 Thank you, Brad. Welcome here. Thanks for taking time out early in CES to come here and update about the HDMI world NITO system. So we're here today to talk about the RODE AK and some very other very interesting features that have recently come out with the HDMI 2.1 specification, which was just released in December so it's very brand new. But first I'd like to give our annual update of the marketplace and the doctor base and what's going on out there in the world of HDMI. So HDMI has been a very successful audio-video interface standard. To date, we have over 7 billion devices have been shipped since HDMI 1 first came out around 2002. So it's taken an industry to do this but it has been very successful, widely utilized and consumers around the world know what this brand stands for. It knows that this is the cable, this is the connectivity I look for when I go out by a TV or a PC or a setup box. Last year, over 900 million devices shipped so we're rapidly approaching the billion unit a year market. That is huge. And also, there's 1,800 companies around the world designing and building HDMI products. This ranges from intellectual property that goes into chips, chips that integrate HDMI of all flavors, subsystems and full systems such as Blu-ray players, TVs and even new categories that we'll talk about here in a minute. And you can see the origins of HDMI go back to the days of the CE industry. How do you connect at that time a DVD player to a TV or a setup box to a TV using a digital interface? But because it's been so widely adopted across displays that it has now moved into other type of categories that nobody would have imagined 10 or 15 years ago. So now we're seeing it into karaoke players. We're seeing it in healthcare products. We're also seeing it in wearables, AR, VR and also automotive. And this just shows the predictions from my HS about how the HDMI market continues to grow. And pretty soon here we'll be reaching the over a billion served per year in the products shipped that have HDMI integrated into it. And a few years back, I remember when HDMI 2 came out and people were talking about 4K. Well, those TVs are beautiful, but they're so expensive. Well, in a few short years, those prices have come rapidly down and the penetration rate and the shipment rates have grown dramatically. And so now, at least in the U.S., it's very difficult to go find non 4K TVs. Pretty much you go into a Best Buy or Walmart and its 4K is featured everywhere. And the prices have come down so much, it's pretty much what a consumer will walk out of the store to put under the Christmas tree. And as you can see here, the forecast is by 2020, in two more years, 50% of the TV ship worldwide will be 4K. So what's next? One of the things you're going to see at the show here is the announcement of 8K commercial, the available 8K TVs. The past few years you've seen a lot of demos from multiple brands which offer 8K prowess, but they were not announced for product availability, shipping, pricing. This year you're actually going to see some commercial products. And HDMI is an important interface to enable source devices to connect 8K to them. And then the question I always get asked is, what about the content? You know, great, I have this super high resolution TV, but can I use it? Can I see anything on it? And we heard the same thing with 4K, but now 4K content is ubiquitous. I can get it from multiple sources and it looks fantastic on my TV. And 8K is being driven right now by a couple of upcoming Olympics, the Japan Olympics in Tokyo in 2020, but also in China they've announced the Beijing Olympics will also be broadcast in 8K as well in 2022. So resolution is easy to talk about, it's a number, people get it. 4K is better than the 1080p, 8K is better than 4K. But there's a lot of other interesting and very useful features that can be applied to today's products using HDMI. And as we see virtual reality, augmented reality, they're one of the drivers behind higher frame rates, higher resolutions. When you put a display right next to your eye, you can start to see the pixels. And so there's a strong desire to go to 4K displays per eye, 120 frames per second, so I get 60 seconds refresh rate per eye. One of the drivers that HDMI 2.1 can be useful for. We also see the drone cameras, those are driving to higher resolutions, and drones being commercially deployed into all sorts of uses out there, agriculture, filming, surveying, real estate, and those too have a desire to move to higher resolutions. We also see new categories like automotive who want to connect to various devices that are using HDMI. And we also want to have an improved experience with our displays at home, such as having smoother, faster, no lag, no latency, and blackout-free switching, when you switch between sources, when you switch amongst content types or even content resolutions or frame rates, you don't want that screen to go black, you don't want to see tearing, you just want to have an instant smooth experience. And we're also going to see and hear a lot about dynamic HDR at the CDS. That's really one of the standout technologies that consumers can really grasp and see. You see that with your eyes, you see these high dynamic range, really pops the image off the screen. Prior, HDMI supported was called static, and we'll talk a little bit about that. Now dynamic makes it even better on a scene-by-scene, frame-by-frame basis. And also improving the audio experience through surround sound systems and also sound bars and sound bases by bringing out the enhanced audio return channel or EARC. So let me turn it over to Robert, the president of the forum here. He will talk about the HDMI forum, and that's the entity as Brad mentioned behind the HDMI 2.1 specification. Robert. Thank you, Rob. I'm here to speak a little bit about the HDMI forum. The HDMI forum has the mission to support and develop future versions of the HDMI specification. And we also support the ecosystem, which is of many interoperable HDMI devices. We also foster broad industry participation in the development of the future specifications. And the HDMI forum milestones are listed here. October 25, 2011 is when the HDMI forum incorporated was established. September 4, 2013 was when HDMI 2.0 specification was released. April 8th of 2015, we released version 2.0a. And then on March 9th of 2016, we released version 2.0b. And as many of you know, last year on November 28th of 2017, we released the 2.1 version. The organization brings together the world's leading companies, including manufacturers and consumer electronic devices, personal computers, mobile devices and cables, components and syllables. And I'll reiterate that. The membership of the forum does consist of a wide variety of companies from all parts of the CE industry and IT industry. The movie studios and content provider, service providers, test labs and test equipment manufacturers are also involved in the HDMI forum. And last year, the forum has gone from 83 to 92 members. And just so everybody has historical perspective, in October of 2011, the forum started with about 40 members. So we've had a great increase in membership over the years. Here's an eye chart for you. It lists a number of the members who are part of the HDMI forum. I'll give you time to take pictures. It's in the press kit too. Yes, it's also in the press kit. And without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and move forward. The HDMI forum membership is open to any interested company wishing to become a member. Companies are encouraged to apply and to help shape the future of HDMI technology. And the benefits of participation is with the HDMI specification itself. And to gain insight into the future of the HDMI technology. And members are eligible to join the technical working group, the marketing working group and be elected to the board of directors. With that, my portion of the presentation is completed. I'll turn it over to Robert. Hey, thank you Robert. And he'll be available after the press conference to take questions about the forum. So now I have the honor and the pleasure of talking to you about HDMI 2.1. As Robert pointed out, the 90 companies that are four members, they're the world-class experts in audio, video connectivity and products and technologies, release the 2.1 specification in November. And now that the specification has been released, we can talk more details about it. And we'll do so here today. We'll just be mostly high level, but we will have a Q&A afterwards. So please ask us your questions then. And then we're available at the booth throughout the show to come by to see demos and also to talk more about the details of the product and the specs. So first we'll start out with the higher resolutions and the faster refresh rates. So the title is 8K. You know, yeah, there's a lot of attention from people. As the industry jumped from 1080p to 4K, now it's making the transition and leap into 8K. So you see some beautiful screens demonstrated out there. And as we move to this higher resolution, which is about four times the resolution of 4K or Ultra HD. So in addition to the specs supporting 8K, it also supports all the way up to 10K. And it also supports 5K. So those are the ultra wide formats out there that will be used by display devices, both traditional TVs but also in the monitor space as well where very wide screen displays are very useful for a variety of applications. We're also going to see faster refresh rates. In fact, here at the show, you're going to start seeing TVs that are 4K 120. And so back in the 1080p era, there was a race and push for, you used to see refresh rates at 120 frames or even 240 frames per second. And those were mostly FRCs or frame rate up conversions in these displays. That took a 1080p 60 signal and used some processing algorithms to try to smooth out the motion. Well, now they're going to bring it through the interface to the source devices. And as we will see content out there take advantage of it for high motion, both in TV world as well as movie world, but especially sports sees that there could be a great advantage to going to these higher refresh rates. In addition, the wider color gamuts such as BT 2020 really helps to render colors that are more realistic in life. And these are, you'll see it with these content that embrace HDR. A lot of times people think these wider color gamuts are part of HDR. They're separate, but they tend to get bundled together to give you higher dynamic range, higher color range as well as bigger contrast ratios. And getting this to more bits of color gives you more resolution in the color space that gets rendered by these displays. And I talked a little earlier about dynamic HDR. I think this is one of the most exciting features. Really gives a strong visual difference that consumers can rapidly tell. Wow, this picture is just amazing and huge improvement over the display I own today. So back in the 1080p era again we had SDR and then recently with the HDMI 2.0 spec A, static HDR was brought to HDR10 and now we're moving to the dynamic HDR era. And so this really gives an improved picture quality. And at the end of the day that's what consumers look for. When they look for reasons to upgrade their TV or display, they want to see a noticeable picture quality improvement. And this dynamic HDR is going to be one of those capabilities that should drive consumers to look for new displays. And as we move from static HDR which took an average of the whole piece of content and applied it, that gave a good improvement in picture quality. But dynamic now allows you to go scene by scene or even in some cases frame by frame and apply specific metadata to that particular scene or image. And I'm going to flip these slides back and forth. So as you can see here on the static HDR the bright scenes are a little muted and the dark scenes you lose some of that sky and background. So you get a lot more detail that pops out. And across the show floor you'll see a lot of dynamic HDR demonstrations out there. There's a number of technologies of dynamic HDR. HDMI is agnostic. It can carry any of those that are out there. What HDMI has done is defined how the metadata gets carried in the signaling where it gets carried. So the source can signal to the sync going to dynamic HDR of certain flavor. And the sync will know where to find that data and how to extract it and how to process it. And to get to this high performance a new cable has been defined called the ultra high speed HDMI cable. And so the features that rely on the enhanced high bandwidth will need this new cable. And so if you're going to 8K, going to 10K, 4K 120 this new cable is required to carry those high performance features. In addition there are improved specifications and there will be improved testing for EMI. So as we go to these very high speeds there's a potential for interference with the wireless radios that are built into these products. Whether it's a TV that has Wi-Fi in it or a smartphone that has multiple types of radios. And so the objective there is to ensure this cable does not act like an antenna and transmit EMI to interfere with these radios. And we're jumping up significantly in bandwidth. The 2.0 spec was 18 gigabits and now we're jumping up to 48. So huge increase in bandwidth. And so therefore we've identified in the 2.1 spec the ultra high speed HDMI cable. And that is also this cable is fully backwards compatible so that if you plug in this cable into your existing 1080p or 4K it'll work. The advanced audio return channel otherwise known as ERP. So this is a very exciting feature. A lot of times people focus on the visual aspects. What's the resolution? What's the frame rate? What's the color depth? But audio is just as important especially if you want a home theater experience. And so the industry continues to embrace surround sound audio systems using AVRs. But now that the TVs have become thinner, speakers, hard for people to hear, the audio is not as clear as this, sound bars and sound bases have become a very important accessory for home theaters. And now EARC just expands the audio capabilities over the back channel of HDMI. And so current, the prior version of ARC was based upon speed F which was mainly based upon the stereo and 5.1 surround sound. But now with more channels up to 32 channels, the high bit rate audios and the object audios coming from the usual sources, there was a lap over the HDMI cable to carry that. But no more. This feature will enable a stream something over the cloud to your TV that has the latest and greatest audio. And over the HDMI cable you're able to send that to your sound bar or AVR for processing. And this is this and Dynamic HDR and some of these other features are independent of the ultra high speed cable and bandwidth. So some of these features can be applied to products that are using the existing 8 gig bit performance. And the next few features are based on this enhanced refresh rate. There's a number of different ones that we'll go through here. And so it's both the goal behind this feature, these set of features are to ensure an enhanced, an added level of smooth and seamless motion in transition as you go from gaming to movies to video back and forth, different resolutions, different frame rates, different types of content. So the first is variable rate refresh. This is something we've already seen in some of the GPUs or game cards from the likes of NVIDIA and AMD. They have their proprietary version of this. This is now part of the HDMI standard. So this can be taken advantage of from the whole industry, which allows the source to change the refresh rate in real time. So traditionally video has been like 24 frames a second for movies, 30 or 60 frames a second for TV. And games had to adapt. That was the only way they were able to send video. Well, sometimes you want to send video faster, sometimes slower. And this allows the link to send it and change the refresh rate real time. So as soon as an image is rendered, the source can send it over HDMI to the sync and render that immediately. And so what are the benefits behind this? And if you've ever played some first-person shooter games, racing games, things that are very fast and interactive, you know, you want low latency, sometimes you'll see some screen tearing on there, frame stutter, skipping, and game interaction lag. So this is all aimed at reducing that, improving the gaming experience on devices connected using HDMI 2.1. So another offshoot is quick media switching. And so if you're ever, you know, connected to like your cable set dot box or today or media streaming box connected to cloud or satellite, when you change channels, you might go from a standard definition to high definition, or now you might go to high def to ultra high def. You might change frame rates from movie at 24 frames a second to a TV show that's 30 or 60 frames a second. Well, sometimes you see a black screen or some other sort of interruption, and it's not very smooth and seamless. And so this allows the devices to instantly change the refresh rate, eliminate that screen blackout, and provide a seamless transition. So, you know, half a second, a second, that's noticeable to consumers. So to remove that is a very valuable capability. And as you can see here, as you switch from a sports to a movie to a TV show, it'll help reduce the delay in any black screens you might see. So another feature is called quick frame transport, QFT. I got to love it when engineers get together and name things, but it'll be memorable. And so this allows a source to send a frame as soon as it is rendered. And so this enables it to get over to the sync, the display, who can render it as fast as possible and put it up on there. And this is really important for, once again, gaming, but also real-time interactive virtual reality. You want that image on the display as fast as possible. And for those who love karaoke, we had to throw that in there. You get the responsive karaoke. Auto low latency mode. And so here the focus was enabling a source to tell a display automatically going to low latency mode. And this is important for, once again, you know, gaming systems. Today our gaming systems are not just for games anymore. They're also media boxes. They're web surfing devices. So the user might be watching a TV show or movie being streamed from the cloud and then switches to a game. But rather than forcing the consumer to pick up the TV's remote control, go into settings, switching to a low latency mode for gaming, it'll happen automatically. So once again, putting intelligence in the system carried over the HDMI makes the experience that much better. That's much easier for the consumer. So that's HDMI 2.1. Very exciting. Come by the booth. We have demonstrations there. We can give you more details. So we'll give you an update on the premium HDMI certification program. So as I showed earlier, there's hundreds of millions of ultra high-speed or ultra HD 4K products in the marketplace today. And as we jump up into the 18 gigabit per second, we wanted to ensure there are quality cables that have been tested and certified on the marketplace. And that is the impetus between the HDMI premium cable certification program. So it does a few important tests. Tests for the enhanced speeds, the 18 gigabits. It also tests for EMI. Once again, we wanted to ensure it reduced the interference. The 2.1 spec takes these and raises the bar even further. There's a design guideline, authenticity and verification program, which includes this label there, an anti-counterfeit label. We also do product lifecycle checks and audits. So it's important for us that we go out and randomly sample cables in the marketplace and test those. We want to instill the confidence in the industry, the distributors, the brands, the retailers and consumers that if they're buying an HDMI premium certified cable, it's going to work. And so if we find issues, we go back to the manufacturers and we work with them to solve their manufacturing issues to ensure their products are in compliance at all times. And then we also have this app that you can scan to ensure that it's an authentic label and an authentic product. And this program has been out for a few years. It's been very successful. We'll see some of the participants and retailers and brands on the next slide here. And it's the only HDMI cable test program that is administered by HDMI LA. So that is the real seal of approval. It requires each length of cable to be tested, not just one sample for that product line. It has to be tested at an HDMI authorized test center, which is also, those are also audited and certified to ensure they do quality testing. We talked about auditing these cables on a regular basis. They're required to use these anti-counterfeit labels so consumers can identify easily these cables. And also this two level authentication app to help verify that the labels are not counterfeit. So here's some of the brands and retailers and participants. You can see here some big names such as Best Buy and Walmart have their house branded cables part of this. Media Market, Amazon, so wide range of retails. And you can see also in all these other brands specifically that many of them are focused on the pro market, the CDA marketplace, where the pro avian installers look for high quality cables to put into their installations. And another new development, it's a recent development, is the HDMI alt mode for the USB type C. So this brings together two of the most popular connectivity standards, USB, HDMI. And so a few years ago, type 8 USB IF and USB implementers for them developed the USB type C connector. And with it they wanted to enhance the capability of a small form factor connector to make it reversible, add more pins and develop what they call alternate mode. And this alternate mode allows other signaling such as HDMI to be carried over that connector. And so HDMI came out with a version to enable that to be carried over the type C. There are other alternate modes out there, you may have seen some of them along the way. Those all require adapters, dongles, docks to connect to HDMI. And at the end of the day that's the brand what consumers look for, they all know HDMI. They all want to connect whatever source device it is to an HDMI display. And this HDMI alt mode enables them to do that in a native manner. Using just a simple type C to HDMI cable. And the other big benefit are devices that implement the HDMI alt mode can use the HDMI brand. So they're able to go advertise to consumers that this product supports HDMI. And that's what consumers look for when they want to buy products that they want to connect to their TV or their monitor or their projector. So I'm going to wrap it up here and after I'm done we will open up the mic for Q&A. But first I want to invite everybody to come by the HDMI LA booth. We're in South Hall, booth 2542. And you will see demonstrations, multiple HDMI 2.1 demos. You'll see a variety of HDMI premium cables displayed there. And we'll also see the HDMI alt mode for USB type C. In addition we have a number of kiosks from HDMI adopters showing off a variety of HDMI enabled products. So please stop by and Brad mentioned if you want to set up appointment time we'll be more than happy to do that as well. So thank you. Thank you Rob. Appreciate that. So now we'll do some Q&A. We'll have everybody who's presented here and representing both the forum and HDMI available for questions. So just to recap the forum representatives, we've got Robert, the president, chairman, Chris Ascolino, and Rob is the CEO and the president of HDMI LA. And myself, Jeff Park, director of technology at HDMI LA. So open for questions. Sure. Can you update where you stand with regards to 2001 compliance testing? And the fact is you announced 2001, I think it's very similar to a year ago. You didn't even release a spec in 2019. Why did it take so long? So two questions I got there. One was compliance test. What's the status of that essentially? The status of the compliance test right now is actually the top priority of the HDMI forum to develop a complete compliance test, testing all elements of that. It is a very deep spec. There's a lot of new technology integrated into the spec. The text actually doubled in terms of total length. So it's a big spec. And there's a lot to test. And so what's going to happen is there's going to be a staged rollout of the compliance test. Major features will get rolled out. I don't know the order in just yet. But we're going to focus on them as these things become available. The compliance tests will be released for the major features that go down the pipe. The second question was why did it take so long? That's a good question. Well, we have 92 companies, all with differing opinions, working with a very complex technology. And the newer technologies, the ones that get us up to 48 megabits per second, the new cable, these are all very complex. And there were just a lot of fine details. And it's really important that we, you know, the forum felt it was very important that we ensure that we have a complete spec with, you know, the least amount of little hiccups in it as possible. And just being very detailed, very thorough. Well, why then did you announce last year at CDS that you extended release in second quarter? And can you give a timetable to the first phase of the rollout of the compliance test? Well, why was there such a big difference? It's because we got a lot more comments back than we were guesstimating. It's always a guess. You see, what's my spec like at the point of making an announcement? Because people want to know when you kind of come out with it. You say, well, I think we're going to get about this many comments that need to be resolved and technologies that need to be cleaned up. And then you get a bigger number. It takes longer time. So at the time we gave the estimate, that was our best estimate. As far as the compliance test goes, I'm expecting that we're going to start seeing something in Q2 of this year. All right. Just to add to that, thank you, Chris. Just as a whole, HMI in the past and as a philosophy, we know HMI is a big impact. You saw the market slides. We're approaching a billion products per year. So I expect we release every time with a huge impact. So when we release stuff, we want to make sure it does what it needs to do properly so that when manufacturers release products, it works as best possible. Any other questions? Yes. Well, HDMI 2.1 supports multiple dynamic HDR formats. HDR 10 plus, as far as I understand, does not require HDMI 2.1 dynamic HDR mechanisms. So it just depends. There's some high-tier implementations that are on the market that can work on existing HDMI platforms. Some of the newer ones, additional ones that may require HDMI 2.1 mechanisms to run dynamic HDR. So it just depends on the platform and the content. If I may, just to add a little more to that. So HDMI, our goal is to enable competition in the marketplace between all the various vendors who are developing product. And HDR 10 plus is one of the competing technologies. There are a number of others. And HDMI's role in this is not to pick the winner and the loser. It's to, as best we can, support those technologies that seem most likely to succeed in the marketplace. And then let the marketplace ultimately decide what is going to be the technology that gets used or technologies that get used. But the forum's position is not one where we try to pick winners and losers. The discussion is about optical fiber-based HDMI cable. Some manufacturers are saying that type of cable. But there are some comparability problems with that optical fiber or active HDMI cable. So I wanted to handle these optical-based HDMI cable specs in HDMI-specific cases. Can you repeat the question? Yeah, so the question was how are we going to handle some reported problems with the HDMI optical cables? Are we referring to 2.1 cables? The specs have not been released yet. So existing cables. So this is the last question just before I answer your question. We will be outside to take any additional questions right after I answer this question. Because we're out of time for this room, but we'll be right outside if you guys can grab us. Any of us here to answer any questions. So to your question, I'm not sure which problem you're referring to. But if there are existing cables that run off of the 1.4V specification, they're converter cables. So basically they take HDMI signal, convert it to some proprietary implementation of fiber signal, and convert it back. So what HDMI compliance testing does is test the HDMI portion. And if there's any issues with proprietary implementation, whether it be fiber, wireless, Ethernet, HTT, it doesn't really matter. That's with the outside scope of HDMI. But within the HDMI ecosystem, it doesn't matter the HDMI version number. HDMI comes in, HDMI goes out, that ecosystem is tested. And if there's any issues in between, that's really out of our scope. So, yes. Last one. Oh, we do? Yeah. One more. One more. Sorry, one more. So a question, what's the difference between premium HDMI cable and ultra high speed HDMI cable? So the premium cable program was launched soon after HDMI 2 was launched to support 18 gigabits per second cable compliance testing and additional program benefits such as anti-counterfeit and other auditing portions. So as some of you may not be familiar, but when HDMI 2 was released, there was no new cable spec part of that HDMI 2 specification. Because the specification was designed from the get go to use existing cables. So the existing cables that were compliant had the capacity to support 18 gigs. When the category 2 high speed cables were originally launched back in 1.4, it was designed for that cable to support 10.2 gigabits per second. But when HDMI 2 was developed by the forum, they designed around the existing cable to support the higher bandwidth. But to give the market and consumers more assurance, we created an additional layer on top to provide the certification program. Ultra high speed cables that were being launched with HDMI 2.1 goes much further. Now these cables are designed to go even beyond that. So it's 48 gigabits, even higher with compression. So it's a completely new spec definition. Now in the spec term, it's called category 3. So category 1, category 2, now category 3. So it's a completely different cable. And there will be some sort of certification program obviously for that as well. Just like anything else, HDMI always had compliance programs for everything. So that cable also has some sort of program. We don't have any details released today. But once we do, you'll have more information from us. Thank you very much. We'll be outside if you need anything else. Thank you.