Welcome to our second thematic newsletter. This issue is on the UHD coverage of one of 2021’s major sporting events.
The UEFA Euro 2020 Football Championship was a massive broadcast and streaming endeavor leading to 2,000 hours of production managed by eleven production teams. Without counting the dozens of staff from each of the dozens of broadcasters and platforms that brought the tournament to viewers, over three thousand total Host Broadcast staff worked in the 11 stadiums, the IBC, the Nyon Hub, and London. Each game was covered by 36 cameras, 8 of which were native UHD-HDR.
Our member, the BBC, described some of their Ultra HD workflows for the event in a blog here. This newsletter has two complementary perspectives from two other member organizations. KPN delivered UHD HDR to its IPTV subscribers and provided unique and insightful user experience-focused feedback which you can read here. TF1 shared some technical lessons learned in receiving the live feeds in HDR for lab analysis and converting them to SDR for delivery read the article here.
Our third and final piece shows the uptake of UHD feeds by commercial operators worldwide is here.
Our take is the Euro’2020, like the FIFA World cup 2018, was a significant milestone in the UHD world, with more consistency on the HDR experience, more immersive audio (dominated by ATMOS), and still, unfortunately, a majority of SDR transmitted to the end-users for device compatibility reasons.
We hope this Euro 2020 newsletter has helped our readers better grasp deploying UHD at scale for a popular sports event. We will follow up in 2022 with a newsletter on an even more significant event, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics! (Update December 2022: issue 4 is here).
