TELLY INNN SPAAACE: Nothing to watch on your 4K TV? NASA to the RESCUE At last, some UHD content to go on that new 4K telly or gadget you bought ages ago: NASA has announced it is launching its own 4K television channel on 1 November. Dubbed NASA TV, the channel will be the first ever non-commercial ultra-high definition (UHD) broadcast in North America, and will be thrown at the …
There are several ways already that the existing stream from the station could be displayed on most newer TVs, granted some are more convenent to others.
Side note, it could be easy to take from the article that NASA TV will be a new channel but it has been a cable channel in the US since the 80s, this is just another bump in resolution like when they went to HD.
Like Netflix they'll be overcompressing their 4K, at least when delivered via the net. The version that e.g. Directv gets will probably be a lot higher quality and a lot higher bit rate, because they added tons of capacity for 4K that is currently unused - NASA TV would not be only be the first non-commercial 4K channel in North America, it will be the first 4K channel of any kind!
"Try double that ..."
The article says 13MBps i.e. 104Mbps which does sound a bit excessive, so not sure if it's a typo or not. It is around 4x the bitrate for 1080p H264 compressed video on a blueray though, and as it's 4x the number of pixels per frame it could be correct.
They might be planning to use H265 compression though, which I've read can achieve a noticably better compression ratio compared to H264, in which case maybe they'd get away with 13Mbps without it looking too awful.
I'm assuming they'll use H.265 for broadcast and streaming, H.264 would be an odd choice. Still, H.265 can't work miracles, if broadcast quality HD using H.264 is 9Mbps (30+ for Blu-ray) then they can't cram 4x the information into an H.265 stream of 13Mbps without seriously degrading the quality. Even Netflix opted for 15Mbps, which is still way too low. For broadcast quality parity you are looking at at least 18Mbps but reasonably we should demand better from 4K broadcasts and not let broadcasters squeeze the image to the point where 4K broadcast/streaming looks like Blu-ray HD.
I would think it's fairly safe to assume they sold out within minutes as the number of units per store is very small.
I'm happy to wait for the big brands to come down to that price before trading in my HD set. And I do hope NASA make downloads available, I'm not upgrading my broadband just for a few TV programs as I am perfectly content with the 12mbps it achieves as it is reasonably cheap, reliable and genuinely unlimited.
NasaTV has been around for quite a while. A kind of odd thing, it used to be that NASA was requiring NasaTV to be carried in the clear, apparently. They eventually dropped this requirement (although I think it's included in any satellite TV package.)
So, if you had a Dish Network receiver with no service, you'd have 1 channel with either Charlie Eigen (head of Dish Network) imploring you to sign up, or (if you were using a hacked card that Dish Network disabled) a channel where Charlie Eigen would chew you out for being such a cheapskate and gloat a bit about burning out your card. And NasaTV.
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