28 September 2017

Eutelsat Communications announces the commercial launch in Europe on 1 October of Travelxp 4K at its popular HOTBIRD video neighbourhood. Travelxp 4K, the world’s first 4K HDR channel, will leverage HOTBIRD’s market-leading penetration into cable and IPTV networks across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

Travelxp 4K will be available in English, Spanish Polish, Serbian, Croatian and Dutch in the coming months. Localisation in other languages will shortly be announced. The channel will initially feature 100 hours of world class travel programmes filmed across the world with multicultural hosts. The 4K version of the Travelxp brand follows the success of Travelxp HD that offers 100% of originally-produced premium travel and lifestyle programming distributed to over 50 million homes globally.

Now encrypted, Travelxp 4K is encoded in HEVC, at 50 frames per second (50p), with 10 bits of colour depth (1 billion colours), in the BT2020 colour space, and High Dynamic Range (HDR) with the Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) standard developed by the BBC and NHK that creates richer and more dynamic images by increasing the contrast ratio between the lightest and darkest areas of the screen and expanding the volume of colours displayed. The HLG standard enables Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) TV sets to display an Ultra HD image (in SDR mode).

Travelxp 4K CEO, Prashant Chothani, commented: “We started the test feed on Eutelsat’s HOTBIRD neighbourhood at the beginning of the year and kept it Free-to-Air to enable operators and hardware vendors to access an HLG HDR content feed. As the world’s first 4K HDR channel, we are extremely grateful to all partners, vendors and stakeholders who have made this happen. Quality is at the forefront of Travelxp 4K and viewers are going to love the quality of content that we have produced.”