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Jeff Berman: Ultra high-Def (UHD) adoption is happening very quickly and it would be in the best interest of cable operators to take advantage of that early consumer interest in it to avoid falling behind the curve, Craig Heiting, SVP of sales and business development at Deluxe OnDemand, said May 17 during the Internet & Television Expo (INTX) in Boston.

Cable operators should make sure to avoid what happened during the shift from analog to HD TV, when the amount of broadcast HD content was limited for several years, he said. UHD is “taking off a lot faster” than HD did, he said, echoing what Nick Colsey, VP of business development at Sony Electronics, said at the Streaming Media East conference May 10 during New York’s Streaming Media East. HD took about 10 years to “really get immersed” in consumers’ homes, said Heiting. By 2019, UHD will be in 35% of homes and high dynamic range (HDR) will be in about 32.9 million homes, he predicted, calling those numbers “very significant.”

He also called HDR a “game changer.” Cable operators, however, “get a little nervous” because it is “a little bit more complex to put out an HDR 4K signal,” he said. After all, “there’s a lot of things still to be worked out,” including standards, he conceded, pointing to the competing formats HDR-10, Dolby Vision and the Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) HDR standard developed by the BBC and Japan broadcasting company NHK for live broadcasts.

Every TV manufacturer and platform is using a different standard, he said, adding quality control is needed for content provided across all the different devices.

Also an issue is that HD files are “really big: we’re talking 120-megabit-per-second files,” he said. That compares to only 5-17 megabits per second that HD requires, he said. There are also “bandwidth limitations,” he said.

The result is that cable operators are saying, “I can’t just launch it today,” he said.

But they actually can launch UHD broadcasts now with the help of services provided by companies including Deluxe OnDemand that use a managed services approach, he said. His company’s platform can help cable operators “launch much quicker and get ahead of the curve, not let other companies who are standalone services necessarily beat them at the game,” he said. “Very little investment” is required with a managed services approach, he said, adding cable operators don’t have to buy expensive equipment that may soon become obsolete.

Consumers, meanwhile, must be careful if they are buying a 4K TV with HDR this year to be certain that they are buying one that won’t be obsolete due to format issues, said Heiting. They must be “cautious” if they are spending $8,000 to buy such a TV, he said.

Cable operators are “reluctant” to move into UHD for several reasons, including the ones cited by Heiting, said Rian Bester, broadcast operations advisor at TV Entertainment Reality Network (TERN) International. The extra bandwidth involved increases costs, said Bester, adding the cable operators are also concerned that 4K may wind up being just a repeat of 3D TV, which failed to catch on in most markets.

TERN, however, is convinced that UHD is “here to stay,” he said, pointing to IHS data showing 5 million U.S. consumers bought UHD TVs and a projection that 50% of North American homes will have UHD TVs by 2020.

TERN is making a major play for UHD content dominance via its Insight division, which Bester said produces 50 hours of new, native 4Kcontent per quarter to meet the demand for meaningful UHD content by 4K TV owners. The company is already providing UHD content via satellite in Russia and plans to soon expand from just HD content to UHD content in several European countries, including the U.K., he said.

It’s also launching in several Asian markets and wants to enter the U.S. market, he said, adding “we are in discussions already with some operators here.” Latin America is planned also, he said.