Basketball fans in China are being treated to live coverage of the NBA Finals on several IMAX screens in a demonstration of the company’s “IMAX Live Experience.”
The games are being broadcast on the giant 59×79 foot screens in three IMAX theaters in Taiwan and one in Hong Kong, according to Vikrum Arumilli, SVP and GM of the IMAX Streaming Division. The four theaters are part of the company’s stable of 1,700 theaters worldwide, 250 of which are connected via IMAX Live technology that delivers high-res content over IP to the theaters and monitored by an NOC just outside of Toronto.
The four IMAX theaters showing the NBA finals, however are not connected and despite this challenge, in a deal struck with NBA China less than a month ago, IMAX arranged to provide ESPN’s live feed over a basic IP network at just 19 Mbps, via LTN’s distribution platform.
“We had to figure out what technology we could use to deliver the IMAX-quality experience to fans, and we came up with a way to utilize our streaming technology, to optimize quality and ensure that even in a very bandwidth-constrained environment that these four theaters present, that we’re able to deliver quality that matches what we do for our live experiences in theaters with the kind of regular connectivity that we built,” said Arumilli.
“The main technology behind it is our StreamSmart technology that we offer to streaming services where we optimize quality and do so in a way that minimizes bandwidth usage,”Arumilli added. “So we’re basically able to take a mediocre quality feed, but ensure that it meets the needs of a 70 foot screen.”
In addition to entertaining NBA fans who can’t make it to the finals in person, the live shows also demonstrate a basic proof of concept for IMAX’s technology, according to Arumilli. “It was a test for a limited footprint for now,” he said.
Setting up the theater for the shows was fairly easy and quick, said Arumilli, who described the setup as “jerry-rigged.”
“We basically took the 19 Mbps ESPN broadcast feed that we received from the NBA, and using Content Aware encoding and our StreamSmart technology we were able to reduce the bitrate significantly while maintaining IMAX quality images at an average of 18 Mbps to the connected projectors, and so it was a pretty agile, quick set up,” he said. “What is impressive about it is, instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up a theater, we were able to do it on the cheap, very quickly.”
Since the theaters are not part of the IMAX network, the company had personnel on site in the theaters monitoring the feeds via the company’s StreamAware technology, according to Arumilli
“We were constantly monitoring quality using our [StreamAware] vision science technology, and the results showed that the quality never dipped thanks to what we were doing with StreamSmart,” Arumilli said.
The theaters have sold out both of the first two games of the NBA Finals, according to Arumilli, who adds that IMAX has even bigger plans for its StreamSmart technology this summer, livecasting the Opening Ceremonies of the Paris Olympics on July 26 to the 250 IMAX connected theaters worldwide.
That show will be a bit more “straightforward,” and won’t present the challenges that go with providing a live feed of the high-action NBA Finals, Arumilli said.
“Basketball is tough given how fast the action moves, it’s tougher to compress,” he said. “The opening ceremony is going to move at a snail’s pace compared to that.”