Ross Video Offers Graphics, AR Support to CCTV’s Chinese Spring Festival Gala Broadcast

CCTV, China’s national broadcaster, has a reach of just over one billion viewers, and one of its most widely-watched programs is the network’s coverage of the annual Spring Festival Gala, a song and dance variety spectacular that is broadcast on Chinese New Year’s Eve. The show has been officially recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s most-watched TV program and is regarded by many Chinese families as an integral part of their New Year celebrations.

This year’s show was broadcast from a number of different venues around China, with the main CCTV stage in central Beijing acting as a hub for the show. The extensive coverage in HDR 12G UHD included a number of animated graphic and augmented reality sequences that were made possible by Ross Video, partnering with CCTV on the New Year’s show for the second year in a row. In common with last year’s broadcast, CCTV chose Ross Video’s Voyager graphics rendering solution to provide stunning, photo-realistic results, as well as the Furio camera motion system, Mira replay server, Ultrix routing/AV processing platform and Gator Toolbox signal processing solution. Unlike last year, CCTV decided to work with the XPression real-time graphics platform from Ross to ensure seamless integration and a more efficient workflow.

According to CCTV’s lead Technical Engineer responsible for the broadcast, Voyager was an instrumental part of the production solution, enabling the design teams to create amazing graphics easily and efficiently. Flexibility, ease of use and speed were all highlighted as key benefits of the Ross solution, a strong endorsement of the Ross philosophy of helping content creators overcome the creative, business and technical challenges they face. Return on investment was also raised as an important consideration – more creative content means more eyeballs and that makes for a more attractive proposition for advertisers.

“Everyone at Ross understands the importance of the Spring Gala Festival broadcast – it’s a lavish production and the scale means there’s great expectation and lots of pressure,” says Mark Cooke, acting Director of Sales for Asia. “I’m delighted that we again helped CCTV deliver a flawless production and would single out our team in Beijing who shadowed the CCTV crew all the way through rehearsal and the live broadcast itself. They really went the extra mile for the customer and that’s the Ross difference!”