In a joint initiative at bringing path-breaking technology to people’s living rooms, South Korean giant Samsung Electronics and Taiwanese semiconductor major MediaTek have launched the first 8K QLED TV, the first in the world.
While MediaTek is more popular for its Helio range system of chip (SoC) mobile processors, it has been collaborating with Samsung supplying its mobile chipsets to be fitted in the South Korean company’s smartphones. Here, the latest Wi-Fi 6 chipset has been fitted on the Samsung TV. Wi-Fi 6 is the latest standard, moving beyond Wi-Fi 5 and offers higher transmission throughput and making 8K video viewing easier and better. It is an entirely different matter that the volume of 8K video content itself is quite limited. It is only catching up now and Samsung and MediaTek might be wanting to be there when the market is ready to receive these 8K QLED TVs. Samsung will call the model, the Samsung 8K QLED Y20 TV (Q950, Q900).
It is definitely a huge step forward in television technology and others, particularly the Chinese big names like Xiaomi, TCL and OnePlus may not take long to come up with their own versions in the near future. The first mover advantage will definitely remain with Samsung (and MediaTek).
MediaTek already has a presence in the semiconductor market for wireless home networking and broadband. MediaTek’s Wi-Fi technology is used in hundreds of products around the world, including mobile devices, audio solutions, PCs, digital TVs, Blu-ray players, IPTV set-top boxes and web cams. The company boasts of over 1.5 billion connected devices a year with its semiconductor parts. These include multimedia products such as smartphones, tablets, digital televisions, 5G, Voice Assistant Devices (VAD) and wearables.