Sky Deutschland and LiveU have a longstanding relationship, reaching beyond the traditional customer/solution provider connection to include multiple 5G trials, involving football and handball, designed to highlight the ease-of use, flexibility and cost-effectiveness enabled by using 5G for media contribution. Working with both the Local Organising Committee (LOC) and a 5G service provider to create a private 5G network, and expanding upon its venue consulting role, the broadcaster identified the table tennis tournament as being ideal for this POC.
The table tennis tournament ran from the 19th June through to the final day of the event. The broadcaster deployed the LiveU EcoSystem with a multi-cam LU800, in four-camera mode, plus three LU-Smart equipped smartphones to capture the event. The feeds from the LU800 were, as with the feeds from the smartphones, encoded and sent to Munich, where they were decoded by two LiveU decoders. Vision mixing occurred in the cloud with the final output made available to both the Director of the World feed and also to Sky Deutschland’s unilateral feed.