At the end of NAB 2024, Intel issued a press release that set out its plans to include an 8K livestreaming experience during this Summer’s Paris Olympics. Intel said:
“Paris 2024 will be the first edition of the Olympics to utilize Intel Xeon processors to showcase an end-to-end 8K livestreaming experience, providing a visible pathway for the future of low-latency, 8K resolution livestreaming over the internet. Broadcast servers powered by the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel® Deep Learning Boost technology will encode and compress the live signal produced by Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) at 8K/60FPS/HDR “More/Faster/Better Pixels” (48 Gbps RAW to 40-60 Mbps distribution using VVC standard) in milliseconds. An 8K over-the-top (OTT) signal will be delivered to the latest Intel-based PCs and laptops connected to 8K TV to selected locations worldwide in just seconds. This will pave the way for viewers around the world to enjoy future Olympic action through a high-resolution livestreaming experience with the highest broadcast-grade quality”.
This is not a new initiative for Intel, which has been developing its technology to support 8K for sport and the Olympics in particular for some time. We thought it would be useful to look back at how the firm has got to today. It shows the long term thinking and patience needed to develop such leading edge technology.
Intel Research’s Ravindra “Ravi” Velhal on the 8KA panel at NAB 2024
Intel Research’s Ravindra “Ravi” Velhal has been a key part of many of these initiatives and especially the development of 8K video for live sports. He was at NAB this year and spent some time on the 8K Association booth passionately describing the tremendous impact of 8K. 8K really conveys the feeling of ‘being there’ when live 8K with HDR and high frame rates is being used on the latest generations of TV sets. He also took part in the 8K Association panel session on the impact of 8K in content production. Velhal has been involved with the Intel initiatives since 2008.
First 8K Olympic Games
The first 8K content captured at an Olympic Games was in 2012 when NHK of Japan captured parts of the London Olympics. NHK was the main driver of 8K in its early days as it aimed to develop its Super Hi-vision 8K (with immersive audio) technology with a development path leading up to the 2020 Olympics. However, the signal was only delivered by traditional satellite broadcasting and was only viewable in Japan. NHK uses satellite broadcasting for 8K in its home country.
In 2016, NHK repeated the experiment with 8K and captured 130 hours of 8K content from the Rio Olympic Games, but again viewing was restricted to just the host country. The content was shown in five centres in Japan to limited audiences. It was also shown in the host nation, Brazil. A breakthrough moment for Velhal came as he walked into Globo-NHK’s 8K theater inside the Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow) in Rio De Janerio, where an Olympic event was being shown in 8K.
“I walked straight up to the screen. It looked so real and with stunning details. I could see every blade of grass in the entire stadium and count the dew on it. Seeing is believing. That’s when I thought that we have to get behind this and start processing and even advancing 8K further for driving its adoption globally.”
8K Comes to Europe
In 2018, with some support from Sharp, France Télévisions captured some of the Roland Garros tennis tournament in 8K. In December of that year, NHK started public broadcasting of 8K in Japan by satellite.
Earlier in 2018 at its Industry Day in Luxembourg, SES had demonstrated satellite transmission of 8K using the DVB-S2X standard. The transmission was carried out on a single 36 MHz transponder on Astra3B. The video was encoded in HEVC and transmitted at a rate of 80Mbps.
Tokyo 2020 Sees a Boost in 8K
Tokyo 2020, delayed until 2021 because of Covid, saw a big ramp-up in the amount of content that was captured and a big boost in the involvement by Intel. A key breakthrough was in encoding the content and then streaming it over the open public internet to viewing sites in 8K with 60fps and HDR. The effects of Covid and the rules in place made capturing the content (more than 4.7 Petabytes!) a real challenge. However, over 216 hours over 19 straight days was captured.
Content was encoded using a 112-core Intel Scalable Xeon-server based encoder. This resulted in the creation of 17 TB of compressed broadcast-grade content that streamed for 419 hours (Live plus 24×7 replay) across several 8K installations in four continents. The streams generated 87 TB of aggregated internet traffic in an advanced 8K ecosystem powered by Intel.
“We learned a lot over the years and from our December field test,” Velhal said. “We learned that we really needed three things to achieve the gold standard of live sports streaming: 8K, 10 bit HDR, 60 frames per second live uncompressed signal (with multi-channel 22.2, 5.1 and 2 ch stereo for audio immersion), and to achieve the scale of delivery we needed to change our uploads to HLS as Xeon CPUs provided all the processing power necessary to process 8K live stream in real-time with low latency.”
At NAB this year, visitors to the 8K Association booth were able to review some of the Tokyo Olympics content being displayed, but now being encoded using Perceptual and Content-aware encoding provided by Spin Digital. Despite the very high visual quality, the bit rates of the demonstration were capped at 60 Mbps, with an average of between 20 Mbps and 30 Mbps, making the content realistically viewable for many consumers with broadband of 250 Mbps or more. Despite the very efficient encoding, the whole live encoding process can be done in around 2 seconds using a single Intel Xeon processor (although there are a lot of cores needed!).
As we went to press, we were eagerly awaiting a chance to see the planned showings of content from the Paris Olympics. Watch the 8K Association website and social media for updates!
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