Poland broadcasts its first football match in Dolby Atmos

Dolby Laboratories has announced that TVP, the Polish public broadcaster, has broadcast the first-ever Polish live football match in Dolby Atmos. It was delivered free-to-air to all Polish households with Dolby Atmos’ immersive sound encoded as Dolby Digital Plus.

TVP becomes the first national broadcaster worldwide to put on a Dolby Atmos live transmission for countrywide distribution which was made available free to everyone, without any limitation.

The transmission was made possible by a dedicated audio OB Van upgraded with a 5.1.4 monitoring system to produce immersive sound live. Embedded 10 Channel (5.1.4) Audio on HD-SDI Signal was contributed from Stadium to TVP Headquarter via Fibre Optical link, then encoded at TVP’s Woronicza headquarters using a Dolby Atmos encoder. Regarding standard 5.1 transmission, the immersive sound capture was done by changing only one microphone within the stadium and the 5.1 Surround Microphone was replaced by a 3D Capture Microphone.

The live Dolby Atmos broadcast was aired on TVP in Poland on 12 June and was a pre- World Cup friendly match between Poland and Lithuania. The results are said to have been phenomenal for the national broadcaster, with viewership during the match of 8.2 million people and an average viewing figure of 6.3 million. This gave TVP a market share of 46.5% during the live transmission.