As Chinese government changes its broadcasting market to UHD digital broadcasting market, Korean broadcasting equipment businesses are expecting increased demands for exports. Many Korean medium and small-sized broadcasting equipment businesses are going after Chinese market with differentiated products such as their own UHD monitors for broadcasting purpose and others.

Korean Broadcasting Technology Association (KBTA) announced that it set up ‘Special Room for Korea’s Next Generation Broadcasting Equipment’ and operated it at ‘International Radio, TV & Film Exhibition 2015 (BIRTV)’ that was recently held in Beijing. BIRTV is a large-sized exhibition where 450 businesses and 50,000 people from 50 different countries come and watch.

KBTA set up the special room with 6 medium and small-sized Korean businesses that specialize in virtual studios, UHD camera surrounding equipment, LED lighting equipment, and others. Other than these 6 businesses, Nimbus that specializes in wireless data delivery solution and Orion that developed UHD monitors for broadcasting purpose also participated in this exhibition with their own separate booth.

“Chinese government is pushing for digital broadcasting where it changes analog broadcasting to UHD broadcasting by end of this year. Our goal is to reach an export quota of $10 million (about 11.8 billion KRW).” said Secretary General Lee Han Bum of KBTA.

Chinese state council announced at its proposed plan of digital broadcasting change in last 2008 that it will change all of its analog broadcasting to digital broadcasting by 2015. Because of this, it started to deliver its ground-wave digital broadcasting by ‘DTBM’ standard, and corresponding government departments announced policies one after the other about vitalizing HD TVs.

Photo Image
<4K UHD Camera that was developed by Chinese broadcasting equipment company called HDVAS>

“As China was selected to hold 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, it started turn center of its previous policies about changing to digital broadcasting from HD to UHD broadcasting. Korean businesses are forming competitive dynamics with Japanese businesses as they are developing UHD broadcasting equipment such as UHD TVs, cameras, editors, mixers, monitors, and etc.” said one person in industry.

Korean broadcasting equipment industry is expecting that its product line such as high efficient video coding (HEVC) encoders, UHD monitors, and others, which received praises about their technology levels from Korea and foreign countries, will make a stable market in Chinese market because while it is cheaper than Japanese products, difference in performance between Korean product line and Japanese product line is not much.

“China’s major businesses such as Huawei ChingChang, Sebei, Sumavision, and others are actively investing in development of UHD broadcasting equipment. To vitalize UHD broadcasting equipment industry, we need to exchange our technologies with China and expand our exports.” said Secretary General Lee.

Staff Reporter Yoon, Heeseok | pioneer@etnews.com