BBC Had 1.6 Million Requests for Livestreamed UHD World Cup, Wimbledon 

The BBC’s iPlayer platform trials fielded more than 1.6 million requests for livestreamed Ultra HD coverage of World Cup and Wimbledon matches, “a scale never seen before in the UK,” blogged Phil Layton, BBC R&D head-broadcast and connected systems. The trials showed for the first time that Ultra HD and HDR can be delivered live and “free-to-air” over the internet, he said Thursday. “We have always felt that Ultra HD needed to be more than just extra pixels,” so the trials also demonstrated the ability to beam hybrid log-gamma HDR and wide-color-gamut images with the 4K resolution, he said. “This is essential to improving the visual experience irrespective of the viewer’s screen size.” Latency is the big “elephant in the room for live internet streaming,” and is “less of an issue for everyday viewing, but it comes in to sharp focus when we look at sport,” blogged Jim Simmons, senior product manager-BBC Design & Engineering, also Thursday. For the live World Cup and Wimbledon Ultra HD trials, “we got latency down to between 45 seconds and a few minutes but it was very variable,” depending on the device, he said. “When we asked viewers about latency in our survey, while they wanted it to be as low as possible, most said they wouldn’t trade it off against picture quality.”