captions on all the players in a football game which tracked the players and displayed uniform numbers and additional information about them.

NHK Science and Technology Research Laboratories (STRL) has been at the forefront of research in broadcasting technology, working on both practical solutions to current issues and visionary future technologies which transform the way broadcast professionals create content.

NHK STRL pioneered high definition television, including the development of plasma displays. Among its many current strands of research is Super Hi-Vision, its implementation of high resolution broadcasting which was recently successfully trialled during the London 2012 Olympics.