8K Association to Debut at CES With 4 TV Brands, 1 Panel Maker as Founders
Four TV makers and one panel maker will be founding members of the new 8K Association launching at CES to spread consumer awareness of the fledgling ultra-high-resolution format, emailed Insight Media President Chris Chinnock, who will be the group’s executive director. It plans a Jan. 9 debut news conference on Day 2 of CES, CTA announced.
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The 8K Association also plans a pre-CES news release in which it will name the companies involved, said Chinnock Tuesday. He wouldn’t identify the founding members. They seem certain to include 8K-aggressive Samsung Electronics and panel maker Samsung Display, entities that sponsored various display-industry conferences that Insight Media produced the past two years. Samsung didn't comment.
At one such Samsung-sponsored conference in West Hollywood in June, Chinnock himself floated forming an industry association to promote 8K adoption. There’s a need for an 8K "industry organization" that would band together top TV brands to develop “common 8K consumer value proposition messaging” and a “logo program with performance benchmarks,” Chinnock said then (see 1806270067). Such a group also could “develop open metrology for performance specs” and allow “reviewers, calibrators, integrators and enthusiasts to validate performance,” he said.
Chinnock envisions the 8K Association as “similar” to the UHD Alliance “in our mission to educate consumers and professionals on the benefits of 4K in their case, and 8K in our case,” he told us Tuesday. “However, we expect to be different in our approach to defining categories (not just a premium category) as well as having open specifications and metrology methods. We will also focus exclusively on the 8K category, while UHDA focuses on the 4K category.”
UHD Alliance President Mike Fidler, commenting on the 8K Association developments, emailed us Tuesday to say that while Ultra HD sales "continue to enjoy strong growth, consumer education remains critical, particularly around defining features such as HDR, which has emerged as the biggest differentiator in picture quality." The alliance "remains focused on fostering a strong UHD Ecosystem, which includes performance requirements for various technical parameters such as Resolution, High Dynamic Range, Wide Color Spectrum, Bit Depth, and Immersive Audio," said Fidler.
The alliance's Ultra HD Premium specifications "define minimum requirements for premium performance," said Fidler. "Products exceeding those requirements (e.g. 8K Resolution) can qualify for the UHD Premium certification if all other requirements are met." At IFA, Fidler told us the alliance would be “monitoring developments in 8K as hardware manufacturers release new products,” but that its “organizational focus” would remain on promoting “the whole” of Ultra HD to consumers, not just high resolution (see 1809050025).
Next month’s CES is bound to feature “important news on 8K,” said CTA’s news conference announcement. “In anticipation of this next phase in resolution, a new industry organization called 8K Association will be announced. Headed by major TV brands, the new organization is being formed to promote 8K products and help educate consumers and professionals on the benefits of 8K.”
Questions abound about the 8K Association and its formation efforts, including whether the group will do any content outreach. Years after the debut of the first Ultra HD TVs, the landscape for native 4K content remains very scarce, but for native 8K it’s virtually nonexistent.
It also will bear watching to see if the 8K Association can succeed in landing member companies from outside the Samsung orbit. Besides media, Samsung's sponsorships of recent Insight Media conferences restricted conference registrations to those with ongoing Samsung business relationships, often to the scorn of outsiders that didn't qualify.