But don’t expect a UHD sets to be on the market any time soon. For now it will only be used for special events. For example, there are plans to cover some of the 2012 London Olympic Games in UHDTV for display at other venues. If UHD displays do come home, they most likely won’t be for displaying UHD images, but rather for glasses-free 3D. I was fairly dismissive of glasses-free 3D sets in my rant about the current state of the industry a little while back, mainly because of the compromises required for them to work. But the more pixels on the display, and the more pixels per inch, the more ‘sweet spots’ can be created, allowing for a wider viewing angle. That means less need to sit in specific locations relative to the screen to perceive the 3D effect.

Now, you may think that a 7680×4320 display much be huge, but that’s not necessarily the case. It is a factor of pixels per inch. Consider the iPhone’s retina display with 326ppi. At that density a UHD display would be only 24.5×13.25 inches, that’s only a 27 inch display. Now, that’s an extreme example, but it just goes to show that a UHD display can be scaled to different physical sizes using today’s display technology. Of course, it wouldn’t come cheap.

Ignoring the displays, how would you even get a UHD image? 16 times the pixels would mean, worst case, 16 times the data for the same quality image – all else being equal. Now, in the real world it doesn’t quite work that way since neighboring pixels will share data and it isn’t a linear scale, but let’s go with the worst case for now. How would you ever get that much data? You’d be looking at an 800GB Blu-ray, which is far more than even lab versions have hit.

The good news is everything doesn’t have to be equal. The other recent news is that the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC), a cooperative effort between the International Telecommunication Union and Moving Picture Experts Group, is making progress on the standard for High Efficiency Video Coding, aka H.265. This is expected to be the successor to today’s champ, H.264. The first draft is expected to be released in February 2012, with a final standard in January 2013. H.265 takes advantage of the growth in processor capabilities. It is more computationally intensive than H.264, but should provide compression 25% to 50% better. That could mean that an H.265 UHD image would only have eight times the data as an H.264 1080p image. And with real world compression aspects factored in even less. That starts to bring things into the realm of possibility. Back in 2008 Pioneer demonstrated a Blu-ray disc capable of holding 400GB on 16 25GB layers. And BDXL, which is already a commercial product, holds 100GB/128GB on three or four ~33GB layers. And work is underway to push Blu-ray all the way to 1TB. So by the time UHD displays are viable for the home, we’ll probably have a Blu-ray disc capable of holding UHD content. Streaming? Does your ISP offer Gigabit connections?

But H.265 will have a more immediate impact. You don’t have to be encoding UHD to use it. That 25-50% savings applies to all content. And with mobile data plans all heading to tiered pricing, bandwidth caps on home broadband, and the explosion of streaming HD content, every bit helps. Just think, for the same amount of data you could have up to twice the run time. Of course, even once H.265 is finalized it will probably take a year or two for it to make it into silicon and then into new devices. And you will most likely have to buy a new device to use it. Most devices, like set top boxes and smartphones, implement video decoding in dedicated silicon. So you’d need new hardware to support H.265. Powerful PC CPUs and graphics cards might be able to do it with a software update, but otherwise it means a replacement.

UHDTV from Broadcasting & Cable. H.265 news from Multichannel News via Zatz Not Funny.

Additionally MagnaGlobal reports that 71 million, 57.7%, of households will have access to VOD content, up from 53.3 million, 45.6% – though they include over-the-top (OTT) services such as Netflix in their numbers. Most interestingly they predict that by 2016 8.4 million people will be completely reliant on OTT services, aka cord cutters, up from only 87,000 by the end of 2011. I’m not so sure about that personally, I tend to feel that cord cutting is a bit overblown, but we’ll see.

Not as surprising, the report also covers Internet access numbers. 85.2 million, or 72.2%, of US households were online at the end of the first quarter, with 90% of those households using some form of broadband. By 2016 that will jump to 98.7 million, with 97.2 million on broadband.

Nielsen categorized DVR owners into three categories, based on how much they time shift programming.

Heavy shifters, mostly women aged 18-49, are heavy TV viewers and shift nearly one-half of their total viewing using DVRs.

Medium shifters watch slightly more TV than an average person and shift about one-third of their programs.

Light shifters — which Nielsen classified as being 70% of DVR households — watch less television than normal people and shift about 10% of their shows, mostly to catch episodes they may have missed.

If heavy shifters shift ‘nearly one-half’ of their viewing, I must be depleted uranium. 100% of my TV viewing, at home at least, is via TiVo.

Via EngadgetHD.