- Globo’s non-commercial Olympic showcase is the first TV 3.0 live production system, and the project paves the way for a roll-out of TV 3.0 in Brazil during 2025.
- The showcase implemented MPEG-5 LCEVC to enhance the live video broadcast, in partnership with Hisense, MainConcept, Jiuzhou, Realtek, Amlogic, and Mirakulo, among others.
- This represents a proven use-case for optimized broadcast implementations of LCEVC, delivering the highest-quality live broadcasting system in the world.
V-Nova, a leading provider of video and data compression solutions, and Globo, the largest commercial TV network in Latin America and second largest in the world, have announced the successful delivery of a TV 3.0 showcase deployed on the 29th of July, during the Paris 2024 Olympics.
SBTVD Forum, a non-profit organization of private and public companies responsible for digital TV deployment recommendations in Brazil, plans to provide viewers with a next-generation system that integrates cutting-edge technology. TV 3.0 enables advanced viewing capabilities including the highest quality video, immersive audio, interactivity features, and personalized advertising insertion. Earlier this year, the Brazilian government announced commercial services availability by the 2026 World Cup. Globo is working with its ecosystem of vendors on the important milestones necessary to foster TV 3.0 technologies.
The TV 3.0 showcase consisted of a full live production infrastructure setup, taking the HD and UHD Olympics feeds and processing them with encoding and decoding devices, supporting the full TV 3.0 technology stack. In particular, the UHD video feed was encoded using MPEG-5 LCEVC-enhanced VVC at 10Mbps, well below the previous benchmark of 12 Mbps set by the SBTVD Forum tests. The event feeds were firstly encoded on a MainConcept encoder, then decoded on a broad selection of consumer devices, including set-top boxes running the full TV 3.0 stack including middleware developed by Mirakulo and TVs from Hisense, Jiuzhou, Realtek, and Amlogic.
V-Nova contributed its expertise as provider of the LCEVC SDK, which was integrated into both the commercial encoder and the consumer devices. LCEVC is a crucial component in enabling TV 3.0, addressing the challenges of providing the best-in-class video quality and capabilities required on limited bandwidths. LCEVC reduces both the cost and energy consumption of the transcoding process by up to 70%, and augments compression efficiency by up to 40%.
Carlos Cosme, Innovation Specialist, Globo commented: “Brazil is leading a digital terrestrial television (DTTV) transformation. During the hugely successful Olympic showcase, the VVC + LCEVC stream delivered live UHD 2160p at 10 Mbps, which is a significant achievement when compared to our current system, which uses 14 Mbps for HD. The improvement in image quality, along with resolution at lower bandwidth, exceeded the results previously published by SBTVD Forum and wowed the whole team. There is great confidence that TV 3.0 will integrate broadcasting into the digital economy.”
Guido Meardi, CEO, V-Nova, added: “The Globo TV 3.0 Olympic showcase is proof of MPEG-5 LCEVC’s reliability in live broadcasting and streaming environments. LCEVC has proven to be a fundamental component when delivering the highest quality broadcast with the lowest possible bandwidth, in the most demanding of all contexts, premium live sports delivery. We applaud Globo and the SBTVD Forum for this incredible achievement and remain committed to helping the deployment of TV 3.0 in the coming months, looking forward to its commercial roll-out in 2025.”