TORONTO — The race to deliver live 4K sports events to TV customers in Canada heated up significantly in the last week, with Rogers slightly ahead of Bell at achieving major firsts in the industry.
Thanks to an agreement with BT Sport in the UK, Rogers Sportsnet broadcast the National Basketball Association’s first-ever live NBA game in 4K, when the Toronto Raptors played against the Orlando Magic at The O2 Arena in London, England on January 14. That was six days before Bell’s TSN network is scheduled to broadcast its first NBA game in 4K (a.k.a. Ultra HD), when the Raptors host the Boston Celtics on January 20.
On the heels of achieving its NBA first, Rogers Sportsnet will also deliver the first-ever National Hockey League game in 4K, when the Toronto Maple Leafs host the Montreal Canadiens at the Air Canada Centre on Saturday, January 23. The first NHL game scheduled to be broadcast in 4K by TSN will be on February 4, when the Ottawa Senators host the Edmonton Oilers.
At an event on Monday, Rogers executives discussed the broadcaster’s plans for live 4K sports events, expanding on its commitment to 4K announced back in October. Rogers Media president Rick Brace (pictured in the middle with Scott Moore, right andf Dirk Woessner, left) said live sports is really going to drive the broadcaster’s overall 4K project. In total, Rogers will provide 500 hours of 4K content in 2016, which includes 300 hours of 4K sports content alone, Brace said.
In addition to 20 NHL games to be broadcast in 4K in 2016, Rogers Sportsnet will also broadcast all 81 Toronto Blue Jays home games in 4K this year, said Scott Moore, president of Sportsnet and NHL Properties at Rogers.
“I’m proud to be able to say that we’re now North America’s 4K sports leader. We’ve committed to doing more live sporting events than any other broadcaster in North America, and in fact second only to BT Sport anywhere in the world,” Moore said.
Rogers Sportsnet was able to beat Bell’s TSN at being first to deliver a 4K broadcast of an NBA game to a North American audience when it became aware BT Sport would be broadcasting the Raptors-Magic game in London in 4K. The decision to telecast the game in 4K to its Canadian customers was made by Rogers about 48 hours prior to the broadcast, Brace said. “So it really was a race to the finish line,” Brace said.
It’s likely very few Canadians actually saw the game at home on a 4K television, however, as 4K set top boxes are barely in the market.
Moore added a little more insight into what went into getting the 4K broadcast of the NBA game in London to air in Canada. “We had to bring that (broadcast) over from London, and there were only two physical boxes that could convert the European standard of 50 frames per second to the North American standard of 60 frames per second. One of those boxes was in Kitchener, and one of them was in Ottawa. We flew and drove the two boxes in (to its Toronto facility) and had the broadcast working only mere hours before we went to air,” Moore said.
BT Sport has offered live 4K sports content for a little over a year in the UK, and through its discussions with the UK broadcaster, Rogers has learned a few lessons about delivering live 4K content already, Moore said. He explained BT Sport decided early on in its 4K project rollout to broadcast in true native 4K so it could tell customers everything they were seeing was absolutely, fully technically 4K. However, in those early days, BT Sport customers complained they were missing out on certain replay angles because non-4K cameras were eliminated from BT Sport’s broadcasts in favour of going with all-4K technology. In fact, for the first eight to nine months, BT Sport didn’t even have 4K-enabled zoom lenses, which it has now been using for the last few months, Moore said.
“What we’ve learned from them is, yes, all the camera shots will all be in 4K, but some of the replays and specialty cameras, like the net cam in our situation, will be up-converted, and that’s to make sure the 4K broadcast is as good in every way and better technically, but is as good from a story-telling standpoint as the HD broadcast,” Moore said.
Although the NBA game in London was Sportsnet’s first live 4K sports broadcast, Moore said his first phone call to discuss the possibilities of airing live sports in 4K was to NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. Moore’s second phone call was to MLB, given Sportsnet’s Blue Jays home game broadcast schedule.
“Gary didn’t need any convincing, I just needed to explain it to him and how it was going to affect our broadcasts,” Moore said. “The most important thing to him, and it’s the most important thing to me, is that no matter what we do with the 4K broadcast, it can’t make the regular broadcast worse.”
Back in October, Rogers said it would begin using 4K high dynamic range (HDR) technology to broadcast Blue Jays games during the 2016 season. However, the HDR standard has not been finalized yet, and is not expected to be until the third or fourth quarter of 2016 at the earliest, Moore said. “When we spoke in October, we had literally just seen the first HDR content,” Moore said.
All of Rogers’s current 4K content is being broadcast on its Channel 999, with Rogers cable customers needing to have a 4K TV and one of the Rogers NextBox 4K set-top boxes installed to view the content. According to Dirk Woessner, president of the consumer business unit at Rogers, the company has about 200 customers using its NextBox 4K set-top box so far. “And actually the customer demand that we have for these boxes far exceeded what we were originally expecting,” Woessner said.
Moore said due to CRTC regulations, all of Rogers’s 4K content is available and must be available to other BDUs. “Certainly for the Sportsnet brand, we want to have this quality content available to the widest number of viewers. But not all BDUs have 4K boxes in the market. We believe Rogers is the only one that has. Videotron has a small number, but in English Canada, we believe that we’re the only BDU with 4K boxes actually in people’s homes right now,” Moore said.
“Transmission for the broadcasts is not quite four times the cost, but it’s four times the bandwidth, so there’s a little bit there… But I said this in October, and it’s turning out to be true, that the cost to go from HD to 4K is significantly less than going from SD to HD.” – Scott Moore, Rogers Media
That is expected to change soon as Bell announced on Monday that its Fibe TV customers in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec City can now purchase Bell’s new 4K Whole Home PVR. Calling it the most advanced 4K PVR available today, Bell said the Fibe TV 4K Whole Home PVR has the largest recording capacity (up to 150 hours of 4K content) and is the only one compatible with Bluetooth remote control. In late February, the 4K Whole Home PVR will be made available to all Bell Fibe TV customers in Canada and to Bell Aliant FibreOP TV customers in Atlantic Canada.
As far as Rogers’s investment in 4K technology, on the production side, there are “two large buckets of capital expenditure,” Moore said. “One was developing the 4K production mobiles (trucks) that we’ve done with Dome Productions (co-owned by Bell). They’ve committed to having two 4K production mobiles on the road by late spring…Each production mobile is multiple millions (of dollars), I’d say high single-digit millions to build.”
The second big expense on the production side is developing a master control at the Sportsnet facility in Toronto, which will be about a couple of million dollars to build, Moore said.
“Then there are operating costs…Now, transmission for the broadcasts is not quite four times the cost, but it’s four times the bandwidth, so there’s a little bit there,” Moore said. “But I said this in October, and it’s turning out to be true, that the cost to go from HD to 4K is significantly less than going from SD to HD.”
Speaking with Cartt.ca after the formal Rogers 4K discussion, Brace said it would be fair to say the company’s 4K-related capital expenditures so far were approaching $10 million. “The majority of the capital costs are really Dome Productions,” Brace said. “And quite honestly, they’re rebuilding their trucks anyway, and in the overall scheme of things it’s not a lot of capital.” Dome Productions is co-owned by Rogers and Bell.
He also spoke about the advantage that Rogers’s vertical integration has given the company when it comes to rolling out its 4K plans.
“When you talk about vertical integration, there’s always a concern that you get too big and you get too strong. But I think in this particular case, it’s what allows us to innovate like this. If we were a standalone, pure-play, specialty broadcaster, you’re a lot less likely to make the investment because the next step is you have to go out and ensure you have carriage, you have to ensure you have the infrastructure, and because we are vertically integrated it’s a lot easier for us to do,” Brace told Cartt.ca.
Previously, Rogers said in October it was considering offering customers a Sportsnet channel dedicated to 4K content that would be made available to other BDUs. However, Brace said a 4K Sportsnet channel was not on the horizon yet.
“We talked about that. We really haven’t advanced our thinking. We’re going to wait and see,” Brace told Cartt.ca.
