KANAGAWA, JAPAN--Japan’s Kanagawa Institute of Technology has announced the successful transmission of an uncompressed 8K ultra-high-definition video earlier this month. The video trial--which took place Feb. 5 during the Sapporo Snow Festival, one of Japan's largest winter sporting events--was hosted by Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology and involved the transmission of uncompressed 8K video over a 100 Gbps Ethernet path linking the two cities.
The uncompressed video transmission demonstration also involved Japan’s National University Corporation of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, the NTT-IT Corporation, PFU Limited, AstroDesign, and the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation. The demonstration, referred to as the Sapporo Snow Festival Verification Test Event, involved the transmission of progressively-scanned 60-frame per second 8K UHD video content sent as a 12-bit stream at 24 Gbps. The received video was stored on two "super high-speed" video servers equipped with IP interfaces.
According to information provided by KAIT, stable distribution of the video stream as ensured via monitoring with "high-accuracy network measurement technology and the 8K video traffic meter." The trial also involved transmission of uncompressed 4K video.
The testing was conducted in order to gather information about the transmission, storage and production techniques involving 8K video, as plans are under way to provide UHD coverage of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. The next phase of the testing will involve implementation of a cloud-based production workflow for UHD streaming video.
