No. 250: Successful international relay of super high-definition video (February 24, 2011)

NTT and NHK announced that they succeeded in the international relay of a super high-definition video that is 16 times as fine as a high-definition video. Embedded with their original data compression technology, the experiment transmitted a video for a distance of 80,000 km using the next-generation high-speed line of optical fiber. The transmission delay was 0.3 second that is a quarter of the time required by the satellite connection. The new technology is expected to allow for public viewing to enjoy videos of sports events transmitted from abroad in a large screen. In the experiment, a video filmed in NHK�s Science and Technology Research Laboratories in Tokyo was transmitted to BBC in London via the U.S., and subsequently it was transmitted back to NTT�s International Sharing Laboratory Group in Tokyo. The new data compression method successfully reduced the data capacity and strengthened the security function to protect data. Super high-definition can reproduce 33 million pixels, 16 times as many pixels as the number of pixels transmittable by high-definition. The next-generation high-speed line is being constructed for universities and laboratories in Japan.