Google, Apple, and NBCUniversal have introduced Eclipsa Video, a royalty-free HDR standard to fix mobile display washouts and challenge Dolby Vision.
Eclipsa Video is a new, open-source, royalty-free High Dynamic Range (HDR) video format and quality compliance programme. Officially announced by HDR10+ Technologies on 29 June 2026, it was developed by Google, Apple, and NBCUniversal to ensure consistent video quality across diverse consumer screens, serving as an open alternative to proprietary formats like Dolby Vision.
Based on the SMPTE ST 2094-50 standard, the compliance and certification programme is administered by HDR10+ Technologies LLC, an industrywide consortium of over 180 companies, including Samsung. To overcome cross-device hardware limitations and extreme ambient lighting fluctuations, Eclipsa Video introduces two specific dynamic metadata protocols:
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The Reference White Anchor: Maps the peak brightness of Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) content directly to the display’s reference point. This reserves the remaining hardware brightness capacity solely for HDR highlights, ensuring mixed-media feeds (like text and video on a single screen) do not wash out.
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Headroom-Adaptive Gain Curves: Embeds explicit framing instructions into the video file. If a display has limited brightness headroom, the metadata dictates how to compress shadows and mid-tones to protect bright highlights without losing fine detail.
The ecosystem initially targets smartphones—where variable ambient light often disrupts mobile HDR rendering—with expansion to TVs, laptops, and tablets to follow. Out-of-the-box system integration has already been added to Android 17 via Jetpack Media3 ExoPlayer and standard Camera2 pipelines, with the first certified consumer hardware expected to debut later in 2026
