High dynamic range: Standards opportunities and challenges

This paper presents progress that high dynamic range studies for broadcasting are making; standards in place, challenges and opportunities that HDR will present to the media market and industry. A question that I have seen in an Asia-Pacific broadcasting magazine motivated me to write this article. As a part of duty as the Head of Technical Department of ABU, this will provide the current status of HDR, its standardisations and what we can expect by the end of year 2016. Just before it was ready to publish, I made some updates based on what I had learnt via media, but not discussed in person with my other CTO colleagues during IBC-2016. In its Technical committee meetings the ABU has discussed HDR and it will be discussed again in October in Bali. By the time you read this article, there could be further new developments and standards that may have been released by standard making bodies such as ITU [1], SMPTE [2] and DVB. One of the key issues is how to commence HDR based services, while most of the standards address HDR combined with UHD. HDR affects the complete value chain of media. Backward compatibility issues are yet to be resolved. With ITU adopting two techniques, primarily for programme production. The Log-Gamma method has been developed to be backward compatible from receiver point of view.