Every Chinese New Year, the discussion of the popular content of the Spring Festival Gala will always run through offline and online social networking. Since 1983, when CCTV first held the "Spring Festival Gala" on Chinese New Year's Eve, the Spring Festival Gala has been successfully held for 42 years. The songs, cross talk sketches, magic, dramas and other programs performed on the stage are transmitted to the eyes of audiences all over the country in real time through the screens of television, mobile phones, tablets and other devices.
As an important part of the "New Year's Flavor", the 42-year history of the Spring Festival Gala not only covers the evolution of people's entertainment lifestyles, but also reflects the development process of China's display industry and communication industry.
In the 2024 Spring Festival Gala, there is another communication "black technology" application, which is 5G-A (5G-Advanced) technology, through higher data transmission rates, lower latency, higher reliability and wider connection range, so that this 8K Spring Festival Gala, AR Spring Festival Gala, and interactive Spring Festival Gala can be delivered to every audience in real time.
From black and white pictures to 8K live broadcasts, the "taste of science and technology" of the Spring Festival Gala is getting stronger and stronger
Many post-70/80 generations should have the memory of "huddled together to watch the Spring Festival Gala",When the first Spring Festival Gala was held,China has just completed the commissioning of the first color TV production line。 At that time, for most people, it was not easy to watch the Spring Festival Gala, many people needed to go to neighbors or even neighboring villages to watch because they did not have a TV at home, and some people could only listen to various programs through their ears in front of the radio.
Statistics show that in 1985, there were only 17.2 and 0.8 television sets per 100 households in urban and rural areas. Even for families with TVs, the viewing experience of the Spring Festival Gala cannot be regarded as good.
On the one hand, unstable signal transmission often causes the TV picture to be lost or the sound to stutter. On the other hand, limited by the ability of program recording, production, and broadcasting at that time, the sound and picture quality of the Spring Festival Gala cannot be compared with the present, but for the people at that time, the joyful atmosphere crowded in front of a small TV is still undiminished.
Since then, the production level of the Spring Festival Gala has risen rapidly, and the sound quality and picture quality expression are also constantly refreshing, from the resolution point of view, from the primary clarity of VCD to DVD SD, and then from 720P, 1080P, to 4K and even 8K resolution. At the same time, there are more and more "scientific and technological tricks" in the Spring Festival Gala, LED screens, holographic displays, AR/VR technology applications, drone aerial photography, branch performances, etc.
Live broadcast on new media platforms such as CCTV
Whether it is the broadcast of higher-definition pictures or the combination of various innovative technologies and live broadcast forms, communication technology is inseparable from it as a "bridge" for basic data transmission. In 2019, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala was broadcast live in 4K resolution for the first time, and the improvement of image quality made every button and logo on the actors' costumes clearly visible.
Subsequently, in 2020, ZTE helped China Mobile achieve 5G+8K ultra-high-definition live broadcast at the main venue of the Spring Festival Gala in Beijing and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area branch, and the shooting position based on the 5G network was also included in the production system of the Spring Festival Gala for the first time, which was used for the live broadcast of 8K TV and CCTV live broadcast on new media platforms such as the Spring Festival Gala.
Compared with the bandwidth requirement between 5Mbps and 10Mbps for 4K live broadcast, the bandwidth demand for 8K live broadcast has directly increased to 10 times.
With the advent of the 5G-A network era, ZTE has helped to upgrade the audio-visual immersion
In order to allow the content of the Spring Festival Gala live broadcast to be transmitted to every audience with higher efficiency, high quality and high stability, in 2024, China Central Radio and Television Station, together with Beijing Mobile and ZTE, launched the "5G-A ultra-high-definition shallow compression wireless mobile live broadcast" technology. Based on ZTE's 5G-A distributed micro-station and base-level computing engine, it is a dedicated wireless video shooting and production and broadcasting network, which can reduce the cable layout and connection in the live broadcast environment, so that photographers can travel lightly and camera positions can be flexibly arranged.
In the Spring Festival Gala of 2024, many large-scale lens movements and close-up shots of actors that you can still see through TV screens, and the seamless switching from panoramic pictures to local close-ups also benefits from the application of "5G-A ultra-high-definition shallow compression wireless mobile live broadcast" technology. It supports seamless mixing between wireless and wired cameras, and then through the uplink rate to 2Gbps, and the average transmission delay is only 4ms, ensuring that the Spring Festival Gala is not only shot clearly, but also seen clearly by users.
As mobile phones have become mobile smart terminals that people use frequently, "watching the Spring Festival Gala on a vertical screen" has also become the choice of many audiences. The data shows that the number of vertical screen viewers of the 2023 Spring Festival Gala has reached 179 million, and the 5G-A live broadcast position supports the switching and cropping of real-time content from the Spring Festival Gala on the horizontal screen TV to the vertical screen mobile phone. In addition, in order to allow mobile terminals with smaller screens to present a stronger sense of picture immersion, the vertical screen live broadcast of the Spring Festival Gala also used the lightweight AR shooting technology launched by ZTE, which reduced the workload of on-site photographers and simplified the workflow from the technical level.
Since this year's Spring Festival Gala still adopts the form of "main venue + branch venue" live broadcast, compared with the main venue in the indoor environment, the branch venue in the outdoor environment and the stage scale is larger, which also poses great challenges to the construction of on-site network communication capabilities.
To this end, ZTE has deployed 5G-A wireless communication networks outside the two branch venues in Xi'an and Xinjiang, and applied the most cutting-edge 5G-A communication technologies such as distributed base station networking architecture, three-band three-carrier (3CC) carrier aggregation, and integrated base stations for communication and perception.
Starting with live streaming, 5G-A empowers thousands of industries
It can be seen from the final live broadcast content that the deployment of ZTE's 5G-A network, with 10 times the large bandwidth of the 5G network and an average low network latency of 4ms, can provide a digital foundation for the on-site recording, production and broadcast of 8K ultra-high resolution, AR perspective, and ground-to-air multi-view camera live content.
At the same time, ZTE's "5G-A ultra-high-definition shallow compression wireless mobile live broadcast" technology and lightweight AR shooting technology have further simplified the shooting process, improved shooting efficiency, optimized the on-site camera layout, and brought technological innovation to media production and broadcasting, large-scale events, concerts, and even the entire new media live broadcast industry.
In the short term, the advantages of 5G-A networks will be reflected in more efficient network coverage and optimization, improved remote operation and real-time interaction capabilities, and innovative entertainment experiences due to higher data transmission rates, lower latency, higher reliability, and wider connection ranges.
In the long term, 5G-A will also enable the digitalization of broader industries, drive the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), and provide a communication foundation for future applications such as autonomous driving, telemedicine, and smart cities.