French video compression company Ateme bore the technology brunt behind the Super Bowl’s venture into virtual reality (VR) coverage this year – supplying its software-based Titan encoders to support the six UHD cameras capturing the event.
In partnership with sports-focused VR platform developer LiveLike and Fox’s Sports Lab initiative, each camera streamed the content via a Titan encoder, to deliver an interactive experience to users of the Fox Sports VR app, which replicated a VIP lounge inside the stadium in near real-time. VR fanatics were hopeful that the full game would be available for live streaming in VR, and consumers have voiced disappointment to be limited to just a handful of highlights.
Multi-format systems such as Titan can do any resolution from 4K down to mobile, for use with live, OTT, mezzanine file, VoD, post-production, playout and archive applications. But, unsurprisingly, the press release fails to address exactly how Ateme encodes VR content, and the company has yet to respond to our inquiries.
Elemental was probably the first to talk seriously about encoding VR in 2015, although Ateme was part of a project in 2014 with 360-degree video stitching company Kolor and mobile interaction firm Finwe, to develop VR technology for broadcast called LiveSphere, which was then inherited by GoPro when it acquired Kolor in 2015.
Harmonic then followed about a year after Elemental, partnering with Dutch research institute TNO using HEVC tiling technology where each screen’s worth of viewing is separated into 9 tiles and only one or two of them are delivered at full density. The rest take up whatever bandwidth is spare, so that your peripheral vision can follow what’s going on. If your eyes move to another part of the screen, in real time the HEVC level tiling is moved to where your eyes are pointed. It is, essentially a shortcut, until we all have 100 Mbps broadband lines, but it will look like a short cut and it will have significant latency as eyes swivel left and right.
Apart from this, gleaned from TNO’s website, no-one has managed to give out any detail on how their technology was getting around the difficulties of VR encoding. Now the same trend is true for Ateme.
While these competing encoding specialists make it difficult for us to shine any light on the special tricks they have up their sleeves, we can briefly summarize the challenges they have to overcome in order to deliver this type of content – which all begins because the data requirement for VR is roughly 9 times greater than that of a single screen. Then in order to deliver an immersive experience, you have to use screens that are 4K, 60 fps, with HDR and full color gamut – which all adds up to some rather hefty file sizes.
Customers such as Fox therefore employ the expertise of pure encoding firms to squeeze their VR content over the 50 Mbps that some broadband lines can currently offer today, by making the existing encoding smarter and more efficient in CPU and GPU power. But the reality is that video viewed as a VR stream is going to pan out at around 80 Mbps or 90 Mbps for the foreseeable future – leaving it limited to cable and G.fast broadband homes.
This time last year Faultline Online Reporter was talking about the emergence of VR as “the next promised land for pay TV,” and we have kicked off 2017 in similar fashion – discussing how VR has grown of age. As the technology develops further, particularly the supporting network technologies, we are certain that its momentum will continue at this impressive rate.
One thing is for certain, the technology has to be ready to live stream the next Super Bowl in full virtual reality, and perhaps even sooner for other sporting events in the coming year, or it may as well be deemed a failure and go the same way as 3D.
Fox said before the game that it would be showing up to 20 highlights of the best plays in 360-degree video, but it is unclear how many VR clips the network actually ended up screening to its viewers.
Fox Sports first tested the waters of 360-degree video on its Fox Sports VR app in September last year when Ohio State took on Oklahoma in a major non-conference college football match. This was also powered by LiveLike, but it was not made public if Ateme was involved.
LiveLike has also worked with British Telecom (BT) to investigate how VR and 360-degree video can sit alongside broadcast, such as showing 360-degree content on social media before a live sports match kicks off. The difference between VR and 360-degree video, otherwise known as “the magic window,” is that 360-degree video is consumed on a smartphone or tablet without a headset, which is ideal for short form content.
“We have worked very closely with Ateme for many years. The scalability and bandwidth efficiency of Titan Live and Titan File matches our VR broadcast specificities as well as our customer’s requirements. On top of that, they provide a pristine video quality, which is crucial to get the best user experience,” said Fabrice Lorenceau, founder and head of production at LiveLike.
Michel Artières, CEO of Ateme, said: “We’re proud to participate in VR development, and make VR streaming delivery become a reality. The challenge here was to lower the bitrate at its maximum to reach the wider possible audience, while maintaining high video quality.”
Also last year, France Télévisions served up live tennis matches in virtual reality (VR) at this year’s Roland Garros tournament in Paris, in partnership with the all-French line up of technology companies VideoStitch, Push-Pull TV, and FireKast.