From The Online Reporter
- New Odemax Network Will Distribute 4K Direct to Homes & Theaters
- No Discs — Just Streaming
- Will Increase Demand for Faster Broadband
After studying the 4K matter before and during CES, it seemed to us that OTT services would stream 4K shows to homes before the pay TV services could pipe it over their networks and before the Blu-ray crowd could add it to their standard. Look at what has popped up! An OTT service called Odemax will in March start delivering 4K movies over the Internet to homes with a 4K player made by 4K camera maker RED.
RED, the company whose cameras were used by Peter Jackson to film “The Hobbit”, will soon start shipping a “REDRAY Player” that plays 4K videos — both the UHD version and the digital cinema version — with the aim of becoming the Blu-ray of 4K. The 4K content comes from a built-in 1TB hard drive that receives it from a new 4K OTT streaming service called Odemax, by FTTP from a secure and licensed site, from an external hard drive or from a network attached storage (NAS) device via an Ethernet connector.
RED says studios already have its RED cameras whose output can be put into 4K. The list of films that have been shot with RED’s cameras are at: http://www.red.com/shot-on-red/cinema
RED was showing 4K content using the REDRAY player connected to an 84-inch Toshiba 4K TV set in the Toshiba booth at CES. In the middle of myriad booths with 4K TV sets at CES, the overwhelming question was “Where’s the 4K content?” RED said the REDRAY player answers that question and that it answers it now. (Lest we forget, Netflix was streaming UHD content to a Samsung TV at CES.)
Alphabet & Numerical Soup
High Efficiency Video Coding: HEVC or 4k or H.265
The current compression technology: H.264
Hello
REDRAY! Bye Bye Blu-ray?
REDRAY boxes will be available in March. See: http://www.red.com/store/products/redray-player
There are two catches:
- The TV must be 4K-ready and they are still pricey.
- The REDRAY player sells for $1,450, which should however not be a burden for someone that has purchased a 4K TV set.
The REDRAY player has six HDMI ports, one of which
supports a 4K TV set. The box also supports 3D videos and
7.1 surround sound. The 1TB hard disk holds about 100 hours
of 4K content. Streams from the Internet require a broadband
connection that’s faster than 25 Mbps, which telcos with
all-fiber broadband and most cablecos are already offering.
Slower streams can be cached to the HD for later viewing.
There’s a conventional remote and a free app for iPads
and iPhones. It uses REDCrypt digital media encryption and
ODEMAX digital rights management. It plays the RED-owned
.RED video files in 4K and .MP4 files in 1080p and 720p. It
supports .RED for up to 7.1 channels and .MP4 for stereo.
RED offers a complete 4K ecosystem: cameras, Internet
delivery and an in-home REDRAY player that can both store
and receive 4K videos.
RED
Started by Making 4K Cameras for the Studios
RED, in partnership with a new venture called Odemax that
Jon Farhat manages, is setting up a 4K distribution system
that challenges the studios’ traditional distribution
networks by going direct to consumers and to theaters. It
streams via the Net to REDRAY players in the home and to its
CRIMSON Projection systems in theaters.
See: http://odemax.com/information.html
Odemax says it’s setting up a Web site for content owners and distributors that will allow them to upload, promote, control and discuss their 4K content. It said 4K content can be encoded with its free Redcine X Pro software with a $20 Redray encode plug-in for PCs and Macs. The encoded content can only be played on REDRAY players.
Odemax provides trailer delivery — both online and theatrical — analytics and marketing tools. It gets a cut of the revenue.
There’s an interview with RED co-founder Ted Schilowitz at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjrbowDN1HA
An interview with Peter Jackson who directed “The Hobbit” is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-VeXLZTm24
Stuart English, who is RED’s Workflow Wizard (employees
at RED have thought-provoking titles) told The Online
Reporter that there are primarily two 4K frame sizes:
RED’s cameras record in much higher resolution — in the 5K range — and the studios’ post production scales the frame size for the intended audience — TV sets, cinema or Blu-ray. The REDRAY box plays both 4K videos and also scales the resolution to the TV set to which it’s connected.
The studio also encodes (compresses) the video into a DRM-protected .RED file, which Odemax streams to the REDRAY player, which decodes (decompresses) for playback on the TV set. The encoding/decoding is not done with an industry standard such as HEVC, but is instead RED’s proprietary compression technology.
There is an ASIC chip in the REDPLAYER that decodes in real time. However, the encoding is done by the studio on Macs and PCs with a $20 add-on piece of hardware RED supplies. That file goes to Odemax for distributing.
O
demax streams to the hard drive in the REDRAY player where it’s cached so that the viewer can start watching as soon as a sufficient amount has been received. For very slow broadband, it may need to receive most or even all of the video before it’s viewable.
English points out that studios and TV networks have finished copies of the videos of show before they are made available for viewing.
How else could Apple get to download episodes of “Downton Abbey” before they are shown the next night on TV. English said that studios and TV networks could pre-download shows to the REDRAY player before their initial viewing time. The DRM would have a clock that allowed them to be viewed only on or after their scheduled release date and time.
Asked how RED happened to think of making a REDPLAYER for use in the home, English said the company wants to build a RED infrastructure and it saw a market. He listed the probable purchasers of the REDRAY player: businesses that want to communicate with employees and customers, education, medical, digital signage and, of course, consumers that want high-quality video entertainment in the home.
Asked about which films Odemax will have at launch in March, English did not provide any. He said it’s a “chicken and eggs” kind of thing. Word is only now getting to the studios about the newly launched REDPLAYER and Odemax OTT service. He expects that independent studios will be among the first to sign up because their path to market now is expensive and difficult. With Odemax, studios can with one click of a mouse make their content available to every home that has a REDRAY player.
We asked whether RED would license its REDRAY technology to makers of other smart TV adapters like Roku or Apple. English would only say that RED wants to build a global RED infrastructure.
We got the same answer when we asked if RED would license its technology to another OTT service such as Walmart’s Vudu or iTunes, both of which boast of their “superior” video and audio quality.
Asked about the pricing of movies and TV shows on the REDRAY player, English said that’s something the studios will have to decide. It could be that some will want to sell shows at a premium over the Blu-ray pricing, say $50 and up, or whether they want to make the decision to purchase a no-brainer at something like $10.
English said there is a very real ....
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- New Odemax Network Will Distribute 4K Direct to Homes & Theaters
- No Discs — Just Streaming
- Will Increase Demand for Faster Broadband
After studying the 4K matter before and during CES, it seemed to us that OTT services would stream 4K shows to homes before the pay TV services could pipe it over their networks and before the Blu-ray crowd could add it to their standard. Look at what has popped up! An OTT service called Odemax will in March start delivering 4K movies over the Internet to homes with a 4K player made by 4K camera maker RED.
RED, the company whose cameras were used by Peter Jackson to film “The Hobbit”, will soon start shipping a “REDRAY Player” that plays 4K videos — both the UHD version and the digital cinema version — with the aim of becoming the Blu-ray of 4K. The 4K content comes from a built-in 1TB hard drive that receives it from a new 4K OTT streaming service called Odemax, by FTTP from a secure and licensed site, from an external hard drive or from a network attached storage (NAS) device via an Ethernet connector.
RED says studios already have its RED cameras whose output can be put into 4K. The list of films that have been shot with RED’s cameras are at: http://www.red.com/shot-on-red/cinema
RED was showing 4K content using the REDRAY player connected to an 84-inch Toshiba 4K TV set in the Toshiba booth at CES. In the middle of myriad booths with 4K TV sets at CES, the overwhelming question was “Where’s the 4K content?” RED said the REDRAY player answers that question and that it answers it now. (Lest we forget, Netflix was streaming UHD content to a Samsung TV at CES.)
Alphabet & Numerical Soup
High Efficiency Video Coding: HEVC or 4k or H.265
The current compression technology: H.264
Two Catches
There are two catches:
- The TV must be 4K-ready and they are still pricey.
- The REDRAY player sells for $1,450, which should however not be a burden for someone that has purchased a 4K TV set.
Multi-Source: Internal Hard Disk, External Drive, Internet
via Ethernet or Wi-Fi
Sets up
Odemax Distribution Network
See: http://odemax.com/information.html
Odemax says it’s setting up a Web site for content owners and distributors that will allow them to upload, promote, control and discuss their 4K content. It said 4K content can be encoded with its free Redcine X Pro software with a $20 Redray encode plug-in for PCs and Macs. The encoded content can only be played on REDRAY players.
Odemax provides trailer delivery — both online and theatrical — analytics and marketing tools. It gets a cut of the revenue.
There’s an interview with RED co-founder Ted Schilowitz at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjrbowDN1HA
An interview with Peter Jackson who directed “The Hobbit” is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-VeXLZTm24
Talking with
RED’s Workforce Wizard
4K Formats
|
Resolution
|
Pixels
|
UHD for TV
sets
|
3840 × 2160
|
8,294,400
|
Digital
Cinema for theaters
|
4096 × 2160
|
8,847,360
|
RED’s cameras record in much higher resolution — in the 5K range — and the studios’ post production scales the frame size for the intended audience — TV sets, cinema or Blu-ray. The REDRAY box plays both 4K videos and also scales the resolution to the TV set to which it’s connected.
The studio also encodes (compresses) the video into a DRM-protected .RED file, which Odemax streams to the REDRAY player, which decodes (decompresses) for playback on the TV set. The encoding/decoding is not done with an industry standard such as HEVC, but is instead RED’s proprietary compression technology.
There is an ASIC chip in the REDPLAYER that decodes in real time. However, the encoding is done by the studio on Macs and PCs with a $20 add-on piece of hardware RED supplies. That file goes to Odemax for distributing.
O
demax streams to the hard drive in the REDRAY player where it’s cached so that the viewer can start watching as soon as a sufficient amount has been received. For very slow broadband, it may need to receive most or even all of the video before it’s viewable.
English points out that studios and TV networks have finished copies of the videos of show before they are made available for viewing.
How else could Apple get to download episodes of “Downton Abbey” before they are shown the next night on TV. English said that studios and TV networks could pre-download shows to the REDRAY player before their initial viewing time. The DRM would have a clock that allowed them to be viewed only on or after their scheduled release date and time.
Asked how RED happened to think of making a REDPLAYER for use in the home, English said the company wants to build a RED infrastructure and it saw a market. He listed the probable purchasers of the REDRAY player: businesses that want to communicate with employees and customers, education, medical, digital signage and, of course, consumers that want high-quality video entertainment in the home.
Asked about which films Odemax will have at launch in March, English did not provide any. He said it’s a “chicken and eggs” kind of thing. Word is only now getting to the studios about the newly launched REDPLAYER and Odemax OTT service. He expects that independent studios will be among the first to sign up because their path to market now is expensive and difficult. With Odemax, studios can with one click of a mouse make their content available to every home that has a REDRAY player.
We asked whether RED would license its REDRAY technology to makers of other smart TV adapters like Roku or Apple. English would only say that RED wants to build a global RED infrastructure.
We got the same answer when we asked if RED would license its technology to another OTT service such as Walmart’s Vudu or iTunes, both of which boast of their “superior” video and audio quality.
Asked about the pricing of movies and TV shows on the REDRAY player, English said that’s something the studios will have to decide. It could be that some will want to sell shows at a premium over the Blu-ray pricing, say $50 and up, or whether they want to make the decision to purchase a no-brainer at something like $10.
English said there is a very real ....
For the complete article go to www.onlinereporter.com
