Las Vegas: While the Canadian TV market is still grappling with widespread adoption of HD, the talk as the National Association of Broadcasters conference opened earlier this month was about next-generation Ultra HDTV.

While it is estimated that 10% to 15% of Canadian TV programming is now produced in HD, in Japan it is another story, according to Hirozaku Nishiyama, managing director of Japan caster NHK.

‘Today everything that we want to see in Japan can be seen in HDTV,’ Nishiyama told the crowd in his NAB Broadcast Engineering Conference keynote address on April 15. ‘Today Japanese audiences have witnessed a live HD broadcast from the international space station and will soon be able to receive HDTV in their cars.’

NHK, which began development of HD back in 1964, commits 12 of its 13-segment 6MHz band to HDTV, with the other segment for mobile services. HD cameras will even be installed on the lunar explorer Selene, to be launched this summer. The orbiter will circle the moon for one year and capture HD footage of the south face and the Earth rising.

NHK’s Ultra HD technology boasts a resolution of 7680 x 4320 and is theoretically 16 times clearer than HDTV. Nishiyama showed projected footage of the NFL Pro Bowl and a field of sunflowers in the format, noting that the super-fast cameras can capture at a rate of 4,000 frames per second. While it didn’t exactly look more impressive than, say, HD on Sony’s 4K projector, NHK is marshalling significant resources behind the technology.

Cameras, disc recorders, encoders and projectors are being developed now, while 2009 will mark the intro of full specs for Ultra HD, to the tune of 32 million pixels. NHK estimates that two years later, satellite transmission tests will begin, and by 2020, Ultra HD will be ready for broadcast to households.

The NHK managing director also unveiled plans to make Ultra-HD wall displays, scrolling handheld displays, and a flexible magazine-like display (12 x 21 inch), which really seems like sci-fi.

‘Television started as a tube to see faraway locations,’ Nishiyama proclaimed. ‘Now it becomes ‘Tele-Sense’ – a device to bring the sensation of distance locations.’

The National Association of Broadcasters, based in Washington, DC, is a lobby group for free U.S. local TV and radio stations and broadcast networks. NAB2007 was held April 14-19 in Las Vegas.

www.nabshow.com