April 2: Watch Le Corsaire ballet LIVE in Ultra HD from the Vienna State Opera

[donaldk]

European Culture Channel ARTE and satellite operator SES will be broadcasting the Le Corsaire ballet live unencrypted in Ultra HD from the Vienna State Opera via the orbital position Astra 19.2 degrees East, this Saturday. The Ultra HD live broadcast will begin at 19:00 CET on 2 April.

The ballet will be broadcast free-to-air on UHD1 by Astra/HD+. The Ultra HD demo channel was launched jointly by HD+ and ASTRA in September 2015. The show can be received with Ultra HD screens equipped with HEVC decoders. SES Platform Services, a subsidiary of SES, will manage the live-encoding and satellite uplink.



"Broadcasting in Ultra HD is becoming increasingly relevant for broadcasters, and we are delighted that ARTE has approached us to broadcast the Le Corsaire Ballet live in Ultra HD," said Ferdinand Kayser, Chief Commercial Officer at SES. "The SES group is the ideal one-stop-shop for broadcasters when it comes to Ultra HD initiatives, because we can provide both premium satellite capacity and solutions such as a seamless end-to-end Ultra HD playout service."

"The high resolution of Ultra HD emphasises the visual quality of the ballet. The sets, the dancers' movements and their costumes look very vivid from every angle. With this pilot project, ARTE underlines its position as an innovative broadcaster, delivering programmes in the highest quality available to a wide audience," said Alain Le Diberder, Programme Director at ARTE.

[donaldk]

Astra 1L coverage area. For 4K I would personally move it up one dish size, these requirements seem a tad optimistic to me.

[donaldk]

It was not just SES and its UHD+ platform that aired the ARTE produced ballet “Le Corsaire” live from the Vienna Opera House, FRANSAT, Eutelsat’s TV platform for digital homes in France, also broadcasted it with Franco-German Culture channel Arte.



The live UHD broadcast is a first-time partnership between Eutelsat, its subsidiary FRANSAT and Arte, the French-German channel. FRANSAT viewers will be able to watch the entire performance live from 7pm on 2 April on Channel 444. The performance will also be shown simultaneously in the HOT BIRD 4K1 demo channel broadcast from Eutelsat’s HOT BIRD position that reaches viewers across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Launched in 2014 from the EUTELSAT 5 West A satellite, FRANSAT’s UHD channel is the first Ultra HD channel exclusively for the French market. The high quality images are encoded in HEVC at a rate of 50 frames per second with 10-bit colour depth, i.e. one billion colours. The channel is available to FRANSAT households equipped with a UHD television set with an integrated satellite tuner and a CAM CI+ module.

Fransat also offers a terrestrial replication service, that just upgraded all the 24 regional France 3 channels to HD. France's public broadcaster to upgrade all of France 3's regional channels to HD from 5 April. The 24 regional channels will be available for the two million homes receiving Fransat, Eutelsat's free-to-view TV platform for French homes.

FRANSAT’s dedicated channel offers a selection of programmes highlighting the enhanced quality of UHD. Travel, sport and culture are brought into focus with exotic images of Polynesia, technical feats of the Porsche 911R or iconic museums and their collections compiled by The Museum Channel. Channel 444 also offers live broadcasts of major events, including the opening of the Holy Door that marked the beginning of the Vatican’s Jubilee Year.

[donaldk]

ATEME announced today that FRANSAT, the satellite TV bouquet of Eutelsat in France, broadcast the Vienna Opera ballet "Le Corsaire" live in Ultra High Definition (UHD) on April 2, in partnership with Arte channel. And in cooperation with German public broadcaster's technology research institute IRT, also available worldwide, through the HbbTV Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV protocol.

The show was available in France, as well as the rest of Europe, Mediterranean region and Middle East through the satellite HOT BIRD, and Eutelsat W5. Though requiring a Fransat Conditional Access module and smartcard. In parallel the satellite signal was transcoded by IRT using TITAN 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 (CDN) worldwide.

The Opera was first compressed and uplinked from Vienna to an ASTRA satellite by SES Platform Services. Ateme handled the transcoding and retransmission to FRANSAT and IRT OTT.



Thanks to its TITAN solution, ATEME played a major role in this technological first, encoding the content in UHD 50fps 10bits using 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 solution that delivers the highest video quality at minimum bitrates. With its powerful user interface, management system and extensive set of APIs, TITAN can easily integrate with any ecosystem, reducing time-to-market and OPEX.

"IRT is always looking for innovative partners," said Dr.-Ing. Rainer Schaefer, general manager, media services and platforms, IRT. "Using pure software solutions running on COTS hardware — whilst also achieving excellent picture quality — provides the flexibility and cost-effectiveness we need. On top of that, TITAN is a future-proof solution, with a path to 4K-UHD HEVC, HDR and BT.2020 color space, demonstrating its ability to evolve to suit future UHD formats."

Emmanuel Boureau, VP sales at ATEME said: "ATEME is gaining momentum in UHD, as more and more tier 1 broadcasters and service providers deploy our TITAN solution all around the world. This new reference for ATEME demonstrates the company's technological leadership in its field."

[donaldk]

I am informed that the main transmission was via Eutelsat compressed by ATEME (from baseband). Retransmision (from IP) was done through Akamai/HbbTV by ATEME. A second transmission was managed via SES by compressed R&S ( also from baseband), Rohde & Schwarz is a/the licensee of the HEVC codec by Fraunhofer.