Ateme and LiveLike bring virtual reality to Roland Garros

Ateme's Titan Live encoding and LiveLike's virtual reality application have allowed us to develop an interesting VR experience at the prestigious tennis tournament.

The potential of Titan Live's live video compression and distribution solution Atem It has once again been evident at the French Open. Titan Live was used to power a virtual reality app that was available throughout the tournament. The app offered a 180° and 360° live viewing experience to tennis fans and was created by Ateme partner, LiveLike. Available free on iOS and Android devices, it used the Titan Live solution to encode Ultra High Definition signals at various bit rates to deliver the best video quality experience on tablets and smartphones to French Open fans.

TITAN Live is a high-quality, high-density software compression solution designed for cable, DTH and OTT capable of delivering live content in SD, HD and Ultra HD (UHD). Starting from a pure and hardware-agnostic CPU concept, it is executable on any operating system: Linux, Windows and Virtual Machine. It is based on the 5th generation Ateme Stream compression engine and delivers the highest video quality at minimum bit rates with accelerated parallel processing. The solution also addresses current and future requirements by addressing primary displays and multi-screen applications, from low resolutions to UHD p60.

Fabrice Lorenceau, co-founder and head of production at LiveLike, highlights that "the organizers of the French Open sought to break new ground and be pioneers in delivering the tournament this time in virtual reality to fans with scale and quality. LiveLike is delighted to have taken a critical role in the French Open VR project in close collaboration with Ateme. More importantly, fans have truly been delighted with the experience."

Claude Stoffel, EMEA Sales Director at Ateme, adds: "We have been working with LiveLike for over two years focused on how to improve the VR user experience. Today, we are very proud to contribute to the creation of this exciting new application developed for the tournament. With viewer demand and expectations changing so rapidly, it is truly incredible to watch a tennis match as if you were just a few meters from the tennis players, while the viewer is comfortably seated on the couch. By combining our Titan Live encoding technology and “With the LiveLike VR application we are entering the future of television.”