A consortium of providers including Viaccess-Orca, Harmonic and VideoStitch are working with Sky Italia to test a virtual reality experience based around a basketball match.
The results can be seen in the Viaccess-Orca Virtual Arena at NAB 2016 in Las Vegas next week (April 18-21).
“Creating fan engagement around major sports events represents a huge potential for us. We’re experimenting with the end-to-end VR technology to capitalise on brand recognition and satisfy increasing viewer demand for more immersive content,” said Massimo Bertolotti, Head of Innovation and Engineering, Sky Italia.
Harmonic provided Sky Italia with essential video delivery infrastructure components, including the ProMedia Xpress WFS multiscreen transcoder and packager for Ultra HD transcoding in MP4 and MPEG-DASH formats, as well as the ProMedia X Origin media server. These have been integrated with VideoStitch’s Vahana VR live 360-degree video stitching software. In addition to managing the entire VR ecosystem, Viaccess-Orca is providing its “Virtual Arena” platform, which includes the Connected Sentinel Player for secure playback and cloud-based Voyage – TvaaS (TV Everywhere as a Service) for interactivity and analytics. By addressing the complex content protection needs of premium video service providers, the Connected Sentinel Player opens up new monetization opportunities.
