OPINION
Delivering high resoluঞon live television By Karl So, Caton Technology
Broadcasters in many parts of the world are now promoting 4k Ultra HD. They use it as a market advantage, a differentiator which audiences recognise and which boosts viewing figures and potentially revenue. In Japan and China, 8k Ultra HD is now on air. Receivers are readily available across the Far East, at price points equivalent to around US$5000. According to researchers Strategy Analytics, one million 8k televisions were sold globally in 2021. The forecasters predict that about 72 million households worldwide will have an 8k receiver in 2025, although to put this in context there are 1.7 billion homes with television in the world. Ultra HD – 4k and particularly 8k – is seen as a premium service, something that is reserved
62
for key content where it will make the most impact. Japanese broadcaster NHK produced 200 hours of 8k video during the Summer Olympics in Tokyo held in 2021, and a Chinese broadcaster went live with 8k for the Beijing Winter Olympics earlier this year. The FIFA World Cup, to be held in Qatar late in 2022, will be covered in 4k throughout, with some additional 8k shoots for key games. The BBC coverage of this year’s Glastonbury Music Festival was in 4k Ultra HD from the Pyramid Stage. All these and more are high profile, live events, where absolute security of delivery and superior quality is essential. The challenge for engineers is to get the signals from the venue to the rights-holding broadcasters, wherever they are.
With the best HEVC encoding available, contribution quality 4k demands a minimum of 50 Mb/s. Add in ancillary services and overheads and you need 60 – 70 Mb/s to be sure. A leased line with that capacity would probably cost around $100k to establish plus a hefty monthly rental. And you would probably want two geographically diverse routes for redundancy, doubling the cost. Satellite capacity, if available, is priced at around $1500 per megabit per month, so again in the $90 – 100k region. But satellite capacity is