Dr. Karl Schubert

Dr. Karl Schubert shares his views on 4K, cloud and other tech trends

Is 4K the future?

At first, I thought 4K was going to be the next 3D. I didn’t think it was going to be all that relevant but now, I see it has a future especially for subsetting of content.

For instance, if I have a 4K camera filming a horse race and one horse from the back starts to move to the front and wins, I need to be able to zoom in on that horse and follow it through its course. Now, if I can find that and subset it out and broadcast it in 2K, I see the benefit of 4K. If I have to take today’s 2K and zoom in and subset it, the image may be hugely pixilated. That kind of use for 4K cameras makes a lot of sense. I don’t see much use for 4K elsewhere because of bandwidth issues.

For a home user, the bandwidth is usually pretty low. The number of bits that comes to most houses for the TV even in the US is about one-and-a-half mbps. There is not even bandwidth to make 4K useful to the home or even commercials for that matter. So, I don’t know why one would do it.

Perhaps it’s better for digital billboards?

That’s a fairly small market. If you’re looking to monetise it, the question is, is the market big enough to pay the cost that will take the entire infrastructure to 4K. I’m not sure.

 So what about your next generation solutions? No 4K?

Our next generation products will be agnostic to frame rate and format.

Does 3D appeal to you?

Actually, I thought 3D would be really cool so I bought a 3D TV a year ago for my family. It wasn’t the success one might have thought it would be.

I have two teenagers at home. After watching one 3D movie, one teenager said – “That’s it. I am not watching another one”.

The second one said, “My head hurts”.

I suppose it’s because with normal vision, if I look at a subject in front of me, the parts behind the subject go out of focus. With 3D, the subject sort of comes forward. Your eyes are telling you this is 3D and your brain is saying, I don’t think so. That internal fight needs to be fixed. Plus, for those who wear glasses, they have to wear a second pair of glass. Is that comfortable? Those who don’t wear glasses don’t like to wear them. So either way, 3D is not just there yet.

How about the cloud?

Cloud is not quite ready for primetime for everybody. The security aspect is being addressed. Rights management needs to be dealt with. The cost issue is also there.

Dealing with sending licensed media across geographical boundaries has not yet been addressed satisfactorily.

Is broadband the biggest deterrent for cloud?

Not really. A couple of trials have been conducted in Sweden with the IP broadcast of the soccer games as well as multiple simultaneous broadcasts in HD and SD. There were no frame grabs, jitter or anything. The infrastructure in selected areas is there and has been developing over time. Ingesting is still going to be a challenge but outbound, you can use multicast until almost the last mile. Still, I think cloud is a three- to five-year thing and 4K is a two- to four-year thing.

What about GV and the cloud?

Our next-generation products are being designed to be in the cloud especially the servers and all the infrastructure elements.

We were working on a consolidated storage strategy that will come out in the next six to nine months. In terms of technology, do you see any radical change in technology?

One of the places where I see major changes coming is in the area of control — essentially, any surface that has buttons. There is a shift towards touch devices so you don’t need a switcher with 1000 buttons any more. If you did them as a touch screen instead, you would be able to reconfigure for the non real-time processes that you are doing and have some extra buttons. This would be more cost-effective and very efficient.