Certain lucky ones are already being able to follow the Olympics in 8K HDR.
We are facing the most decaffeinated Olympic Games in history, with less public following, with practically no fans in the stands and with a feeling that perhaps they should not have been held, but something that they are excelling is in technology, and in a 8K HDR streaming that certain fans in Japan are already enjoying.
For the first time, thanks to Intel, certain events of the Olympic Games are being broadcast in HDR video, at 8K and 60 fps, and certain Japanese fans with compatible television are already enjoying it.
Now the middle techhive have been able to attend some test of this new 8K HDR broadcast technology. They explain that the Japanese station NHK “captured 8K (7680×4320) multi-event images at 60fps and 10-bit HLG high dynamic range with 4: 2: 2 chroma subsampling using Sony F65 cameras. The raw data, which requires a bandwidth of 48 Gbps, was sent over fiber optics to the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS), where it was converted into a 4x12G SDI electrical signal.”.
Explain that the signal was encoded and compressed using “Spin Digital Enc Live V1.0 HEVC codec on a server with four Intel Xeon 8380H Scalable CPUs and a total of 112 cores running Ubuntu / Linux operating system. Other hardware included 384GB of RAM and 480GB of Optane 900P SSD. The HEVC output of the system included a 250 Mbps contribution signal and a 50 to 100 Mbps distribution signal, both with 4: 2: 0 subsampling.”.
Then the signal was uploaded to an open cloud service such as AWS from Amazon, Azure from Microsoft or Google Cloud.
This whole demonstration was followed from Los Angeles, and was captured by a “gigabit ethernet router that passed it to a Windows 10 PC via Wi-Fi 6E. That computer included an 18-core Xeon W-2295 CPU, as well as 64GB of RAM and a 1TB Intel SSD. Spin Digital Player V2.2.2 decoded the video in real time, which was then output to a 75-inch 8K TV via HDMI 2.1 from an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU.”.
Go ahead that the image was so sharp that he was even able to read the names on the athletes’ identification cards, even what he put on each of their tattoos, they could also appreciate the water droplets that splashed during the 50m freestyle swimming.
Not only the resolution, but also the HDR stands out where I could see each of the shots very brightly lit in the lower area of the stadium, and less lit in the upper part, being able to see the contrast perfectly.
But this is still too far to reach the consuming public. While it is true that certain consumers in Japan with 8K TV have already been able to appreciate these broadcasts, the rest of the world still has it somewhat far away.
Not only are there no streaming service providers that enable this access, but there are many households that don’t even have 4K resolution televisions, so 8K televisions are still far from the commercial norm.