Elemental has been giving details of the fast to market deployment made for BT in the launch of its Ultra HD sports channel last summer.
Greg McCall, Managing Director of TV Technology and Content for BT said he was proud of both the picture quality and the experience given by the BT Sport channel.
“We were used to a game a week and all of a sudden we had to do 351 games across the season with 12 matches at once at its peak, said McCall, adding that when he first sat down with Elemental no standards had been defined.”
One of the challenges was to create a seamless experience that took viewers between simultaneous matches, with accompanying goal flashes, rather than just switching channels.
When BT Sport Ultra HD launched in July 2015 it was the first such channel in Europe; even the US was struggling to introduce the technology. By December BT TV had become the first TV service in the UK to offer Netflix in Ultra HD, supported by Elemental for high-efficiency video coding (HEVC/H.265) and 4K content processing and delivery.
A key point for BT has been delivering the same content through a unified architecture across SD and HD, and now Ultra HD versions, alongside a genuinely interactive app that has been downloaded 4.8 million times.
“Software defined video tackles the industries biggest challenges, multiscreen, 4K, monetisation and delivery. Single software can define all the way from mobile profiles through to traditional broadcast delivery including 4K and HDR,” said Elemental founder and CEO Sam Blackman.
Last September Elemental was acquired by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Blackman indicated that BT had been running tests using the AWS cloud.
