Ultra HD Forum is an organization whose goal is to help solve the real world hurdles in deploying Ultra HD video and thus to help promote UHD deployment. The Ultra HD Forum will help navigate amongst the standards related to high dynamic range (HDR), high frame rate (HFR), next generation audio, and wide color gamut (WCG). The Ultra HD Forum is an industry organisation that is complementary to the UHD Alliance (that maintains consumer-facing logos), covering different aspects of the UHD ecosystem.
On July 21, 2015, the Ultra HD Forum announced that they had over 20 member companies after incorporating as a US-based non-profit a month earlier.
On April 18, 2016, the Ultra HD Forum announced industry guidelines for UHD Phase A content. The Ultra HD Forum also announced that it had increased to 46 member companies.
On January 5, 2017, the Ultra HD Forum announced that their guidelines had been updated to version 1.2 (including things like immersive audio, BT.2100, etc.) and that additional companies have joined which includes Google.
UHD Phase A covers broadcasting services to be launched by end of 2016 or early 2017. The guidelines for UHD Phase A are:
UHD Phase A consumer devices should be able to decode the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Main 10 profile Level 5.1 and process Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG10) or Perceptual Quantizer (PQ10)/HDR10 content using Rec. 2020 color space. The guidelines consider Rec. 2100 1080p content with wide color gamut (BT.2020) and high dynamic range as Ultra HD service.
The guidelines also document live and pre-recorded production, as well as the combination of HDR and SDR video content and conversion between BT.709 and BT.2020 color spaces and different HDR metadata formats. Broadcasters are advised to provide backward compatibility by using HLG10 with BT.2020 color space, or simulcasting PQ10 or HDR10 streams (for example, using Scalable HEVC).