The New Phase of Terrestrial UHD Service: Live 4K UHD Broadcasting via Terrestrial Channel

摘要

Over the past few years, UHDTV (Ultra HighDefinition Television) has been developed and standardized,and is currently considered the core of the next broadcastingera. As many manufacturers launch diverse UHD-relatedequipment, lowering thus the barriers to UHD services, it isbecoming more relatively important to produce UHDcontent to be consumed. Live 4K UHD content productionwould be particularly difficult. However, to advance theUHD era, KBS (Korean Broadcasting System) has carriedout live 4K terrestrial broadcasting of three major sportsevents in 2014, based on our successful past experiences ofterrestrial 4K UHD experimental broadcasting. We coveredthe KBL (Korean Basketball League) finals, the 2014 FIFAWorld Cup, and the 2014 Incheon Asian Games. Inparticular, 4K UHD live coverage of the KBL finals was theworld’s first live 4K terrestrial broadcasting and peoplecould enjoy the World Cup and the Asian Games withUHDTV at home. In this paper, the overall production anddelivery of the sports events is described, including onlocationlive production, live HEVC encoding, SFN (SingleFrequency Network) transmission, as well as experimentalIP transmission of uncompressed 4K video over KREONET,a national R&D network.