France tv tests 8K broadcasting in 5G
The history of television and its technologies is long, very long even, almost one hundred years old, and it is during the next decade, perhaps on the anniversary dates of the beginnings of TV, that a new stage in its history will be written with the implementation of the 5G broadcasting ecosystem combined with very high definition 8K.
Few people were expecting the arrival of the new 8K TV screens in mass distribution this year, which already promise an image definition 4 times better than 4K on larger and larger screens and which the public seems to appreciate.
Sharp was the first to draw an 8K product. Its Taiwanese parent company, Foxconn, is putting considerable resources into the manufacture of 8K LCD panels for next-generation TVs, a technological jewel with 33 million pixels, at its gigantic American industrial complex in Wisconsin.
The South Korean giant Samsung should follow by announcing at the next IFA 2018 in Berlin a range of TVs in this format. Other manufacturers are expected to follow and thus anticipate the distribution of products that were not expected before 2020.
And already history is repeating itself: "why a new format? Why a new format?", "You need big slabs to enjoy it", "Why so fast? "HD is enough for me", 4K is just beginning to be deployed", "there are no 8K programs anyway", "by far, you can't see the difference" etc... All this confirms the stuttering of the history of television at each evolution of its screens, from black and white to color, from 819 to 625 lines, from 4/3 to 16/9, from HD to 4K and now 8K!
But this time with the 8K, all experts agree that to broadcast digital content at a minimum of 50 frames per second, with 33 million pixels, it will take speed, a lot of speed. Whether for OTT offers for the first VOD or linear TV offers, if broadcasters are interested, as it already seems to be the case in Japan with the NHK. In any case, Hollywood is getting ready! "8K is on the right track," said Michael Cioni, SVP of Panavision.
To deliver 8K to the home one day, we will have to find a means of transport to the user.
Why 5G?
The technical means of digital broadcasting already exist: satellite as well as fiber optics are today undeniably convincing means to achieve this.
But the newcomer that is 5G and its new promises will in the coming years provide a technical means with hitherto unknown performance perfectly compatible with the requirements of 8K.
The key will of course lie in the bandwidth capacities. The initial requirements are not exactly what you might expect, but the work that is now beginning will be to provide objective expertise on 5G performance, both for services called "unicast", such as streaming, and for broadcast services, which are now at the heart of digital TV broadcasting.
In the coming months, controversies of all kinds will probably erupt over this new means of dissemination. Including the need to pay a subscription to a provider to access it in front of a free DTT TV.
It is true that since the 1920s, hertzian television broadcasting has been offered free access with a simple receiving antenna. So what's the difference between 5G and 5G? Maybe nothing! Everything exists so that nothing changes, even in the latest standardized version of the 3GPP consortium free reception without a SIM card, so no subscription is possible, but only the economic and regulatory model will decide.
But before giving an answer, we had to check this possibility: will we be able to "broadcast digital content in 8K (and other 4K...) on 5G"?
Is the world's first 5G and 8K TV proof of concept done?
On July 5, 2018, France Télévisions broadcast on the Nokia Paris Saclay Campus, the largest European R&D center dedicated to 5G, the first tests of programs recorded in 8K and transmitted in 5G, tests never before seen with real TV programs. "It's a world first," even Nokia assures us!
This operation was decided in the wake of the production of sports programs produced in 8K by France Télévisions' Innovation and Prospective Department and its Sports Department during the last Roland Garros tournament.
Les équipes de France Télévisions ont apporté les précieux fichiers tournés pendant cette quinzaine sportive, prêts à être diffusés à 200 Mb/s* sur le canal d’expérimentation 5G calé dans les bandes millimétriques des 28 Ghz, autorisées par l’ARCEP, sur ce site, situé aux portes de Paris.
(*moins de 100 Mb/s auraient suffi, mais profitons du test pour pousser loin le benchmark technique…)
After a few complex parameterizations of the transmission equipment, installed in the 4,000 m² of laboratories of this campus dedicated to innovation, the lights of the "gNB Airframe and other Airscale" (simply the software intelligence and radio devices of the 5G) all turned green, meaning that the broadcast antenna in Massive Mimo technology and the reception MTP (your future reception tuner), could see the sublime images of Roland Garros in 8K in their state-of-the-art electronics.
The tense faces of the mobilized engineers suddenly began to smile when they saw these images in 8K and their measuring instruments confirming that 5G and 8K were perhaps going to make it possible to write a new page of television, that of the post-2020s.
