Warner Bros. has decided to support HDR10+, the enhanced HDR metadata technology announced last year as a cooperative effort between Samsung, 20th Century Fox and Panasonic.
The announcement means Warner Bros. content will be supported by Samsung, Panasonic and other HDR10+ capable 4K HDR TVs.
“Warner Bros. has always strived to provide the best next gen home entertainment experience to consumers,” said Jim Wuthrich, president of the Americas and Global Strategy for Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, in a statement. “With HDR10+ dynamic metadata, WB can continue to more accurately bring the filmmakers’ vision of our 2018 releases and our vast catalog of over seventy-five 4K HDR titles to the home across a broad range of HDR10+ capable TV’s.”
Warner Bros.’ involvement arrived on the same day the three founding member companies announced updates to the associated certification and logo program for the HDR10+ platform, which they said will “soon” be made available to content companies, ultra-high definition TVs, Blu-ray disc players/recorders and set-top box manufacturers, as well as SoC vendors. The companies said that tools for Ultra HD Blu-ray metadata generation are also being developed with third parties.
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The idea behind HDR10+ is to provide a royalty-free (though annual administrative fees still apply) open HDR standard as an alternative to Dolby.
“It was important for us to create an open system that is flexible and offers a viewing experience much closer to the filmmaker’s creative intent for the film,” said Danny Kaye, executive vice president of 20th Century Fox, and managing director of the Fox Innovation Lab, in a statement. “Together with Samsung and Panasonic, we aim to standardize the licensing process making it easy for partners, including content creators, television and device manufacturers, to incorporate this technology and improve the viewing experience for all audiences.”
HDR10+ uses dynamic tone mapping to optimize picture quality on a scene-by-scene basis for brightness, color saturation and contrast.
Last month, Amazon announced that it would begin offering its entire HDR streaming library in the HDR10+ format.