Envivio 4K compression technology selected for landmark French Open broadcasts
Envivio has announced that its 4K Ultra HD compression technology is being used used by French broadcaster TDF for live streaming of the French Open 2014 tennis championship to compatible 4K TV sets in France. The deployment is said to represent the world’s first DTT broadcast video transmission delivered in 4K, using HEVC (H.265) compression.
Coverage of various matches from the Centre Court will be broadcast by TDF in DVB-T2 format to TNT, the national DTT service, and will be viewable on compatible Panasonic 4K TVs as well as other compatible 4K television sets. This will include TV sets at the RG Lab on France Televisions’ booth as well as at French Tennis Federation’s facilities on the Champs de Mars near to the Eiffel Tower transmission facility. The 4K video being distributed is encoded at 50 frames per second using Envivio Muse Ultra HD encoding software on Envivio G5 appliances.
“Envivio has provided an outstanding contribution for the debut of live 4K HEVC video transmissions over a DTT network at the French Open tournament,” said Alain Komly, deputy director at TDF. “The sharpness and rich quality of the video is absolutely stunning, and we are excited to present this emerging technology for the first time in France.”
“The French Open is one of the most prestigious sporting events in the world, and we are extremely pleased to provide the compression technology for this world-first, over-the-air broadcast in 4K Ultra HD, in partnership with TDF and TNT,” said Julien Signès, Envivio’s president and CEO. “Our Muse video processing software has been fine-tuned for 4K to provide the best video quality possible, while leveraging the efficiency of HEVC to optimize bandwidth efficiency.”
Envivio Muse Ultra HD can encode up to 4K video resolution (four times HD resolution) in up to 60 frames per second, offers a larger colour range with the new BT 2020 standard and can be encoded in eight or 10 bits. Envivio Muse software is designed to support both live and on-demand 4K compression in HEVC format. The HEVC standard reduces bandwidth consumption compared to MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) by 30 to 50 percent, improving the video experience and reducing cost of operations for both Ultra HD big-screen services and existing mobile or over-the-top TV services.