OK, so you've bought a new plasma or LCD, it's cost you an arm and a leg, and you're waiting for Channel 4's hi-def transmissions to boost your viewing pleasure.

So far so good. But also be aware that there are some serious developments taking place in R&D labs around the world, all designed to make your new TV set obsolete.

Here comes Ultra HD

Those clever folk at Japan's public broadcaster NHK are leading the charge for 'Ultra HD'. This is a spectacular 4,000-line system (compared with HD's 720 or 1080 lines).

A few weeks ago the first step to creating a worldwide standard for Ultra HD was taken at a meeting in Paris - much like the work that was done 15 years ago on MPEG-2.

Peter Symes is director, standards and engineering, at the Society of Motion Picture Television Engineers ( SMPTE) and says a formal request from NHK to examine U-HD has been made. SMPTE has already distributed documents for pre-ballot review.

Symes says: 'They [NHK] are saying Ultra HD might be 20 years away. People thought they were just as crazy when they invented HD, in analogue, first shown in the US at our SMPTE Conference in 1981, 25 years ago last year. One very well-known pundit at the time said "HD television will be delivered to the home at the same time as the anti-gravity machine."

Future on satellite

Symes says that everyone knows this is not something for the next three or four years. And whatever developments are made in image compression over the next 10 to 15 years, it is also inevitable that Ultra-HD will need significant amounts of bandwidth per channel - great news for satellite.

The other good news to emerge from SMPTE is that HDTV - as we know it today - is far from done and dusted.

'What we are also exploring at SMPTE how the two now-established transmission standards, 1080i and 720p, might move forward. For example, many engineers looked at 1080p (in 50Hz or 60Hz) as something of a 'super production' standard, which would easily convert to 1080i or 720p and be a good archiving format.

Thoughts are now changing, asking whether it makes sense to move the standard from a production format to potentially much wider distribution. The EBU has done some excellent work in this area, which suggests 1080p could well be a transmission format as we move forward,' says Symes.