SuperTennis from 105 Stadium in Genova
SuperTennis was born on 10th November 2008, created by the President of the FIT (Italian Tennis Federation) Angelo Binaghi. It is a powerful promotional tool and a single-themed television channel that offers a grand spectacle to the Italian viewers.
The publisher is SuperTennis Sportcast Ltd., a Group company that manages FIT's all our other communication activities.
SuperTennis has recently signed an agreement with Eutelsat through which it was carried on a live satellite broadcast considered a record: 3 consecutive days for the live finals of the A1 series of tennis in the maximum image quality, 4K. The finals were aired via Hot Bird on channel 4K1, the first satellite channel in Europe at 50 frames per second, encoded in HEVC and 10 bit color.
Eutelsat so has provided the world broadcast community numerous teachings towards the affirmation of the TV of the future and also thanks to the collaboration of a team of technological excellence companies. An important teamwork for an innovative experience, which reaffirms the immediate availability of satellite broadcasts in Ultra HD, since 4K tv screens are already available in stores.
The first of the challenges faced during the three days, was to make successfully visible the tennis ball as it moves extremely fast.
For Roberto Gaddoni, Sales Manager of Rohde & Schwarz Italy, a company which handled the delicate signal encoding, "the trajectory of the ball was always perfectly visible, especially during the beats when the speed exceeds 200 kilometers per hour. And this has demonstrated that the technology can respond to this need with an immersive vision and appreciation of detail, even in extreme conditions; despite the lack of standardization in the coding phase makes complicated the interface between the various components of the system ".
4 different signals to form the 4K arrive at the Encoder and multiplexing is the next step; being a very heavy signal and full of movement its processing is rather complex.
It is precisely the integration between the various components of the system one of the problems faced by the working group of Adriano Zatta, Sales Manager of Broadcast Solutions, which has made the production of the event directed by Telecine Service and two 4K cameras provided by Grass Valley LDX 4K, one for the general shooting and the second for close-ups. These cameras have three sensors and employ standard optics instead of cinema ones and then the broadcasters can use the lenses they already own in HD. Even the "focus" of the images is less complex than with cinema lenses.
On field was also used the K2 Dyno always by Grass Valley for the slow motion and to realize the playlist of the most important phases.
A van was sent to Genoa and in the control room the images were shown on a TV 4K by Samsung, with a 4K decoder to especially appreciate the detail of the tennis court, the depth of field and the faces of the spectators in the first rows. The definition of 3840x2160 pixels was used.
The challenge was even in the phase of satellite uplink signal, managed by M-Three Satcom, present with its SNG ob vehicle, used without interruption for a long period of time.
It was the first technology at European level using a signal in 4K distributed on a very broad European basin which also involved the Middle East and North Africa. The spread was produced on channel 4K1 distributed by satellite Eutelsat Hot Bird at 13 East to a potential audience of 120 million users.
This "experiment" is very useful in stimulating the production of contents in this format and to carry out tests to adopt as soon as possible the new compression algorithms that are already available and allow a significant savings in bandwidth at a ultra high definition.
Renato Farina, CEO of Eutelsat Italy said: "It is a source of great pride that our channel 4K1 on Hot Bird was the setting for this extraordinary commitment in the name of the Ultra HD. We intend to continue on this path in the belief that the important partnership with SuperTennis may soon give other satisfactions of the genre, combining tennis with the innovation of the television via satellite. "
