Rai, Italy’s national public broadcaster, and Eutelsat are offering Italian TV homes coverage of seven games of the Euro 2016. The initiative with Eutelsat marks Rai’s most ambitious foray into Ultra HD that represents the next big leap forward in broadcasting.
Images of the matches are filmed by 14 Ultra HD cameras located by UEFA at the Vélodrome Stadium in Marseilles and sent to the International Broadcasting Centre (IBC) in Paris where they were forwarded to Eutelsat’s Paris-Rambouillet teleport.
A temporary studio set up by Rai at the teleport added live commentary, after which the special Rai 4k channel was encrypted and uplinked to Eutelsat’s HOTBIRD satellites. Tivùsat homes equipped with an Ultra HD screen and a CAM certified by Tivùsat were able to watch all the quarter finals. They will also be able to watch the semi-finals on 6 and 7 July and the final match on 10 July.
These live broadcasts of European Championship matches constitute Italy’s most significant broadcast of live sport in Ultra HD and prefigure the launch of regular channels. With the take-up of Ultra HD screens in Italy expected to hit one million units by end 2016, the market for higher resolution TV is rapidly taking shape.
The special broadcasts also involve the support of industry-leading technology partners, including DBW COMMUNICATION and V-Nova that is providing the P.Link 4K, a software-based contribution encoding and decoding system that can contribute the highest signal quality from the IBC.
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