No 4K from Olympic Games
February 3, 2016
By Chris Forrester
The CTO of the Olympic Games’ Olympic Broadcast Services has confirmed there will be no 4K/UHD transmissions from the Rio event.
Sotiris Salamouris says that he and his team have been planning the Rio de Janeiro TV coverage since 2009 and at that time, 4K was very much on the distant horizon, and was still not covered by defined standards. Moreover, most national broadcasters simply did not have the technical facility to support even simple down-conversion.
Salamouris was talking to trade magazine TVB Europe. Journalist Adrian Pennington revealed that OBS was, however, supplying 8K ‘Super Hi-Vision’ transmissions to Japan’s NHK for test broadcasting and down-converting to 4K, but the transmissions would be a day later than the Rio events.
Perhaps alarmingly, Salamouris stated that “4K is not there today, and we have some doubts about whether it will happen in the next few years”. He added that 8K was a different story, as there had been more time to develop equipment and workflow properly.