53 VR FOCUS Sports
THIS IS NOT THE END OF THE GAME WITH VR, IT’S BASICALLY THE BEGINNING
says Beale. “On the bigger events, the 12-camera jobs, we use the Blackmagic Design ATEM switcher. From there it goes into an H.264 encoder and it gets streamed to our back end system, hosted by Deltatre.” This sports tech company has been the key VR partner for BT Sport from the start, a partnership formed on that initial UEFA Champions League final. “Deltatre do two things for us,” explains Beale. “They put out the cameras and manage cameras on the ground. And they also provide their Diva Player app, which is embedded into our BT Sport app. When you press on a match and it asks if you want to use the enhanced player, it actually opens the Diva Player inside the app. “In the app you can do all sorts of things, not just watch the live game – you can see live data overlays, you can choose multiple angles for replays, you can see scores of other matches. “We didn’t want the viewers to come out of that experience to enjoy the VR, so we’ve now put the VR player in the same app. It’s a seamless experience – you can watch a goal in VR or 2D.” During the live production, BT Sport clips up main events in VR and publishes them against a timeline. In the app, users see a live timeline that displays all the match’s key events, such as goals or red cards, as icons.
Pinned to that are VR replays that viewers can go back and watch at any time. “The other sport we do in VR is MotoGP, a premium motorsport with motorbikes. On any given race weekend, Dorna Sports, the rights holder for MotoGP and also the host broadcaster, will put a VR camera on the pillion of one rider. So you can sit onboard in 360 behind the rider. That is an amazing experience, particularly on the first few laps when all the bikes are really close and constantly swapping places.” MULTITASKING MOBILES However, this audience is not using VR in the fully immersive, goggles-bound way you might think. Although the BT Sport app can run on Oculus for a full VR 360 experience, the most commonly used hardware are smartphones and tablets. It also supports Google Cardboard.
“You can stick it into Google Cardboard, but quite often we find that people use it in what we call Magic Window mode, where they just hold the phone up and move it around,” says Beale. “The feedback we got was that if people were using Cardboard, they didn’t like how they lost the use of their phone while they were doing it. They want to be on Twitter or text. If you’re a sociable user of content, you’ll do all of those things at one time. With the Magic Window you can be in and out of the app, it’s all in one place. You don’t need to be fumbling around going in and out of Google Carboard or an Oculus.” 8K WOW FACTOR “This is not the end of the game with VR, it’s basically the beginning,” says Beale. “Whenever we do anything, whether that’s a service or a product for customers, we always measure it against our benchmark values – does this bring customers closer to the heart of the sport, does it immerse them and make them more engaged? We believe that VR does.” Thus the next goal for BT Sport in VR is to improve that experience – and 8K is the key. “At present we [capture] a 4K VR experience, but when you get that into a headset or onto a phone, that’s still relatively low resolution, because it’s an HD cut-out of a 4K rectangular video,” says Beale. “So we’re trying to move on to an 8K VR experience that will capture all the source content live in 8K. We will distribute that using a slightly different technology
THE THICK OF IT BT Sports have used the latest technology to get fans even closer to the sporting action
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