Live From Paris 2024: India's Viacom 18 All In on UHD, Delivering 20 UHD Streams Back Home

Live From Paris 2024: Indias Viacom 18 All In on UHD, Delivering 20 UHD Streams Back Home Siddharth Sharma, Head of Content and Production, says UHD effort builds on cricket coverage of Tata IPL By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director

Wednesday, August 7, 2024 - 4:55 am

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India's Viacom18 is all-in on UHD Paris 2024 coverage, delivering 20 UHD streams to consumers back in India on the JioCinema OTT app and 3 streams for TV in HD1080i, all with Dolby 5.1 immersive audio. That's a carryover from what we started with Cricket and the TATA IPL, says Siddharth Sharma, Head - Content & Production, Viacom18 Sports, of the UHD commitment. We've got the full UHD package coming in from OBS to our switching control room at IBC, and essentially we're creating our own little scheduling pattern and pushing out 20 streams back to India.

Viacom studios in Mumbai are using XR to help engage with India Olympic fans in a deeper way.

Sharma says Viacom 18 wants to make it the biggest and obviously the best Olympic experience ever shown to an Indian audience and all the innovations for the Olympic presentation are designed to keep the audience at the centre of it all.

Fans are leaning into an engaging experience as they cheer for Indian athletes, adds Sharma. The immersive coverage tipped off with a dedicated camera feed and correspondent on the India float throughout the Opening Ceremony giving viewers a ring-side view of the Indian contingent. The Opening ceremony was covered across 18 channels on our network, besides JioCinema, our digital streaming platform.

Speaking about the objective behind showcasing the event, Sharma says an event of the size and scale such as the Olympics often brings unprecedented complexities that Viacom 18 tried to address with the most comprehensive presentation of the Olympics in India ever.

With a choc-a-bloc schedule and several Indian in contention for medal positions, we ensured that every Indian athlete in action is presented on one of our 20 feeds and fans can seamlessly switch between their preferred choice of sport, he says. We also built JioCinema for this event such that fans can not only track live action in a language of their choice but also follow the schedule of the day, medals tally, and results of the day right below the Livestream Player. A dedicated schedule banner showcasing all India events is also shown daily, thus ensuring the streaming platform acts as a one stop shop for all things Olympics for viewers.

Viacom18 has close to 20 people in Paris, with some located at the IBC handling all the feeds and then three ENG crews out covering Indian athletes as well as the events that are of most interest back home. All original content in Paris is captured in 1080p and then upconverted to 4K back home in Mumbai.

Viacom 18's team in Paris ensures all the signals get to Mumbai at maximum quality.

The idea is to cover sports of interest to India and also all India participating athletes and we're not missing any India participation whatsoever, explains Sandeep Srikanth, Senior Vice President, Creative & Production for Viacom18 Sports. Helping in those efforts are the 20 streams of content getting all of that content home require HEVC compression and 4 Gbps circuits.

While we send 20 switched feeds to India, we are further using those as a base to create 3 hyper curated streams for TV and digital, says Srikanth. Those feeds jump between sports depending on India participation events that matter to India and really customize the experience. One of them is India in focus, which is always Indian athletes or events of Indian importance, the other feed is an International focus and we are doing studio shows around both.

There are about 500 people working back home in Mumbai as there are three studios and seven commentary booths zeroed in on covering the events which begin at 11 am in India and go until 3 am. The studio shows are available in English and Hindi while the event commentary is also available in two other India regional languages, Tamil and Telugu.

The Mumbai studios are using a mix of physical & green screen studios with XR and VR sets and extensions powered by Pixotope, the sets and backgrounds a mix of the base TATA IPL studios delivered by Clickspring & Sequin AR with a new Paris 2024 focused virtual environment and graphic package delivered by long term partners Wtvision India.

There is also a Women's Power Feed which gives OTT viewers a continuous stream dedicated to women athletes and women's team events.

If the sport is there and we can show it, we'll show it to you, says Srikanth.

Two of the three ENG crews have ENG cameras with LiveU units while a third ENG option has been an Apple iPhone. With venues like shooting, which is very far away but popular in India, requiring deeper coverage Srikanth has often deployed himself at venues with the mobile unit so that the proper ENG crews could be deployed to finals events including at the shooting.

Viacom 18 has used iPhones to give extra flexibility to its ENG efforts in Paris.

It's worked better than expected and as long as there's Internet at the venue, you're getting clean 1080p uploads and live 2-ways from the mixed zones, which is all we want, he adds. You want that first reaction as quickly as possible.

Popular sports back home include shooting, badminton, field hockey, table tennis, boxing, wrestling and athletics events like javelin where the defending Olympic champion is from India. Workflow wise Viacom18's audio team is embedding the English commentary on channels 15 and 16 via Madi at the IBC and then pushing it to India where there's a full sub-mix set up for final 5.1 and stereo delivery.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2024/08/07/live-from-paris-2024-indias-via...
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