BBC to publicly broadcast Commonwealth Games in 4K

Are they treating Ultra HD more seriously now?

by hodg100
The BBC’s turnaround on 4K continues with news that they are to become the first broadcaster to relay live Ultra HD action, via IP, at next month’s Commonwealth Games being held in Glasgow.
Having trialled 4K broadcasting during the ongoing World Cup, this is taking things a step further and will not be a totally behind closed doors event. Members of the public will be invited to a special viewing area being set up at the Glasgow Science Centre and the action will be shown on a pair of 65-inch 4K TVs.

We’ll take a guess that they might be from Sony as the action will be captured by their F55 4K cameras. The BBC has developed its own technology, called IP Studio, which uses specially configured PCs to convert the camera signal into an IP stream, live, using HEVC compression.

"IP will enable us to be more flexible with services we already produce, and longer term, to introduce new kinds of services," said Matthew Postgate, controller, BBC R&D. "We wanted to do this in 4K to prove the system is capable of working at the highest resolution and of simultaneously working at all lower resolutions. By the time 4K comes around we won't have to spend time doing the research all over again."
'IP Studio' converts a 4K camera signal into IP stream in real time
BBC to publicly broadcast Commonwealth Games in 4K

Fittingly, the first action to be shown will be the Opening Ceremony which will be followed up with footage from The Hydro, the Games' venue for gymnastics, netball, wrestling and boxing.

Some of the production is deliberately taking place in London to test the robustness of the system working in remote locations. The BBC has made special arrangements with Virgin Media to use their fibre optic cable which can reportedly operate at up to 100GB/s.

"Part of the experiment is about how the network can perform when handling such large bit rates in a live environment," explained Phil Tudor, principal engineer at BBC R&D. "[IP Studio] is not a complete system. It's very much research and designed to feed into the BBC's future broadcast strategy and the standardization efforts being made by the European Broadcasting Union and others. You need these sorts of live field trials to prove whether ideas work."

But don’t go thinking that this means that BBC 4K is just around the corner for the Licence Fee payer, as the organisation works to schedules many years hence.

"The horizon we work to is 20 years plus," said Postgate. "I think that reflects our desire to make sure all audiences have access to a service they expect of us. That said, our audience is increasingly less homogenous so we need to cater for them all."

Yes you most certainly do, Mr Postgate.
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