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About MainConcept
The Paris Olympics are probably the most anticipated and biggest global sporting event in 2024. From a broadcast production perspective, alongside the Opening Ceremony, more than 1,000 cameras are capturing over 320 competition events in Paris, delivering an estimated 4,000 hours of live sports coverage.
Past the halfway point of these Games, MainConcept Codec technology have been well-represented by our large customer base whose hardware and software are helping to produce and deliver content to billions of viewers worldwide. However, we are also directly involved in the production, joining a live showcase from Brazilian media company Globo at their headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. The MainConcept Live Encoder – integrating exciting technologies from our partners V-Nova, Fraunhofer IIS and InterDigital – is being used to encode next generation broadcast TV 2.5 and TV 3.0 content in real-time.
A Technology Partnership That Drives Future Broadcast
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The Globo showcase for the Paris Olympics 2024 is the continuation of several joined projects that originally started with the FIFA World Cup in 2022. With our technology partners V-Nova, InterDigital and Fraunhofer IIS, MainConcept initiated a new chapter in next-generation TV broadcasting. Brazil is the first country deploying VVC/H.266, standardized by their SBTVD (Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital Terrestre) Forum as TV 3.0. In addition, until more devices are capable of processing TV 3.0, the Forum defined TV 2.5 as an intermediate standard, featuring AVC/H.264 as base and Advanced HDR by Technicolor® as an enhancement layer, which can deliver better picture quality to CE-devices in a backward compatible mode, as well as MPEG-H Audio for immersive and personalized sound.
Four software companies contributed the following technologies to the Globo TV 2.5 and TV 3.0 showcase. And the MainConcept Live Encoder with its AVC/H.264 and VVC/H.266 codec support, combines all technologies from our partners in a single flagship software:
- V-Nova: MPEG-5 Part 2 LCEVC
- InterDigital: Advanced HDR by Technicolor
- Fraunhofer IIS: MPEG-H Audio
Working across different countries, even continents and time zones was definitely a challenge, but the market experience and tireless commitment of those involved in getting the showcase up and running paved the way for a successful Paris Olympics live broadcast event. It helped the SBTVD Forum and Globo prove that the technologies behind TV 2.5 and TV 3.0 were the right choice for the next-generation TV standards in Brazil. To get a better understanding why this is the case, let’s take a closer look at the showcase setup.
A partial view of Globo's TV 3.0 control center for the Paris Olympics 2024 showcase. Source: Carlos Ribeiro via LinkedIn.
TV 3.0: Globo as a Vanguard of Next-Gen TV Broadcast
The major focus of Globo’s Paris Olympics 2024 showcase is TV 3.0, the first official TV broadcast standard based on the VVC/H.266 codec. The event is split into two paths: VVC Main 10, and VVC with LCEVC. The MainConcept Live Encoder is a major driver behind this whole showcase. It is the control center deploying all our partners’ technologies under one hood.
In the first setup, the Live Encoder receives an UHD (3840x2160) feed via SDI, encoding to VVC Main 10 Profile 3840x2160 progressive, 59.94 fps, BT.2020, HDR10. It also uses MPEG-H Audio (Baseline Profile). For OTA (Over The Air) and OTT (Over The Top) delivery, the content is packaged into MPEG-DASH or ROUTE DASH.
In the second showcase demo for TV 3.0, the MainConcept Live Encoder creates a VVC base together with an LCEVC enhancement layer. This scenario encodes the VVC base layer in 1920x1080p, and the LCEVC metadata in the SEI messages is able to upscale the video to be decoded as 3840x2160p. This results in significant bitrate savings requiring less bandwidth while providing larger resolution and amazing quality.
That reminds me, we haven’t talked about audio yet, a fascinating topic in TV 3.0! Fraunhofer IIS contributed the Next Generation Audio technology MPEG-H Audio to the Brazilian standard. Being object-based, it allows the creation of personalized immersive audio experiences. In production, the signal consists of 16 PCM audio channels. The last of them is a Control Track that carries all necessary metadata, such as channel layout, position of objects and loudness information to configure the encoder for delivering a proper MPEG-H Audio soundscape. This prompts all MPEG-H Audio enabled devices, like TV sets, set-top boxes or soundbars to play back a customizable sound experience. You can imagine that for sports events, object-based audio creates a completely new immersive experience. For example, you can focus the volume on the crowd in the stadium and lower the commentators’ talk to completely dive into the atmosphere and vice versa.
The TV 3.0 content is streamed to various CE-devices, like TV sets, corresponding receivers, mobile devices and connected TVs supporting both VVC/H.266, LCEVC and MPEG-H Audio playback. The showcase consists of various delivery methods from terrestrial broadcasting to any IP-based technology, such as WiFi and 5G, proving TV 3.0 and the VVC codec are ready for primetime. In fact, it will become reality in 2025 when it is scheduled to go on-air in Brazil. And this is also true for the enhancement codec LCEVC for video and personalized immersive MPEG-H Audio for sound.
The MainConcept Live Encoder combines the technologies from our partners and our industry-leading codec technology into a single solution to ensure real-time processing in stunning quality and performance for next-generation TV broadcast standards.
The Paris Olympics Showcase as a Signal for Global TV Broadcast
It also serves as an obvious statement by the SBTVD Forum to other continents and countries that VVC/H.266, MPEG-H Audio and LCEVC codecs are worth considering as next generation standard for TV transmission.
Notably, there are already ambitious efforts by ATSC 3.0 in the US, DVB in Europe and ARIB in Japan to investigate whether establishing VVC/H.266 as the future video codec will solve today’s eminent problems, like limited bandwidth conditions, high resolutions up to 8K, high frame rates, HDR, best quality, and last but not least, a custom audio experience. For broadcasters, ad tech features and possibilities are of significant importance because they need to foster existing and establish new revenue streams, VVC holds great potential in this area. In the end, commercials in OTA and OTT workflows are a major revenue driver. VVC/H.266 as a codec clearly has some ad tech related benefits compared to other codecs.
Recognizing the importance of this showcase, MainConcept integrates the technologies from V-Nova, Inter Digital and Fraunhofer IIS into a single live encoding solution that can be used for both contribution and distribution processing. Partnering with these renowned technology providers turns over a new leaf in the future of TV broadcast. The MainConcept Live Encoder is future-ready today, by combining predefined profiles for both TV 2.5 and TV 3.0 content creation in real-time with AVC/H.264 and VVC/H.266 plus LCEVC, Advanced HDR by Technicolor and MPEG-H Audio. The Live Encoder even goes beyond these codecs and formats by supporting HEVC/H.265 (for OTT use-cases), MPEG-2 (for legacy TV broadcast) as well as output formats like HLS, SRT, Zixi, RTMP, Transport Stream, etc. Download a free evaluation version here to get a glimpse of the Paris Olympics showcase yourself. This project and collaboration is a gold medal team effort of its own kind!
