At this year’s French Open tennis tournament, France Télévisions used professional 8K cameras and one of the first 8K monitors available in the world, with a resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 pixels. France Télévisions says it will be one of the first TV groups to test this new technology under real production conditions.
At its showroom at the tournament venue, the broadcaster presented 5G equipment that will be used in the terrestrial broadcasting of programmes in 8K, having conducted a 5G transmission test under real-life conditions on a TV set in the United States last week. It also exhibited a prototype of a conversational interface which allowed users to find French Open matches from 1988 to 2017 via voice control.
Over the past three years, the broadcaster has also tested and produced services at the French Open that use various components of VR. This year, it presented a new technology intended to improve the visual quality perceived by users on TV sets, tablets or VR headsets, using a total of 24 video cameras, assembled to film images on the Suzanne Lenglen court.
France Télévisions is testing live broadcasts of the tournament using HDR streaming under real-life conditions. It is also proposing a UHD “special events” channel, produced exclusively in Hybrid Log Gamma HDR from the Philippe Chatrier court. Ultra HD streams will be broadcast 24 hours a day throughout the 2-week tournament over DVB-T in Greater Paris, Toulouse and Nantes. The rest of France will be covered by satellite.
The broadcaster also illustrated 30 years of technological progress by showing the tournament on authentic 4:3 and 16:9 format TV sets from the 80s, 90s and 00s, up to today’s HD and UHD images. Retrospective videos also looked back at how the services available around the French Open have evolved, including teletext, Minitel, TV over ADSL and on mobiles, interactive television and the various “Technological World Premiers” introduced by France Télévisions during this period, such as HD, UHD, HbbTV and VR live.
