SVG Europe Sit-Down: MediaKind on taking VR in sport forward with live 360-degree video streams and beyond By Heather McLean, Editor
Thursday, August 1, 2019 - 15:48
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Basketball goes virtual with the Telekom Baskets Bonn
In a project commissioned by Deutsche Telekom, on 9 December 2018 a live 360-degree video stream of a basketball match between Telekom Baskets Bonn and EWE Baskets Oldenburg was delivered from the Telekom Dome in Bonn, Germany, to Deutsche Telekom's Magenta Virtual Reality (VR) consumer app at 6K resolution. We speak with Stuart Boorn, head of portfolio management at MediaKind, about how this industry world first was achieved.
What was the aim of this project in terms of benefit to Deutsche Telekom and its consumers?
Consumer demand for more personalised, immersive and interactive visual experiences is at an all-time high, and we can see this in the way the media and entertainment industry is responding.
The growing transition to 4K UHD, HDR and Wide Colour Gamut (WCG) all reflect a collective desire to enrich content and ultimately create viewing experiences that match being there' for live events. Deutsche Telekom wanted to test potential methods to enhance the quality of its existing 360-degree service. This project was designed to explore the possibility of efficiently delivering higher quality, immersive 360-degree video streams using existing technology within the critical 15MBps bandwidth parameter. The project was also designed to test its wider commercial viability by making the streams available to most users of Deutsche Telekom's Magenta VR service.
What were the challenges that this cutting edge project presented for you?
For a truly immersive experience, the resolution of the 360-degree image needs to be very large. Delivering these large images to consumer devices such as mobile phones and tablets presents two issues.
First was the bandwidth, an issue compounded by the fact that compression artefacts, which might be imperceptible on a TV screen, can often be clearly seen when viewed close-up on a tablet or head-mounted device (HMD).
The second issue concerned the devices we were aiming to target. To achieve widespread adoption, we needed to target consumer devices, phones and tablets, not the VR hardware most commonly associated with gaming. With the exception of the most recent arrivals these devices don't support the decoding of 8K images.
Both of these issues are solved by using so called viewport adaptive streaming. For our project with Deutsche Telekom, we used the viewport adaptive technology from TiledMedia which exploits the fact that whilst the source image needs to be very large, at any one time the viewer is looking at only 15% of the full 360-degree image. This means the remaining 85% is effectively redundant. It works by splitting the source image up into small tiles and encoding and packaging them separately. The client then chooses to download the tiles needed to fill the current view. This way, both the bandwidth and the decode capabilities of the device are maximised.
Of course, encoding such large images brings its own challenges. The tiled method helps here too though. By leveraging the elasticity of cloud platforms we can deploy many lightweight encoders to handle the individual tile encodes. This way we are scalable to any resolution which will surely be necessary as device resolutions increase.
Performing the encode in the cloud means that data has to get from the event site into the datacentre. Fortunately, reliable 1Gbps links from sports venues are now pretty common and this was less of an issue than anticipated.
What is the benefit of using 6K for VR viewing? Why not 4K? Why push this boundary?
The resolution of the source image is, to a large degree, determined by the end device resolution. At any one time the user is looking at around 15% of the full 360 view. If the user device has a screen resolution of HD then in order for the pixels of the source image to not be visible, the source image should be 8K x 4K or the equivalent of 16 HD broadcast videos. With a 4K source image the user's view is pixelated or blurry, which significantly detracts from the immersion. Currently, the limitation on the resolution lies in the camera quality and the power of the stitching servers. So for this event we compromised slightly and went for 6K x 3K.
What are the challenges within 360-degree video delivery specifically for sports broadcast, and what is holding it back right now?
The main challenge for delivering 360-degree video for sports is in meeting the quality requirements in a live workflow. From a technical point of view, the main limiting factors at this time are the availability of high quality 360-degree camera rigs and the capacity of the stitching servers to meet the resolution requirements in real time. That said, delivering a 6K or 8K 360-degree video service, either for a VR headset or mobile device is entirely feasible.
One limitation for 360-degree video for sports broadcasting is in the perception that it must be viewed on a head mounted display (HMD). Given live sports and music events are primarily social occasion watched alongside other people, you can understand the reluctance to don a headset.
For that reason, we see potential for 360-degree video delivered to tablets or phone screens on what we call a flat' app, which allows the user to choose the direction of view by swiping. It provides viewers with an opportunity to personalise their experience on their device whilst sharing in the main broadcast. For instance, this might involve selecting a certain camera angle or focusing on a particular area of the pitch or stage. At the same time, the viewer will still have access to follow the director's curated action on the main screen.
This is a technology
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SVG Europe Sit-Down: MediaKind on taking VR in sport forward with live 360-degree video streams and beyond By Heather McLean, Editor 
