NAB
The world is barely screened in HD, let alone 4K UHD, yet 8K
TV is so advanced as to be considered inevitable, leading some companies to
actively pursue live video production and distribution at 16K resolutions — by
2024.
https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/so-you-say-youre-planning-a-16k-live-stream/
Intel, along with Japanese broadcaster NHK and Brazilian
broadcaster GloboTV, just announced plans to experiment with multiple streams
of High Frame Rate High Dynamic Range 8K and even 16K at the Paris Olympics,
which is just three years away.
What’s more, this leap in resolution will be accomplished
over the open internet and not over satellite or cable as per traditional TV
broadcasts.
“We are way beyond proof of concept,” says Ravindra Velhal,
global content technology strategist and 8K lead at Intel, writing in an
Intel-sponsored article at VentureBeat. “Right now, we’re at the beginning
of another seven-year cycle for a new TV 8K format.”
Scaling 8K Over the Internet
The Olympics was first broadcast live in 8K in limited
fashion at the 2012 Olympic Games in London, led by NHK with input from the
BBC. Intel streamed matches of the 2018 FIFA World Cup in 8K over a dedicated
link. At the Tokyo Games earlier this year Intel, NHK and GloboTV broadcast 8K
at 60 frames-per-second with HDR (High Dynamic Range) to Brazil and Japan. It
was believed to be the first live, broadcast-quality transmission on an open IP
network cloud.
“The technical feasibility we’re showing now is using
agnostic cloud service provider, so that you can have millions of clients
consuming content in 8K globally,” said Velhal. “What we’re doing with OBS/NHK
is to show that we can take the 8K signal and scale it to a larger area, beyond
one city or country, over an open Internet cloud. That’s the big difference.”
If we’re to take Intel’s description of its achievement at
face value, then it is remarkable given the data it is processing and the ultra
low latency is claims for an 8K live sports experience.
According to Intel, the major innovation here are its
Scalable Xeon-based local encoding and delivery solutions. You need a lot of
them and Intel doesn’t go into cost, but the whole focus of its involvement is
to sell more chips.
The company isn’t not shy about explaining the workflow,
however. Content is captured at 8K 60fps HDR “in big, fat”
48-gigabit-per-second optical lines. That’s fed to Intel’s encoder server, from
where data is either distributed directly to consumers at 80-100 Mbps or
offered as a contribution feed at 250 Mbps to rights holders. The higher
quality is necessary for broadcaster’s to further manipulate the signal for its
own presentation.
According to Velhal, right now, the web service provider
cannot handle distribution of more than 100 Mbps. “Basically, we’re delivering
8K on the existing 4K infrastructure,” he says.
This comes back to Intel chips. If you want to process 50
Gbps data and compress it to 80-100 Mbps, you have to use 112 core-based Xeon
Servers. At the Tokyo Olympics, they used encoded servers equipped with four
Xeon 8380H processors. Going off this price chart, I think that works out
at 4 x $8000 x 112 = $3.584 million. Forgive me I’m wrong on that Intel. Seems
like a heck of an investment.
8K Data Crunching and Latency
Point is, 8K live streaming at scale can be done. Delivery
to the open Internet cloud is managed using standard repeat request protocols
like RTP and TLS or RTP and HLS. Intel says it solves the bottlenecks of an 8K
TV playback using single cable HDMI 2.1. The only non-Intel part used in the
Tokyo proof of concept was an Nvidia graphics card, which handles color
correction and outputting this to the HDMI 2.1 compliant TV. All the rest is
done by Intel CPU, both from the encoding side and the decoding side.
Impressively, the round trip latency from venue to screen of
the 50 Gbps input signal encoding to produce a 200-250 Mbps contribution and 80
Mbps distribution signals for OTT is 200-400 milliseconds.
“That’s a world record in itself, though we yet to get an
Emmy Award for it,” Velhal says.
He has however twice won Hollywood’s prestigious Lumiere
award, been twice projects were nominated for an Emmy, holds several patents,
and chairs the 8K Association, an advisor to film industry forums
worldwide.
He went on to explain how Intel divide the 8K screen into
multiple horizontal bands, each with a dedicated Intel Xeon core processor.
“That’s how we do a lot of metrics calculation, add, multiply, add, because
there’s huge amount of vector data or scalar data. Quality of service is
important for broadcasting industry standards, because we are doing a lot of
this parallelism here. That’s how we’re able to achieve 200-400 millisecond
latency from input to output.”
Noting that the pricing for 8K TVs is consistently falling,
along with the fact that YouTube has more than one million 8K videos available,
and that entire 8K workflow toolsets from capture to post-production “are
increasingly affordable,” Velhal says you don’t need to wait for your cable
carrier to start streaming their library in 8K.
Now, On To 16K
The breakthroughs in streaming 8K live are a continuum of
the “format momentum” that has led the industry to deliver digital TV, HD and
UHD. There are always those who will argue whether 8K resolutions are even
necessary or actually visible to viewers without a very large screen, and Intel
is keen to point out that its experiments combine 8K with HDR and HFR,
attributes that significantly upgrade the viewing experience.
On that note, Velhal says, “For the Paris 2024 Summer
Olympic Games, Intel technologies will continue to push pixel frontiers to even
live 16K, multiple 8K TV channels or 8K with 120 frames-per-second over 5G.
Technically, 16K is several times more than 8K 60fps data rate. When the next
platform comes we’ll continue to evolve and advance this technology and explore
new frontiers.
“The work we’re doing is the future of Olympic broadcasting,
the future of sports broadcasting, and the future of live entertainment
broadcasting. We are preparing the world for the democratization of 8K using
open Internet.”
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