French TV channel TF1 and Viaccess-Orca have jointly announced what they claim is the first broadcast of a live-streamed football match in 360-degree “Ultra HD” video and encoded in HEVC. While a broadcast to a private audience in three remote locations isn’t as impressive as, say, a national audience, it does sound like an impressive demo.
The France-Russia football match is going to be shown off at NAB and TV Connect – for viewers willing to strap on the required VR headset in order to watch it. Although the official announcement makes no mention of it, the viewing device used is almost certainly a smartphone, and not the more powerful tethered VR headsets. We are also waiting on Viaccess-Orca to clarify what it means by UHD, as that spec has a specific resolution, which isn’t really used in VR viewing, as its perspective is very different to traditional screen form factors.
Combined, the demonstration used Harmonic for the video encoding and compression, Keepxio for its OTT streaming expertise, VideoStitch’s 360-degree video editing tools, AmpVisual TV’s live event production process, and Digital Immersion for filming and post-production. Viaccess-Orca says it managed the entire thing, using its Virtual Arena product.
Virtual Arena uses VO’s Connected Sentinel Player for the secure playback, providing the content protection for the high-value video, and VO’s Voyage TV Everywhere as a Service (TVaaS) system, for the interactivity and analytics that accompany the video stream.
In the live environment, this will be the overlays that accompany the video stream, which at a base level will include the usual on-screen information found in sports broadcasts, but could be expanded to include advertising opportunities, additional information overlays, or user-engagement prompts to guide the viewer to where the action is in case they are distracted by a passing seagull or snacks vendor.
Replay or alternative angles would be a compelling addition to the stream, although the technology doesn’t yet exist that would allow the camera systems to be put onto players or match officials to provide their own POV of the action.
As it stands, stereoscopic cameras placed at key points around the stadium are used to capture every angle (within reason). The separate feeds are then stitched together to create a single video, which is then sent through the workflow and finally sent to the viewer.
The biggest challenge for VR be balancing the network load of this streamed image. Sending the entire 360-degree file to the viewer who will only be watching a portion of it at a time is wasteful, but any method that might introduce latency or motion-lurch into the experience risks creating an environment that a consumer can’t spend the full 90-minutes of a football match inside. Such a failure would be disastrous for repeat-revenue, and the word-of-mouth impact of that could prevent a service from ever taking off in the market.
“Viaccess-Orca and TF1 are ushering in a new era for sports entertainment. At the event, our audience experienced an actual stadium ambiance, feeling immersed in the game. This was made possible by our best-of-breed, end-to-end solution for streaming of 360ᵒ video. Pre-integrated with an ecosystem of technology partners and compatible with existing industry standards, our Virtual Arena offers a premium 360ᵒ TV experience, for the emerging VR environment”, said Alain Nochimowski, EVP of Innovation at Viaccess-Orca.
There are many technical questions to be put to the network engineers, mostly regarding the bandwidth that the system will need to operate. There’s no mention of whether the VR system requires a smartphone app and an adapter headset like Google’s Cardboard or Samsung’s Gear VR, or if this needs one of the much more powerful tethered option like the Oculus Rift or HTC’s Vive.
For the smartphone, the barrier to viewing for potential audiences is simply the cost of the app and the adapter. That could be anywhere from below $10 to nearer $100, depending on the quality of the headset the consumer opts for. But if this experience needs the more powerful VR headsets, this will be nothing but a niche viewing platform until the consumer hardware becomes cheap enough for mass adoption.
The current tethered headset required for rendering photorealistic, particle heavy, CG environments in a high enough resolution and quick enough framerate for non-nauseous VR are very expensive. The required gaming PC and VR headset is easily north of $1,000 currently, and it will take several years of improvements before that kind of graphics horsepower can be built into a smartphone.
But filmed video is an entirely different beast than the next-generation video games like EVE: Valkyrie. With clever editing and encoding, the stream can pull only the required video needed to render what the viewer is looking at. In such a nascent industry, there are all sort of tricks that can be used to reduce the bandwidth. Faultline has seen streams that render peripheral vision in lower quality than the content center-stage, as well as using analytics to determine what the majority of viewers look at in the stream, in order to prioritize server-side resources to deliver a better viewing experience.
However, live content won’t allow the content creators to use these tricks. It’s a much more dynamic environment, where viewers are able to look where they please. Of course, in something like a football match, you can guarantee that the majority of fans will be paying attention to where the ball is on the field.
NextVR, a company that produces VR content that Faultline has spoken to in the past, has said that it is able to use its in-house algorithms to livestream a 6K resolution video at 80fps at 8Mbps – a very manageable speed for smartphones on WiFi, and possible too over cellular in good network conditions. As VO and its partners appear to be playing this very close to their chests, it’s not clear whether this can scale out as a mass market offering with the increasing adoption of VR headsets.