ATEME powers first live 4K UHD broadcast in France
FRANSAT, the satellite TV bouquet of Eutelsat in France, broadcast the Vienna Opera ballet Le Corsaire live in Ultra High Definition (UHD) on April 2, in partnership with Arte channel. The show was available in France, as well as the rest of Europe, Mediterranean region and Middle East through the satellite HOT BIRD.
In parallel the satellite signal was transcoded by IRT using TITAN to power a fine-tuned UHD DASH OTT real-time delivery on Arte’s HbbTV portal for smart TVs. DASH packetisation was supported by an Anevia NEA LIVE Advanced Origin server that directly fed the Akamai content delivery network (CDN) worldwide.
Thanks to its TITAN solution, ATEME played a key role in this technological first, encoding the content in UHD 50fps 10bits using HEVC codec. TITAN is a virtualised software-based encoder-transcoder, designed for cable, DTH, and OTT. It supports HEVC, H.264 and MPEG-2 codecs, with resolutions from mobile devices to 4K-UHD.
“IRT is always looking for innovative partners,” said Dr.-Ing. Rainer Schaefer, general manager, media services and platforms, IRT. “Using pure software solutions running on COTS hardware — whilst also achieving excellent picture quality — provides the flexibility and cost-effectiveness we need. On top of that, TITAN is a future-proof solution, with a path to 4K-UHD HEVC, HDR and BT.2020 colour space, demonstrating its ability to evolve to suit future UHD formats.”
Emmanuel Boureau, VP sales at ATEME said: “ATEME is gaining momentum in UHD, as more and more tier 1 broadcasters and service providers deploy our TITAN solution all around the world. This new reference for ATEME demonstrates the company’s technological leadership in its field.”