Earlier today, the NBA teamed up with BT Sport and Rogers for the first live, 4K Ultra HD broadcast in league history.
At 3 pm ET on January 14, 2016, the Orlando Magic squared off with the Toronto Raptors at the O2 in London and the contest was made available to those with 4K Ultra HD TVs via BT Sport’s Ultra High Definition channel in the U.K. and Rogers 4K in Canada. The NBA has captured a game in 4K before, but last year’s New York Knicks vs. Milwaukee Bucks contest — which took place at the NBA Global Games London 2015 — was available by invite only and was only offered to an exclusive list of NBA and BT Sport executives.
Thursday’s broadcast was produced using a specialized 4K-production truck and was shot using several, state-of-the-art 4K cameras capable of delivering 3840 x 2160 pixel resolution. Regular high-definition broadcasts, on the other hand, top out at a resolution of 1920 x 1080.
The NBA’s foray into 4K comes less than three months after the league broadcast the first live professional sports contest in virtual reality on opening night of the 2015 season. That game pitted the NBA champion Golden State Warriors against the New Orleans Pelicans, and the VR live-stream also included the pre-game championship ring ceremony.
For those interested in the results of Thursday’s match-up, the Toronto Raptors bested the Orlando Magic in overtime by a score of 106-103. Though the game was a big step forward for live sports, the Magic are probably too busy licking their wounds to notice.
No word yet on when this technology will be utilized in a domestic NBA broadcast, but we’ll be sure to let you know as soon as fans in the United States can watch LeBron, Durant, Curry and the rest in glorious 4K Ultra HD.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?