MediaKind wins NAB Technology Innovation Award with world’s first multi-channel 6K tiled 360 degree live stream

During a basketball match in Germany in December 2018, MediaKind managed, coordinated and processed the world’s first multi-channel 6K tiled 360 degree live stream and for that effort the company has won the prestigious NAB Technology Innovation Award.

MediaKind developed the 360 degree live encoding workflow incorporating Tiledmedia’s ClearVR viewport-adaptive streaming technology, all deployed in Google Cloud Platform. The solution delivered two live 6K 360 degree video streams from a basketball match to consumers.

The live streams of the basketball match between Telekom Baskets Bonn and EWE Baskets Oldenburg from the Telekom Dome in Bonn, Germany were delivered to customers of Deutsche Telekom’s commercial Magenta VR service via a consumer app. To enable cost effective processing and streaming of viewport-adaptive 360 video content live from sports events to a base of real-world consumers, MediaKind created a live encoding workflow using stateless microservices within a Google Cloud instance using the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

The 360 degree live encoding workflow combined MediaKind’s virtualised software encoding technology with Tiledmedia’s ClearVR streaming technology, which was then orchestrated and deployed in Google Cloud Platform. The devops approach to deployment and operation used MediaKind’s software-based probes to monitor every point of data traffic flow and cloud processing operation, create customisable and detailed operational dashboards using common cloud visualization tools, and orchestration to deploy, scale, and tear down the entire public-cloud based 360 degree live encoding workflow as needed.

Now in its tenth year, the NAB Technology Innovation Award, which was presented to Olie Baumann, senior technical specialist, MediaKind, recognises organisations that bring advanced technology exhibits and demonstrations of significant merit to NAB Show.

Angel Ruiz, CEO, MediaKind, said: “Winning the 2019 NAB Technology Innovation Award is an enormous honour and a wonderful way to mark our inaugural NAB Show as MediaKind. As consumers – especially sports fans – push for more ways to not only watch but experience their favourite live events, being ready to deliver the next generation of immersive experiences to multiple devices and in multiple formats is key. This award win confirms we are leading the way in the rapid evolution of 360 degree video technology and how, by pushing the potential of this technology, we are reshaping the way live sports and music events can be watched in the future.”

The delivery of this award-winning live stream offers a sample use case of MediaKind’s new commercially launched 360 degree video processing as a Service (360aaS) solution for live events, which forms part of the Cygnus family of solutions in the MediaKind Universe.

At MediaKind’s NAB Show booth (SU720), visitors can get a first-hand experience of this immersive technology. MediaKind is exhibiting pre-recorded content from the December 2018 proof of concept event to showcase this unique innovation and recreate many of the elements used in the multi-partner collaboration in which Deutsche Telekom commissioned the project, Magnum Film did the production, INVR.SPACE delivered the 360 cameras and stitching infrastructure and Tiledmedia provided the tiled streaming technology.

Rob Koenen, founder and CBO at Tiledmedia, noted: “We are proud to be part of the team that proved the feasibility of delivering beyond-4K immersive experiences on a massive scale. As the quality of headsets keeps increasing, as it must, the quality for consumers increases too, but so do the challenges of distributing the bits. ClearVR tiled streaming, integrated in MediaKind’s 360aaS platform, lets content owners distribute very high quality VR360 content over existing networks, today.”

This world’s first live 6K, tiled, 360 degree video delivery to end users was made possible by the collaboration of Deutsche Telekom, Magnum Film, INVR.SPACE, Tiledmedia and MediaKind. This has been further recognised by being shortlisted for best Project, collaboration or event, at The IABM’s 2019 BaM Awards. The winner of this award will be announced during the NAB Show.