The 8K Association was founded about three years ago to draw attention to the nascent 8K value chain and now, says executive director Chris Chinnock, that entire ecosystem, from production and post to live-to-air events, has become a reality. TV brands, panel makers and chip set providers are the 8K Association members that will primarily be at CES 2002 in January. The Association will not have a booth at the confab, but Chinnock will be making the rounds to tout some of the highlights of 8K’s progression over the last few years. Japan has been broadcasting 8K since December 2018, for example, and the Summer Olympics in 8K were “a big hit.”

“Although most of that was distributed and seen in Japan, there were extra feeds, including a demo at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles,” he says. “Globo TV in Brazil also got a feed and streamed it to more than a handful consumers with 8K TVs. It was clearly an experiment, but it went off without a hitch.”

As to content, Chinnock points to “The Explorers,” a streaming 8K series from France that is an embedded app in Samsung and TCL 8K TVs. “I expect another TV brand to support ‘The Explorers’ 8K app as well, which may be announced at CES,” he says. MEGOGO, a Russian company, also distributes an app with a dedicated 8K channel in Eastern Europe, much of it upconverted from 4K to 8K and SDR to HDR.

At CES 2022, Chinnock explains the 8K Association will release the next version of its Tech and Test Specs for certifying 8K TVs, which he says contains “new picture performance metrics that he does not think any other organization is using yet.” Details are still under wraps. The Association also published a new white paper on the state of live 8K production, followed by a webinar on the topic, and established a consumer-facing website.

At the show, Chinnock is also eager to see new TV technology from the major TV brands. Samsung, a founding member of the 8K Association, is expected to show off its QD-OLED display technology that “creates a uniform OLED blue layer red and green patterned quantum dot on top of that layer,” he explains. “The blue OLED layer creates native blue subpixels while the blue light then converts the quantum dots into red and green subpixels.”

He adds that, this hybrid technology, “should be more light-efficient than LG’s white OLED TV technology.” “I don’t know if there will be 8K models,” he says. “It will be a premium product to begin with, but the goal is to bring the cost down.”

Panel makers like BOE and Samsung Display will be at CES showing the latest innovations in display technology, including 8K. “The advancements I will be looking for include thinner panels, better backlight control coupled with more miniLEDs, enhanced picture performance and advancements in the user interface,” he says. “Maybe there will be some surprises too.”

Chinnock adds he is especially interested in meeting with MediaTek to see a new TV SoC dubbed Pentonic with hardware-based VVC decoding and an improved AI-based super-resolution upscaling engine, among other features.