Sphere Entertainment, the company behind the Las Vegas icon, and data storage and hybrid cloud management company Hitachi Vantara have revealed some of the technology behind delivering Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth to the venue’s LED screens.
Both Sphere’s 160,000 square-foot interior LED display plane and 580,000 LED exterior use Hitachi Vantara’s software as a key tool to stream content.
For Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth, the system handles over 400 gigabytes a second of throughput at sub 5 milliseconds of latency and a 12-bit colour display at a 444 subsampling, said the companies.
Hitachi Vantara utilised its storage platform Hitachi Content Software for File, a high-performance, software-defined, distributed parallel filesystem storage solution, they added.
The Hitachi Content Software for File system consists of 27 nodes, with 4PB of flash storage for playback within Sphere and streamed in real-time to 7thSense media servers, each streaming 4K video at 60 frames per second, which the companies say is a world-first in terms of technology capability at this scale.
“Sphere is home to many firsts, one of which is streaming immersive, high-resolution video content on a scale that has never been done before,” said Alex Luthwaite, SVP, show systems technology, Sphere Entertainment. “Hitachi Vantara worked with our team to develop a solution that’s fast, reliable, and efficient.”
