White Paper: Is your data center infrastructure ready for UHD?

Abstract

There are already 50 Ultra HD channels and over-the-top (OTT) services such as Netflix and Amazon now that offer 4K plans. 4K UHD TVs will make up over a one-third of TV sales in 2017 and are on pace to account for nearly two-thirds by 2020.

And UHD doesn't end with 4K either, 8K is on the horizon. The Japanese public broadcaster NHK plans to offer full 8K coverage of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

UHD deployments will require massive amounts of video data to be captured, processed and transmitted. In order to provide truly immersive UHD experiences that engage with the audience, media companies will need to optimize their video infrastructure to prepare for the upcoming UHD wave.

However, the arrival of UHD combined with the increasing demand for online video services are outstripping the processing capabilities of existing video infrastructure. At the same time, the industry is moving to open, cloud architectures that benefit from the programmability of software defined, virtual environments and the economy of scale of mainstream servers. Service providers thus need a cost-efficient, agile and scalable way to deploy UHD.

This white paper looks at the important role that commercial, off-the-shelf solutions based on hardware-accelerated video processing will play in next generation UHD deployments.