A new Polish TV channel has become the first in Europe to feature Dolby’s new AC-4 next-generation audio.
The three-month trial is part of the Poland’s move to the DVB-T2 standard, giving TVP (Teleizja Polska) the opportunity to operate the next-generation Dolby AC-4 audio standard in a fully live commercial context. Transmitters in Krakow and Katowice that reach six million viewers are being used for the trial.
TVP began internal testing of AC-4 in 2018, with an experimental immersive audio production of the Poland vs Lithuania pre-World Cup football match. More recently, Dolby Poland in Wroclaw, TVP, and the Polish transmitter operator Emitel conducted interoperability tests on a wide selection of TVs in the Polish market.
Dolby also collaborated with France-based video compression specialists ATEME for integration of the necessary functionality into the TVP Kultura workflow, based on ATEME’s TITAN Live encoder.
Javier Foncillas, VP Commercial Partnership Dolby Europe, said: “The choice of Dolby AC-4 became compelling for a number of reasons, including enhanced audio quality, accessibility, ease of integration with the existing distribution chain, the high take-up of Dolby AC-4 in modern TV sets, and high spectral efficiency at a time of frequency reallocation.”