This article was originally published at www.display-central.com
Insight Media stopped by the Sony booth at NAB 2014 on the first day of the show while the company aired the first live broadcast of 4K content over a cable backbone (see video above). The demo was delivered via a live feed from a Time Warner studio in New York, where a F55 4K camera was set up, and the 4K broadcast was encoded by a Cisco AnyRes Live encoder at 60 frames per second using HEVC.
The broadcast was then delivered over an IP network to the Las Vegas Convention Center, where it hooked up with a Cox Cable system, which then delivered the signal to the TV on location. At the TV, a prototype set-top box developed by ViXS used a chip set for the HEVC decoding and then output the content over HDMI 2.0 at 60 frames per second to the Sony TV.
While the live feed ran at about 15 megabits per second, there was not much activity going in the studio so we couldn’t really see any problems with the encoding. Insight Media was told that it can go as low as about six, and it really starts to break up at about nine or so. But if there’s any movement in the picture, the equipment would need to go beyond about 15. But, for most content and for most people, this might be acceptable. The set-top box should be available later this year.
Sony TVs will also include their own HEVC decoding chip that can support 4K at 60 frames per second, which will allow, for example, the delivery of Netflix content directly to the TV without needing to go through the set-top box. So, users can choose a couple of different options for content delivery.