That, he says, is where Advanced HDR by Technicolor comes in. This solution uses embedded metadata and machine learning to deliver a single stream as HDR on devices that support it, while automatically falling back to SDR on those that do not, protecting investments in legacy infrastructure without sacrificing image quality on modern displays.

“If you only have one HDR pipeline, you can drop the SDR pipeline completely,” he said. “That’s a huge benefit for both broadcast and streaming service providers. And on the viewer side, they benefit because regardless of what device they have, they’re always getting the highest quality stream that is possible.”

The challenge of converting legacy SDR content into HDR-compatible formats is particularly acute for Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television, or FAST, services. These platforms have built large audiences by offering free access to older catalog content, from 1970s sitcoms and 1990s dramas to more modern blockbusters. But that content arrives in a patchwork of formats, color spaces, resolutions, and aspect ratios that were never designed to coexist in a single distribution pipeline.

Managing Multi-Generational Content Complexity for A Modern Audience

Legacy content, he explained, often carries inconsistent color metadata, varying gamma settings, and brightness levels that do not meet HDR mastering standards. Content that was originally shot on analog formats adds further complications. Upscaling, de-interlacing, and color remapping all introduce processing demands that can threaten the low-latency performance that live scheduling and dynamic ad insertion require.

That last point matters enormously to FAST operators, whose entire business model depends on advertising. If an HDR program is interrupted by an SDR commercial, the jarring brightness shift is not just an aesthetic problem. It is a failure that undermines the premium experience that operators are selling to both viewers and advertisers.

“Users who pay a lot for premium content or a huge live sports event would be very frustrated if there is a break in the HDR processing,” Schönberger said. “The ad must be HDR in the same way as the premium content.”

MainConcept’s codec handles that conversion on the fly, translating incoming SDR advertising feeds into HDR output without introducing visible transitions or latency. Schönberger said the technology exists to execute that process seamlessly, but it requires some integration work on the operator side.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that HDR itself is not a single standard. The market currently supports at least six distinct formats, including HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG), PQ, and Advanced HDR by Technicolor. Each format carries different technical requirements, and playback devices do not always support every option.

MainConcept’s approach centers on building support for all of those formats directly into its encoder software development kits, which are licensed to broadcasters, OTT platforms, production companies, and operators in industries ranging from security surveillance to medical imaging.

That said, Schönberger highlighted Advanced HDR by Technicolor as a format with particular promise for operators navigating the SDR-to-HDR transition. The technology can take an existing eight-bit SDR feed and generate HDR output from it, meaning operators do not necessarily need to overhaul their production infrastructure to begin delivering HDR content. It also supports HDR-to-dynamic-HDR conversion, adjusting metadata on a per-frame basis to maximize image quality across different display types.

“You can stick to your existing eight-bit SDR infrastructure,” Schönberger said. “You can easily turn your legacy SDR content into HDR, and in the end you only have one stream.”

The format has already been adopted into broadcast standards. It is part of the TV 2.5 standard in Brazil and is included in ATSC 3.0, the next-generation broadcast specification being deployed across the United States. Several U.S. broadcasters, including Sinclair and Gray Media, have already put the technology into production.

Beyond traditional broadcast and streaming, Schönberger sees HDR playing a growing role in augmented reality, virtual reality, and extended reality applications, particularly as wearable devices become more capable. The deeper blacks, brighter highlights, and expanded color palette that HDR enables translate directly into more convincing immersive environments.

“The audience wants to dive completely into the premium content they’ve paid for,” he said.

“HDR extends the contrast ratio and color palette beyond SDR. It shows a more realistic, more detailed, and more immersive picture quality regardless of whether devices support standard definition (SD), high definition (HD) or ultra-high definition (UHD) content.”

Preparing for an HDR Future

Schönberger said the trajectory of the industry is clearly toward dynamic HDR, which adjusts image parameters frame by frame rather than applying a single static setting to an entire program. Doing that at scale, particularly for live content, will increasingly require automated and AI-assisted processing tools.

“Doing this on the fly requires AI-driven or automated tools,” he said. “Dynamic HDR is the future.”

For an industry still managing the long tail of SDR infrastructure while racing to deliver premium HDR experiences, the codec layer may be the least visible but most essential piece of the puzzle. 

Watch the Full Vidcast Interview Here.

Q: MainConcept has been in the codec business for more than three decades. How does that depth of experience shape the way you approach a technology shift like HDR?

Frank Schönberger: It gives you perspective that younger companies simply do not have. We have watched the industry move through analog to digital, standard definition to high definition, file-based workflows to streaming, and now this HDR transition. Each of those shifts created winners and losers, and the difference usually came down to whether a company could support the old infrastructure while building for the new one. That is essentially the same challenge we face today. Our customers cannot abandon their SDR viewers overnight. They need solutions that allow them to move toward HDR without leaving legacy audiences behind, and without doubling their operational costs in the process.

Q: Premium content has always been a differentiator, but you seem to be saying the stakes are higher now. Why?

Schönberger: The number of streaming services competing for subscriber attention has grown dramatically. At the same time, broadcast is losing ground to streaming in most markets. So you have a situation where everyone is fighting for the same viewer, the same subscriber dollar, the same advertising spend. Premium content, and the technology that delivers it at its best, becomes a real competitive lever. HDR is part of that. When it works well, it is genuinely better. Brighter whites, deeper blacks, more vivid colors. It is a more realistic picture. Viewers who have experienced it on a quality display notice the difference, and that matters to the operators paying for it.

Q: HDR is not a single standard. There are at least six formats in active use. How does MainConcept manage that fragmentation?

Schönberger: That fragmentation is one of the more difficult aspects of the current landscape. You have HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, Hybrid Log-Gamma, PQ, and Advanced HDR by Technicolor, and each of them has different technical requirements and different levels of device support. Our approach is to build support for all of those formats into our encoder software development kits (SDKs) so that our customers are not forced to make an either-or decision. We also have a dedicated universal color space converter that handles the transformation between formats, including conversion back to SDR when needed. The goal is to give operators the flexibility to work within whatever HDR ecosystem their distribution partners and device manufacturers require.

Q: The industry has largely been running dual workflows, one for SDR and one for HDR. What does that actually cost an operator?

Schönberger: It doubles everything. You have double the hardware, double the maintenance, double the operational overhead. For a broadcaster with a large content catalog and multiple distribution channels, that is a significant ongoing expense. And it creates workflow complexity that introduces risk. More moving parts means more opportunities for something to go wrong, especially in live production environments where you have no margin for error. The industry has understood for some time that the goal should be a single pipeline that serves both SDR and HDR audiences from one stream. The question has always been how to get there without degrading quality at either end.

Q: That is where Advanced HDR by Technicolor enters the picture. How does it address the single-stream problem?

Schönberger: Advanced HDR by Technicolor is genuinely well-suited to this challenge because of the way it was designed. It uses embedded metadata and machine learning to deliver a single stream as HDR on devices that support it, while automatically falling back to SDR on those that do not, protecting investments in legacy infrastructure without sacrificing image quality on modern displays. And the machine learning component is important. Traditional SDR-to-HDR conversion relied on static lookup tables, which produced inconsistent results and compressed the HDR signal in ways that undermined the whole point of using HDR in the first place. The adaptive approach in Advanced HDR by Technicolor adjusts on a per-frame basis, which is what you need for live content where lighting conditions are constantly changing. A stadium broadcast at noon looks nothing like the same stadium at dusk, and a static conversion cannot handle that transition gracefully.

Q: Free ad-supported streaming services carry enormous libraries of older content. What specific challenges does that create for HDR delivery?

Schönberger: The scale and inconsistency of legacy content are core issues. When you have a catalog built over decades, you are dealing with content that was produced under completely different technical standards. Different color spaces, different gamma curves, different aspect ratios, varying levels of metadata, some of it analog in origin. There is no single conversion approach that handles all of that uniformly. Each piece of content may need a different treatment to look correct in an HDR environment. And the operational complexity compounds when you factor in live scheduling and dynamic ad insertion, because you may be switching between content from completely different eras and technical backgrounds within a single viewing session. The codec infrastructure has to absorb all of that variation and produce a consistent output stream.

Q: The advertising model is the revenue engine for FAST services. What happens when an HDR program is interrupted by an SDR commercial?

Schönberger: It is a real problem, and it goes beyond aesthetics. When a viewer is watching premium HDR content and an SDR advertisement appears, there is an immediate and jarring shift in brightness and color quality. The viewer notices. In some cases, it looks like something has gone wrong with the broadcast. For an operator who has positioned their service around a premium viewing experience, that is a credibility problem. The ad has to match the quality of the content surrounding it. Our encoders handle that conversion in real time, translating an incoming SDR advertising feed into HDR output without introducing a visible break. The viewer should only notice the ad, not the technical transition.

Q: Where does HDR fit in the emerging world of augmented and virtual reality?

Schönberger: It is a natural fit. The whole premise of immersive content is that you want the viewer to feel present in what they are watching. HDR contributes directly to that by extending the contrast ratio and color palette beyond what SDR can produce, which means the image is closer to what the human eye actually perceives in real life. As wearable devices improve, the display technology will increasingly be capable of rendering HDR content in ways that are genuinely immersive. The production and delivery infrastructure needs to be ready for that. Dynamic HDR, which adjusts image parameters on a per-frame basis rather than applying a single static setting across a whole program, is where that is heading. It is more computationally demanding, but the combination of better processing hardware and AI-assisted automation is making it practical at scale.

Key Takeaways

The HDR transition is not simply a display technology upgrade. It is a fundamental reorganization of how video content gets produced, packaged, and delivered across an increasingly fragmented device landscape. For operators managing legacy content libraries, dual SDR and HDR workflows, and advertising feeds that may arrive in any format, the codec layer is the critical point of integration.

Schönberger’s central argument is that the industry no longer needs to accept the cost and complexity of parallel pipelines. Solutions like Advanced HDR by Technicolor, now available as an MainConcept SDK and already deployed by broadcasters operating under ATSC 3.0, make single-stream delivery viable today. The technology handles the SDR-to-HDR conversion in real time, preserves metadata integrity through the encoding process, and adapts dynamically to the kind of variable content that defines modern broadcasting. For an industry navigating simultaneous pressures from subscriber competition, advertising revenue requirements, and the approaching demands of immersive media, that combination of efficiency and quality may prove to be the most consequential codec development in a generation.

• Delivers premium HDR to Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão Digital (SBTVD) TV2.5 to optimize the transition from SBTVD TV2.0 to SBTVD TV3.0. The demonstration will be provided along with the presentation of Cobalt’s 9904-UDX-4K openGear processing cards, providing ITM and SL-HDR encoding tools implementation and MainConcept Live Encoder with AVC/H.264 — a powerful all-in-one video and audio encoding engine that simplifies common broadcast and OTT video workflows.
  
  
• Worked with Globo on FIFA World Cup 2022 trial that demonstrated TV2.5 premium HDR with unique SDR backward compatibility. Advanced HDR by Technicolor collaborated with Cobalt Digital, V-Nova and MainConcept to provide production and distribution tools.
  
  
• Provides solutions that are fully compliant with AVC 8-bit codecs to support TV2.5 while reducing banding effects and comparing the results to HDR PQ delivery.
  
  
• Prepares the transition to TV3.0 with VVC and LCEVC codecs.
  
  
• Leverages the ATSC 3.0 standard to bring premium HDR viewing experiences in the United States via new Hisense TVs equipped with MTK chipsets.

To schedule a briefing with Advanced HDR by Technicolor subject matter experts during SET Expo 2023 contact airrion@mindsharecapture.com.

About Advanced HDR by Technicolor

Advanced HDR by Technicolor® is a suite of High Dynamic Range (HDR) production, distribution and display solutions that leverages machine learning (ML) technology to maximize image quality and enhance the consumer viewing experience. There are two major components to Advanced HDR by Technicolor:

• The Intelligent Tone Management (ITM) tool provides a dynamic, tunable, real-time solution to up-convert SDR content to HDR with full freedom and flexibility to manage contrast, brightness and color saturation.
  
  
• The Single Layer HDR (SL-HDR) is a dynamic and tunable real-time tool that implements the ETSI SL-HDR standards to generate and deliver a single, consistent, high-quality broadcast stream starting from any mix of input content (such as live, movies, news) across a wide range of HDR formats (HDR10, HLG, S-LOG3). SL-HDR1 transforms HDR input streams into SDR-plus-metadata streams. SL-HDR compatible receivers provide consumers with high-quality HDR images that can be adapted to optimize the display capabilities of their devices. Thanks to the unique backward compatibility feature of SL-HDR1, consumers who do not have HDR devices can enjoy the highest quality SDR experience.

To learn more about Advanced HDR by Technicolor visit:
https://advancedhdrbytechnicolor.pro/ 

Most importantly, the demonstration proved how content captured and stored in HDR and SDR can be replayed from storage without compromising the quality or creative intent of both formats.

“This is the first time that the industry will see the ability to store SDR with the SL-HDR metadata so that we can reconstruct either format at any stage in the chain,” said Valérie Allié, Video Solutions Group Director at InterDigital. 

“We have made it possible to record live content, replay, and distribute in either format in real-time. It’s a great demonstration of our ability to cover all the stages of the dynamic metadata management requirements while streamlining the entire lifecycle of live event content,” she added. 

The demonstration illustrated the ability to innovate and dramatically improve production processes that deliver enhanced viewing experiences to consumers using standards-based technologies.

“We’ve always focused on the advanced format for video and audio, so our partnership with Advanced HDR by Technicolor has been an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how complex workflows with metadata can be streamlined utilizing existing SMPTE standards,” explained Guillaume Arthuis, CEO at BBright. 

The demonstration also showed how recent developments in compression technology improve technical performance throughout the production lifecycle — even as new innovative formats create a more complicated environment. 

“While video codecs evolve, metadata tends to transcend individual codecs. Encapsulating the metadata within the compressed bitstream means that we can process it without impacting compression quality,” said Thomas Kramer, VP of Strategy and Business Development at MainConcept. 

“Advanced HDR by Technicolor perfectly fits into the modular, multi-codec design of MainConcept Live Encoder. Since Advanced HDR by Technicolor gets encapsulated into the compressed bitstream, MainConcept Live Encoder is able to frame-accurately append its HDR metadata to the core content. This brings broadcasters the right tool to support SDR content with legacy consumer devices while enhancing the same signal to a greater user experience on HDR-enabled TVs,” concluded Kramer. 

Editorial Note: To learn more about Advanced HDR by Technicolor, please visit: www.advancedhdrbytechnicolor.pro