"It's so shocking, everyone cheers and is proud in unison! Unlike watching TV at home, the cinema has a more sense of scene and atmosphere! ”
Mr. Xu from Shenzhen watched the live broadcast of the men's singles table tennis final at the Paris Olympics with his family, and was still immersed in the joy of Fan Zhendong winning the gold. Different from watching the game in the past, today the family came to the cinema near their home and experienced a new way of watching the game with nearly 100 spectators. When Fan Zhendong successfully won the gold and achieved the "Super Slam", the applause and waving national flags instantly ignited the atmosphere of the scene.
"My original expectation was to feel the atmosphere, and the cinema live broadcast was a little lower quality and some delay was acceptable. But today's experience was completely beyond my expectations! The audio and video experience was full, and there were several moments when I felt like I was sitting in the audience. Mr. Xu said that he has reserved theater seats for the next few events, and strongly commits it to his colleagues and friends.
More than halfway through the Paris Olympic Games, hundreds of cinemas in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing and other cities have brought "movie-watching" live broadcasts of the Olympic events to nearly 10,000 viewers through Tencent Cloud Live and other technologies. Some studio staff said that the attendance rate of the live broadcast of the Olympic event even exceeded that of many popular films.
"It's also the first time we've tried live in a theater, and the response has been really good." The person in charge of a cinema market told reporters, "The giant screen and audio equipment of the theater better restore the artistic effect of the opening ceremony; There is no lag and almost zero delay during the live broadcast of the event, and with the blessing of the live atmosphere, it is a completely different live experience from watching the game at home. ”
It is reported that more than 800 cinemas across the country that meet the requirements have joined the "Cinema to Watch the Olympics" event. Relying on years of technology accumulation and industry practice in the field of audio and video, Tencent Cloud provided a number of technical supports for the event, and broadcast the opening ceremony and competitions of the Paris Olympic Games to the big screens of multiple theaters across the country in ultra-high definition and low latency, making the artistic opening event more infectious, and the shocking audio-visual effects and fierce competition brought a more immersive experience to the audience.
Affected by multiple factors such as signal transmission lines, data processing, and terminal equipment, the live broadcast of large-scale events around the world has always been full of challenges. In the live broadcast process, the organizer often needs to remotely transmit the original collected audio and video signals to the production center at the event site, and then process and distribute the media through the cloud after secondary production through the production center, and finally present the event to the players of audiences around the world, and the stability and quality of the entire link transmission are particularly critical. However, in the live broadcast scenario, this link faces many quality problems, such as transmission lag, packet loss in mobile environments, insufficient bandwidth of a single network, or switching. These problems will cause the live broadcast to be unstable due to a single network link channel or insufficient bandwidth, resulting in uplink stream stuttering, which will have a bad impact on the experience of the broadcaster.
The relevant person in charge of Tencent Cloud said that in order to achieve the expected live broadcast effect in the theater and bring the best viewing experience to the audience, the project technical team needs to focus on overcoming four major challenges - the limitation of the transmission speed of the theater bandwidth, the playback clarity under the large-size giant screen, the low latency requirement of data transmission for the live broadcast of the event, and the full coverage of the distribution nodes of hundreds of theaters across the country at the same time.
In response to these four challenges, Tencent Cloud's technical team has developed a customized and developed a live broadcast solution for the "Cinema to Watch the Olympics" event, based on years of experience in large-scale sports live broadcasts, live concerts, and large-scale game e-sports events such as League of Legends.
First of all, Tencent Cloud uses powerful video encoding capabilities to compress the event images in real time, and superimposes ultra-fast HD intelligent perception dynamic coding technology to ensure the subjective quality of the video while saving more than 50% of the bandwidth cost, ensuring an ultra-high-definition and smooth video experience.
On the basis of smooth data transmission, Tencent Cloud further realizes real-time encoding of ultra-high resolution through intelligent scene recognition, dynamic encoding technology, and a three-level precise control model of CTU/line/frame, and comprehensively improves the clarity of the live broadcast image through AI image quality enhancement, so that the audience in the theater can see every dynamic detail clearly in the tense event.
In terms of addressing the challenges of data transmission latency, Tencent Cloud uses StreamLink video streaming media transmission service to compress the latency of global cross-region transmission to less than 400ms, and uses advanced technologies such as redundant scheduling engines, clustered video processing nodes, and load balancing to bring stable and efficient cloud processing capabilities for live data transmission. This technology can fully avoid problems such as frame skipping, stuttering, and audio and picture synchronization during the live broadcast of the event, and first ensure a smooth viewing experience.
Relying on Tencent's mature audio and video technology platform, Tencent Cloud CDN content delivery network, and leading audio and video AI technology, 800+ theaters across the country have been able to simultaneously receive ultra-high-definition content, so that Chinese audiences thousands of miles away from the Paris Olympic stadium can cheer with the audience in the theater.
At the 1980 Moscow Olympics, people watched the broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in a simple open-air cinema; At the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, people received the images of the Olympic stadium for the first time through digital live TV signals. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, more than 70,000 computers from around the world participated in the live broadcast of the Olympic Games for the first time. In 2024, people will reunite on the big screen and feel the live broadcast feast of cinema events brought by cloud computing for the first time.
Previously, Tencent Cloud StreamLink has served Tengjing Sports for five consecutive years, providing technical support for the global live broadcast of the League of Legends S Finals. During the Hangzhou Asian Games, Tencent Cloud undertook the live streaming between Hangzhou and Hong Kong. The "Cinema to Watch the Olympics" project will also arrange live broadcasts of more than 10 key events such as table tennis, badminton, and diving in the next stage of the event, as well as the live broadcast of the closing ceremony at 1:30 Beijing time on August 12. Tencent Cloud will also escort the whole process and continue to provide all-round technical support and guarantee for live broadcasting.