With the slow extinguishing of the snowflake flame on the closing ceremony, the Beijing Winter Olympics also officially came to an end on February 20, and the difference between previous events is that due to the epidemic affecting the whole Winter Olympics to adopt closed-loop management, the vast majority of ordinary viewers can only participate in the Winter Olympic activities through television and mobile phones, and this Winter Olympics has also greatly strengthened the expressiveness of the picture through various black technologies in the broadcast of the event. Among them, 8K technology has become the iconic technology reported on this Winter Olympic Games. The Beijing Winter Olympics will achieve full coverage of 8K, including the opening and closing ceremonies and live broadcasts of key events, and such a large-scale application of 8K technology is also the first time in the world.
As an important carrier of the "100 Cities and 100 Screens" project jointly deployed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other six departments, the 8K ultra-high-definition channel of the Central Radio and Television Corporation began trial broadcasting at 10:00 on February 1, 2021, and officially started broadcasting at 11:00 on January 24, 2022, which is also the first Chinese 8K ultra-high-definition TV channel. During the Beijing Winter Olympics, TV channels such as CCTV's 8K Ultra HD Channel and Beijing Radio and Television Station's Winter Olympic Documentary 8K Ultra HD Test Channel conducted 8K live broadcasts of the Winter Olympic Games.
In order to achieve the whole process of 8K live broadcasting, including shooting, directing, transmitting, entering the home and other links need to meet the level required for 8K, the 8K resolution has reached 7680 * 4320, which is 4 times the 4K resolution, 16 times that of 1080p, in addition, the frame rate of 8K live broadcast has also increased from 25 frames per second in the Full HD era to 50 frames per second. CCTV's requirements for 8K code streaming reached 80 to 120Mbps, as a comparison, the program code rate of CCTV 4K channels is 38Mbps, and 8K has increased by 2-3 times on this basis. It is understood that the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics for the first time used euHT wireless broadband technology with high reliability and low latency characteristics of independent intellectual property rights for 8K wireless transmission, and adopted the AVS3 coding technology standard independently developed by the mainland. Therefore, the existing 8K channels are more dependent on the set-top box bound by the operator in terms of decoding capabilities, and there are still some problems in the decoding playback level of ordinary 8K TVs or network set-top boxes that support 8K decoding. Although the CCTV 8K ultra-high-definition channel has now started broadcasting, it is still not a simple thing for ordinary viewers to see the 8K signal through the TV at home.
In order to cope with 8K live broadcasting, the home network must reach at least 100 megabits, and it must use optical fiber, 5G and other media for transmission. As of the opening of the Winter Olympics, only the cable TV networks in Beijing and Guangdong have the demand for 8K channels to be watched in the home, and they need to cooperate with the 8K special set-top boxes provided by cable TV service providers. Viewers in other regions can still only watch the content of 8K channels through the outdoor large screen at this stage.
According to the "Candidate Directory for the First Batch of Public Large Screen Access to "100 Cities and 100 Screens" released in June last year, there are currently 28 public large screens in 20 cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Chongqing, Hangzhou, Wuxi and so on to achieve the demand for 8K viewing, at present, Guangzhou Xinda new department store, Chengdu Chunxi Road, Chongqing Guanyin Bridge, Wuxi Yaohan and other outdoor ultra-high-definition large screens have become local 8K viewing hot spots.
As the city of the Two Olympics, Beijing has built a total of 18 8K ultra-high-definition displays in Badaling Great Wall, Shougang Park, Contemporary Mall, Pinggu Jinhai Lake, Yizhuang Han's Square, Wangjing Fangheng Shopping Center, Beijing Times Square, tourist attractions and popular business districts of Contemporary Mall to meet the needs of Beijing citizens.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the State Administration of Radio and Television, and the Central Radio and Television Corporation jointly issued the "Ultra-high-definition Video Industry Development Action Plan (2019-2022)" in 2019, which pointed out that by 2022, CMOS image sensors, optical lenses, professional video processing chips, codec chips and other core components have made breakthroughs, and 8K front-end core equipment will form industrialization capabilities; 4K TV terminals that meet the requirements of HDR, wide color gamut, three-dimensional sound, high frame rate and high color depth are fully popularized, and the sales of 8K TV terminals account for more than 5% of total TV sales.
The data shows that in 2021, the Chinese market 8K TV shipments of 100,000 units, Aowei Cloud Network predicts that in 2022, China's 8K TV retail sales are expected to reach 200,000 units, an increase of 1.5 times year-on-year. Omdia also predicts that 8K devices will grow by more than 400% between 2020 and 2025.
In a multi-party favorable environment, China's color TV industry and upstream and downstream industrial chains have also accelerated the pace of 8K layout.
This year is the end of the "Ultra-high-definition Video Industry Development Action Plan (2019-2022)", the action plan of that year focused on the deployment of 'core components research and development' key tasks, China's color TV industry giant Hisense this year not only jointly with the Central Radio and Television Corporation to jointly develop the mainland's 8K broadcast-level professional monitors, but also released the first domestic self-developed 8K AI picture quality chip on January 11 this year, and officially launched the world's first 8K laser display solution during CES2022, a number of simultaneous, It has provided impetus for the development of 8K Ultra HD.
As a pioneer in the domestic display industry, laser TV has now become an indispensable force. According to experts, the laser upgrade from 4K to 8K can maintain the same power and efficiency, which is more energy-saving and environmentally friendly. 8K laser TV can not only meet the requirements of consumers for super size, ultra-high image quality and ultra-low power consumption at the same time, but also the future curling form and the characteristics of host screen separation, but also better integrate with the home environment.
Since 8K TV was first exhibited by Sharp in 2013, IT has always been dominated by LCD TV. With the advent of domestic 8K laser TV and domestic 8KOLED TV, domestic TV brands have fully realized the full category coverage of 8K resolution, so that China's color TV industry has achieved global leadership in technology and products.
It is understood that the domestic 8KOLED TV uses printed OLED panels, which is different from the third large-size OLED technology route in addition to The Korean company WOLED and QD-OLED, and is accelerating the mass production process together with JOLED. Compared with olED technology of the evaporation process, the printed OELD technology has three major advantages, such as high material utilization, no vacuum environment, and simple structure, which will significantly reduce the mass production cost of OLED large-size panels and significantly reduce the price of large-screen OLED TVs.
In addition to hardware technology, domestic content platforms have also begun to pave the way for 8K. On December 6, 2021, Bilibili Main Site announced the opening of user submissions for 8K "Ultra HD" videos, and launched the event page and the first manuscripts. On the relevant content submissions, the parameters of the official suggestions are as follows: video encoding standard: H265; Recommended resolution: 7680x4320 (short side greater than or equal to 4320); Frame rate: unlimited; Color depth: 8bit; Code: H.265; Recommended bit rate: 60M; Peak bitrate: 180M; Manuscript sizes are up to 16GB. According to the actual tests of netizens, the current 8K video of Station B can only be watched on 8K TV through the official TV App "Cloud Audiovisual Small TV", or through the Safari browser above version 11.
Although Station B is still not open to ordinary users to submit 8K videos, through professional cameras or mobile phones such as Canon and Sony, ordinary consumers can already shoot 8K videos themselves. Obviously, it is still too early to talk about the ecological environment of 8K video, but through the Winter Olympics and subsequent related layout construction, 8K may achieve rapid development in the next five years or so.