ATEME Powers the First Live 4K-UHD Broadcast in France

FRANSAT, the satellite TV bouquet of Eutelsat in France, broadcast the Vienna Opera ballet ‘Le Corsaire’ live in UHD on 2 April, in partnership with Arte channel. The show was available in France, across the rest of Europe, the Mediterranean region and Middle East through the satellite HOT BIRD. Hot Bird is a group of satellites operated by Eutelsat transmitting only digital radio and television channels.

In parallel, the satellite signal was transcoded by IRT using ATEME TITAN software encoding to power a fine-tuned UHD DASH OTT real-time delivery on Arte’s HbbTV portal for smart TVs. DASH packetization was supported by an Anevia NEA LIVE Advanced Origin server that directly fed the Akamai content delivery network around the world.

With the ATEME TITAN application, the content was encoded in UHD 50fps 10-bit using the HEVC codec. TITAN is a virtualized software-based encoder-transcoder, designed for cable, DTH and OTT. It supports HEVC, H.264 and MPEG-2 codecs, with resolutions from mobile devices to 4K-UHD. TITAN is a high density systemthat delivers high video quality at minimum bitrates. With its user interface, management system and extensive set of APIs, TITAN can integrate with nearly any broadcast or transmission environment.

Dr-Ing Rainer Schaefer, general manager of media services and platforms at IRT said. “Using pure software solutions running on COTS hardware - while also achieving excellent picture quality – gives us the flexibility and cost-effectiveness we need. On top of that, TITAN is a future-proof system, with a path to 4K-UHD HEVC, HDR and BT.2020 colour space, demonstrating its ability to evolve to suit future UHD formats.”   www.ateme.com