CES 2015: ATEME Brings 360-degree Video on Set-top Box
Story Highlights
At CES 2014, ATEME, together with its partners Kolor and Finwe, announced LiveSphere, an end-to-end live video broadcast solution that captures, stitches, streams and displays video to provide an interactive consumer experience for tablets, smartphones and virtual-reality headsets. ATEME announced that this immersive experience is now possible on the television in the living room, allowing a viewer to dynamically change their field of view using a remote control. 
LiveSphere application runs on Android set-top box (STB) In this demonstration, the LiveSphere client application runs on an STB reference design based on the STMicroelectronics Cannes chipset under the latest Android L operating system. The Cannes chipset is capable of decoding Ultra High Definition (UHD) UHD decoding performance in the STB allows the capture and transmission of the entire spherical video with a great level of detail. Uses 4MOD200 remote control to navigate 360 degrees.
The dynamic selection of the field of view relies on a remote by 4MOD Technology, a leading provider of innovative wireless user interface solutions. The selected field of view is output over HDMI to any HD or UHD TV set. Value-add for service providers This demonstration shows an interactive high-quality television experience that service providers can offer to their broadband subscribers with an UHD-capable STB, even when they do not yet own an UHDTV set.
“LiveSphere is a real innovation in the way we watch television, providing the end user with the possibility to navigate inside live events using a remote control,” says Ismail Allalcha, manager of strategic & ecosystem marketing, Digital Consumer Group, STMicroelectronics. “This demonstration confirms the maturity and performance of our well-established Cannes and Monaco chipset families, which can reach resolutions of up to Ultra HDp60 a definite advantage for 360-degree video applications.”
ATEME Adds Support for High Dynamic Range in Its TITAN File Production Workflow
According to Displaysearch, a global market research and consulting firm now part of IHS, Inc., 4K TV shipments jumped more than 500 percent Y/Y in Q314 to top 3 million units, bringing total shipments to 6.4 million units in 2014. While service providers around the world are launching or expanding 4K VOD services to satisfy the demand of new ultra high-definition (UHD) TV owners, content providers in general, and Hollywood studios in particular, are looking for ways to enhance the experience for viewers, not just with more pixels but also with a higher degree of fidelity in the rendering of those images. As a result of its cooperation with Hollywood majors, ATEME announced today that it has added a host of features to its broadly deployed TITAN File video-processing platform, including:
- Delivers more realistic or more vivid colors TITAN File now supports BT.2020 extended color gamut to enable more realistic or vivid colors, all according to the original creative intent. Files created with TITAN can be signaled as BT.2020 when the source content is already referencing this color space or converted from other color spaces such as BT.601, BT.709 or P3.
- Support of high dynamic range (HDR) Allows for enhanced contrast by signaling the electro-optical transfer function (EOTF) as SMPTE ST 2084 Perceptual Quantizer (PQ).
- Enables higher-fidelity rendering By signaling the characteristics of the reference display used by the artist to create the original program, TITAN File implements the SMPTE ST 2086 mastering display metadata standard.
- Native support of the SMPTE Interoperable Master Format (IMF) Includes the IMF composition playlist, an important feature to streamline UHDTV content delivery workflows.
“ATEME has been heavily engaged in researching new television formats as part of the 4EVER project, a collaborative program that was launched in 2012 with partners including Orange Labs and France Televisions,” says Jérôme Viéron, advanced research manager, ATEME, said. “The addition of HDR support in our products is a logical outcome of this research effort, which has established the value of enhancing the television experience not just with more pixels, but also with better pixels.”
