BT Sport takes Elemental step of software encoding

It was EUFA - Empty, Uninformative Fuck All

Pretty much, yes. And sadly typical of Faultline's stuff. A pity in this case as it does indeed sound like the company has done some interesting stuff.

I can't remember the full details of stuff but I think UHD with HEVC wasn't really available on hardware until very recently. When the hardware can do it then you definitely do want to use the hardware. I'd like to think there is some custom hardware in the editing suite.

Broadcasting football matches in high resolution is a challenge but you are still largely working with fixed camera positions and a studio setup. Presumably the cameras aren't encoding on the fly and you probably don't want a mobile server farm to do it for you so you need fibre back to the NOC where you can then transcode in relative peace and scale up as and when needed – presumably this is the core of the "software-defined" approach.

It's also easier for newcomers to leapfrog incumbents technologically. And, expensive as the kit may be, it's a lot less than the money spent on the broadcasting rights. I seem to remember an article on The Register not too long ago making pretty much this point with the shift to HD production as standard for broadcasters.

Still the odd UHD broadcast isn't as challenging as doing the whole channel in it which is what we'll see with the European Football Championships next month and the Rio Olympics. Those will be the real showcases for full-stack UHD designed to entice consumers into buying the necessary kit, connections and subscriptions. Like HD in its time, UHD is likely to remain niche for a couple of years so the whole chain can do everything in hardware.

"Umm, that was true 10 years ago. But now single-threaded performance of "generic processors" has hit a wall."

If the hardware needs upgrading in your TV or STB whether a generic CPU or ASIC it still means a new box. Really this is about them saving a few pennies using a commodity CPU rather than an ASIC, its nothing to do with saving on the number upgrades or providing a better service for the consumer.

Re: Best thing about BT and Sky squabbling over football rights...

I remember , as a kid, "World of Sport" (with Dickie Davies) which included a variety of sports, well...wrestling and horse racing ("ITV 7" is probably a channel name now)

Re: Best thing about BT and Sky squabbling over football rights...

But the Grandstand theme tune was both aces and skill.

Re: WTF is...

It's obvious I'd have thought.

Instead of buying proprietary hardware to manage and compress video it can now be done on standard server farm kit using software.

It's roughly akin to NFV, where network functions are taken away from proprietary routers and switches and again handled as software resources on x86 boxes.

Re: Personally ...

I hope we can get this BT Sport stuff over the airwaves because BT won't upgrade the lines here.