Emmy Award for Recommendation ITU-R BT.2100 - HDR TV

I’m extremely honoured to be named as the BBC representative, amongst the four key developers, in the Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy® Award for Recommendation ITU-R BT.2100 – the international standard for high dynamic range television production and international programme exchange. But of course, the inclusion of Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) in the standard, alongside Dolby’s Perceptual Quantizer (PQ), was a huge team effort.

Not only did it rely on the scientific experiments conducted by my colleagues at BBC Research & Development and NHK, but also the critical peer-review of experts from around the world attending the meetings of ITU-R Working Party 6C. I’m not aware of any other standards organisation where technical solutions are subject to quite so much scrutiny. But it is the peer-review and evidence-based approach of the ITU-R that ensures its standards are robust, accepted by industry and will stand the test of time.

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The Emmy, however, is about more than the specification. It recognises the success of a technology in the market. In the case of BT.2100, there are of course the two solutions – PQ and HLG. They target production systems and applications with different requirements, and have found equal success. With HLG, that success would never have been possible without the support of more than a dozen of my colleagues at BBC R&D, who worked tirelessly to ensure that the end-to-end ecosystem for HLG based television production, distribution and consumer equipment was in place. We were also fortunate to win the support of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, BBC Studios Events and BBC Sport in early trials of the technology.

When we started the project back in 2013, we had no idea of what it would take to re-invent the way we that make and distribute television. At the last count, we have ensured that HLG is supported in 31 different standards and guidelines, produced by 11 different standards organisations or associations.

Those standards range from compression codecs, such as H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC; through distribution standards such as DVB-DASH and ATSC 3.0; interface standards such as SMPTE’s suite of serial digital SDI (co-ax based) and ST.2110 (IP-based) interface standards; HDMI for set-top boxes; test patterns such as ITU-R Colour Bars and PLUGE; the EBU’s Tech 3320 HDR monitor specification and Tech 3325 monitor test procedure as well as the EBU’s R 153 live programme delivery specification and DPP’s AMWA AS-11 X1 file based specifications for UHD programme delivery based on SMPTE’s IMF.

Had I known back in 2013 quite how much work we were taking on, I often wonder what the reaction would have been. But the HDR images are so compelling, that they speak for themselves and the investment in time, energy (and cost) has been very worthwhile. 

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