For coverage of this year’s French Open at the Roland Garros stadium in Paris, Eurosport has been taking advantage of XPression’s 3D and augmented reality capabilities to create content that complements the live tennis. Also contributing to the French Open coverage, ATEME has been selected to provide the primary live video encoding platform in 4K HEVC (H265) during the event.
The Coach – a twice-daily segment in both English and French where a top tennis coach analyses the playing style of one of the day’s competitors – uses on-screen graphics designed to seamlessly blend with the physical set. Commenting on XPression, Eurosport’s head of graphics Richard Lievre said: “We needed to evolve from our previous graphics system and we felt that XPression would be the right platform for us; it’s been easy to adopt, simple to use and augmented reality has opened up a great many creative possibilities for our team”.
Patrick Jeant, head of post production at Eurosport, agrees: “XPression allows us to work with one single graphics package across all of the different domains within Eurosport where graphics are required – set up once, deploy everywhere. We’ve been one of the first broadcasters in France to use Ross’ augmented reality solution and we’re looking forward to building on the excellent content we’ve produced at the French Open tennis”.
Images are being broadcast during the two week tournament on the Fransat platform, which provides the distribution of the French free to air broadcasting service (TNT) by satellite (EUT5°W), and can be viewed on any 4K compatible TV.
Ateme is providing the primary live video encoding platform: video is encoded in Ultra High definition at 50fps and uses the colour spectrum BT2020. The HEVC codec reduces bandwidth by 30 per cent to 50 per cent, compared to MPEG-4, the previous generation codec, thereby improving image quality and reducing the cost of UHD live broadcasting.
