HDMI 2.2 to be announced at CES 2025

As is often the case in December around this time, information about new audiovisual tech, products and services planned to be unveiled in January’s CES is slowly starting to emerge – but some expected announcements are more important than others. The HDMI Forum, for instance, has silently started sending out invitations to media outlets about an announcement it will be making on January 6th, one day before the Consumer Electronics Show officially kicks off in Las Vegas – and, although not mentioned by name, what’s expected to be unveiled is none other than HDMI 2.2.

According to the German outlet ComputerBase, the HDMI Licensing Administrator – which is overseeing the compliance of all HDMI devices with the specs the HDMI Forum is proposing – confirms the following:

The HDMI Forum will announce a new version of the HDMI specification. The new specification, featuring next-generation HDMI technology and higher bandwidth, will enable a variety of higher resolutions and refresh rates and will be supported with a new HDMI cable. New technologies are enabling higher quality options for content producers such as television, film and game studios now and in the future, while also enabling multiple distribution platforms.

If the next version of HDMI does enable higher display resolutions and/or higher refresh rates, then that new cable is obviously the easiest part in all of this: HDMI 2.2 will have to break through the current bandwidth barrier of HDMI 2.1 end-to-end in order to accomplish that. For that to happen, upgraded HDMI ports – plus new controlling chips for those ports – are needed. So what we’re inevitably talking about here are future HDMI 2.2-compliant devices of all kinds, from TVs and AV receivers to graphics cards and computer monitors.

What yours truly actually expects the HDMI Forum to do in January is just announce the proposed technical specifications for HDMI 2.2 – as it did for HDMI 2.1 back in November 2017 – setting a broad time frame manufacturers can take into account when planning the release of 2026 or 2027 hi-end products. Controlling chips for the new HDMI ports will have to be designed and tested first. Those will be made to work with upcoming chipsets that future Smart TVs, monitors, GPUs, receivers, media players etc. will rely on (and vice versa), so that manufacturers can eventually offer new products built around HDMI 2.2 as a whole.

All of that will take time. What yours truly is looking forward to find out in January – with greater interest than the expected increased bandwidth, for instance – is what new features HDMI 2.2 will be bringing to the table. HDMI 2.1 proved to be quite important in that regard: over the past few years it gradually offered consumers genuinely useful video or audio functionality we have come to take for granted – such as eARC, VRR, ALLM and QMS – as well as support for 4K/120 and 8K/60. Those two resolutions, even in compressed form, are practically necessary to a number of flagship and even mainstream TV models nowadays.

New features aside, HDMI connectivity could use a spec boost after seven years of agonizingly slow improvements and questionable implementations that caused a lot of confusion to consumers. In terms of speed, DisplayPort 2.1 offers data bandwidth of up to 80 Gbps while Thunderbolt 5 displays could – in theory – support data transfers of up to 120 Gbps in certain implementations. It would be nice to see HDMI 2.2 get closer to what those standards offer when it comes to raw audiovisual data bandwidth, especially if it takes another seven years for the next version of HDMI connectivity to appear.

To be fair, many HDMI 2.1 devices still don’t make full use of 40 Gbps of data bandwidth, let alone 48, but that’s no excuse: the next version of HDMI should strive to meet consumer needs that 3-5 years down the line. Last but not least: everyone expects HDMI 2.2 to be backwards compatible with HDMI 2.1 when it is officially announced, but here’s hope that – this time around – the HDMI Forum and the HDMI Licensing Administrator clearly define what it actually means for a device to be labeled as HDMI 2.2-compliant. It’s not too much to ask, is it?