July2013
www.tvbeurope.com
TVBEurope 17
Broadcast Case Study: The evolution of BSkyB
NOT SURPRISINGLY, similar ideas are being played around with at sister Sky group broadcaster BSkyB. Keen to put to rest suggestions that Sky had imminent Ultra HD launch plans, Chris Johns, chief engineer, Broadcast Strategy at BSkyB, nonetheless emphasised the need to ensure that when it does so, it is done right. “We’ve no plans to launch a UHD service at this point in time,” Johns stated. “It is still very early days. I have the L-plate on. With HD we went through a two-year test period. With 3D it was 18 months. We are still at that early phase so that when we are able to deliver a beyond HD viewing experience we can deliver a high quality one.” A chief contention is that in tests Sky has made of 4K capture at soccer matches, it has been unable to truly understand what is needed in terms of frame rate to overcome motion blur. “All the available 4K displays that we are using are 30Hz or less — when we need at the very least 50fps for sports and arguably higher,” he said. Johns referred to beyond
HD rather than Ultra HD, preferring to keep Sky’s delivery options open. Indeed over-the- air UHD transmission may be surpassed in terms of
timeframe by IP delivery to the home. “What is the best medium to deliver the future of TV? In less than eight years Sky has gone from SD to HD, small to big screen, linear to on-demand, 2D to 3D and basic compression to efficient codecs. “Something beyond HD might have no interlace, more resolution, finer pixels and these are all great. But what else is there? It has to deliver a new viewing experience. It has to be something consumers want to have.” Drawing on lessons learned
by Sky during its pioneering introduction of dedicated channels, HD, 3D and IP-delivered subscription services like Sky Now, this experience has to have range of content from the start, not just a couple of shows
certain sequences of certain programmes (general views in travel shows, for example). “We also need to think about audio and matching it to the visual, perhaps in terms of new object-based technology which manipulates the audio according to the environment you are sitting in. In addition, and very importantly, it needs to be cost effective from camera to compression. “If we are able to deliver it all in 2014 then great. But there are many elements to solve. The question for today is how far have we gone with some of those elements for the next generation of visual experience to the customer. “When you factor all of this in
— from dynamic range to frame rates — then you may have 20
Chris Johns: “We’ve no plans to launch a UHD service at this point in time”
Johns addressed the topic of editorial grammar, believing that this may require a change with UHD, just as the introduction of HD did by providing a wider, higher angle for covering sports events. “You could have fixed
“Everyone is trying to understand what works and what doesn’t work in UHD — before anyone makes any sort of commitment to any kind of services at all”
a week. “It has to have improved motion portrayal and it has to have dynamic range,” he said. “You are missing an evolutionary technical step if you don’t deliver that treat to the eyeballs. More colour is nice to have but will only enhance the experience of
times today’s bandwidth, so how do we cope? HEVC may be the transmission format and to mobile devices but what will we use in-plant? Do we produce in the rawest baseband form or use a form of compression in our production environment?”
“This camera viewpoint Chris Johns, BSkyB
cameras covering the full width of a football pitch and pan-and- scan within the frame which would eliminate motion blur because it moves with, not across, the pixels — though you would lose resolution (going from 4K to HD).
would also allow a viewer to move their eyes around that screen. But storytelling is still very important. You could have the fixed camera view and a smaller one on the same screen real estate telling the story as the director intends.” He also touched on the impact of UHD on 3D, where, with much higher resolution for passive glasses viewing (effectively doubling the number of vertical lines to full 1,000 lines per eye), UHD may actually be a helping hand for 3D. “The utopia is glasses-free 3D,” he said. “Again UHD can lend itself to that because of the increasing number of fields of view that 4K and 8K screens can display.” — Adrian Pennington
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