Comcast's 4K Efforts Are Delayed. Again.
Comcast appears to have once again delayed the cable giant's foray into 4K ultra high definition television. On May 6, 2015, Comcast issued a press release proclaiming that the cable giant would be offering a 4K set top cable box by the end of the year. In that announcement, Comcast proclaimed that its "Xi4" set top box was to deliver 4K, while the company's looming "Xi5" box would be offering users access to HDR content. But despite the occasional hype bubbling forth from Comcast, the company's 4K efforts -- and new 4K-capable set top boxes -- were a no show.
This week the company gave a little more insight into the delay, but also indicated that the launch of 4K would be delayed even further.
Speaking at an industry trade show this week, company executives acknowledged that they've quite intentionally "slowed their roll" when it comes to 4K, largely because of evolving standards and the desire to integrate HDR (high dynamic range) -- which provides sharper, more realistic colors and contrast -- and 10 bit HEVC encoding -- which also provides "greater color precision," according to the company.
Comcast's Joshua Seiden said that the 10-bit HEVC standard (read more here) is new enough that Comcast is "having trouble getting the decoders it needs for its set-top boxes." The delay in deploying 4K content has allowed companies like Netflix and Amazon to take the lead in 4K, while cable providers debate whether to embrace QAM or IP for 4K delivery.
"4K HEVC almost has to be done over IP," said Seiden, noting that a single stream of 4K content consumes nearly an entire 6MHz cable network channel. With cable networks already constrained (many still haven't even offered full HD without compression artifacts) and QAM resources as limited as they are, cable providers are finding those bandwidth demands untenable.
According to Comcast there's still multiple 4K and HDR set top boxes in the works, but they're not likely to appear until the end of this year. And even then, Comcast's 4K push isn't really expected to take flight until the 2018 Winter Olympics.