Samsung recently announced that they had developed a new type of HDR technology in partnership with Amazon, called HDR10+, and now they’ve put out a release to provide additional insight into how the technology works and how they’re hoping to bring it to mass adoption. The highlight of Samsung’s explanation is that HDR10+ uses what’s called dynamic metadata, meaning that the picture’s color gradient, gamma, and other variables can be adjusted on a scene-by-scene or even frame-by-frame basis, in contrast to the static metadata for a whole piece of video that the currently popular HDR10 standard uses. This means that where an HDR10 TV would use the same profile for dark and light scenes, an HDR10+ TV could adapt to the scenery for more realistic color and lighting, as long as the content supported it.
HDR10+ and its use of dynamic metadata could be used as an attractive exclusive feature of Samsung TVs, but instead, Samsung has opted to open the standard without royalties, putting it on even ground price-wise with its predecessor. HDR10+ also boasts flexibility at a system level, meaning that it can be incorporated in various hardware and by various end users, from independent content creators to Hollywood producers. This, again, puts it on par with HDR10. Essentially, all of this means that content producers can adopt a standard that produces better results and offers more flexibility than HDR10 without any extra cost, or any extra work to implement it. While this doesn’t mean that the standard will be supported by all HDR-enabled hardware — especially products made by manufacturers who develop their own competing HDR standards — anyone who wants to implement HDR10+ in their hardware will easily be able to do so.
Right now, Samsung’s QLED lineup from 2017 is the only hardware that supports HDR10+, though their 2016 QLED TVs will be getting the capability via a firmware update in the future. With the standard now being open, however, it will likely start showing up in more hardware soon. Since neither Samsung nor Amazon make any money from the standard itself, they’ll have to pull their revenue from sales of Samsung hardware featuring the standard as a selling point, and sales and subscriptions on Amazon’s end, since they will be the first content provider to host content that supports the new TV standard.
