CAMPBELL, Calif.—Fox Sports and YBVR have announced that they will be creating an immersive virtual reality experience for the Copa América Final on Meta Quest, revolutionizing how fans engage with sports broadcasting.

More specifically, Fox Sports will bring the Copa América Final to virtual reality (VR) on YBVR's Xtadium platform, which is exclusively available on Meta Quest.

Produced in an immersive 180-degree format, the VR experience will enable fans to experience the excitement and intensity of the match from multiple perspectives within the stadium.

Fox Sports and YBVR said that this groundbreaking collaboration combines cutting-edge VR technology with extensive coverage, providing viewers with unprecedented access to live matches and comprehensive content.

In addition to the Final to be played on Sunday, July 14th (8 PM ET), YBVR's direct-to-consumer platform, Xtadium, available exclusively on Meta Quest, will also showcase the 3rd Place match live in VR. 

Also available within the app, and free to all users, are full replays of the Copa América Semifinals - Argentina vs. Canada and Colombia vs Uruguay.

"We are thrilled to team up with Fox Sports and to provide them a platform within Meta Quest to broadcast Copa América to fans in VR," said Hector Prieto, CEO of VBYR. "This opportunity underscores our commitment to innovation in live sports streaming, enhancing viewer engagement and delivering a truly immersive experience."

Within Xtadium, Fox Sports will publish shorter 5-minute highlight packages of the Semifinals, 3rd Place match and the Final providing fans with quick recaps of the tournament's most thrilling moments.

"We're excited to bring our presentation of the Copa América 3rd Place & Finals matches to YBVR and Meta Quest, so fans can enjoy this new, immersive experience from the comfort of their own homes," said Michael Bucklin, senior vice president of digital at Fox Sports. "Through this state-of-the-art VR technology and our determination to be at the forefront of broadcast innovation, this is yet another example of our determination to deliver enhanced, differentiated, world-class viewing experiences to sports fans."

The live VR broadcasts and content offerings will be available for free viewing via Meta Quest and YBVR's direct-to-consumer service Xtadium from July 11th, 2024. Viewers can download Xtadium for free from the Meta Horizon store to access the live VR streams, replays, and highlights.

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS—NDI, the globally standardized video-over-IP technology, today announces that its SDK plugin is now compatible with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) and is available for download now.

“As soon as Unreal Engine 5 was released by Epic, we were receiving requests for an NDI SDK plugin so more creatives can unite the powers of UE5, and NDI, to achieve more with video," ays Tarif Sayed, President, and GM of NDI.  "NDI has a great relationship with Epic, and we’ve worked together for over 5 years to bring our joint users more value and are immensely excited to see how they harness the potential of our technologies together, to advance virtual storytelling.”

The NDI SDK enables systems like UE5 to find, send and receive video streams over IP, with an encoding algorithm independent of resolution and frame rate supporting up to 4K and beyond, along with 16 channels of floating-point audio. It also includes tools to implement video access and grouping, bi-directional metadata, IP commands, tally and more.

With the improved integration of NDI into Unreal, creators unlock full IP support for both inputs and outputs of audio and video—even with an alpha channel. The SDK allows creators to build commercial or free AR and VR without any royalties so both large, and small teams can push the boundaries of what is possible in creating visual content and experiences. Now, they can also leverage NDI’s revolutionary potential for sharing video-over-IP in the highest quality, with the lowest latency, the company said.

“We’re excited with the potential for creators to use the new SDK plugin for UE5 to make incredible real-time 3D content,” adds Bernt Johannessen, Unreal Engine Business Director for Broadcast at Epic Games. “With NDI, teams have access to multiple live video sources and Unreal Engine tools all on a standard network, removing obstacles and lowering complexity of live content creation without compromising quality. Unreal Engine is the world’s most open and advanced 3D creation tool on the market, and together with the world’s most used and adopted video-over-IP technology, we’re removing obstacles and giving storytellers more freedom to create amazing content.”

For more information, and to download the NDI SDK plugin for Unreal Engine 5, visit: https://ndi.tv/sdk/ 

Fremont, CA - November 15, 2018 - Blackmagic Design today announced that its ATEM 4 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K live production switcher and ATEM 1 M/E Advanced Panel were used as part of the immersive live streaming workflow at the recent Oculus Connect 5, Oculus’ annual virtual reality developer conference.

Headed by Supersphere, an L.A. based immersive content and technology company, the 4K and 12G-SDI virtual reality (VR) workflow also relied on a number of additional Blackmagic Design products, including six Teranex AV standards converters, a Smart Videohub 12G 40x40 router, six HyperDeck Studio 12G broadcast recorders, five DeckLink 4K Pro capture and playback cards and several Teranex Mini Quad SDI to 12G-SDI converters.

“We have been working with Facebook and Oculus for a while as an immersive streaming provider,” said Jason Diamond, partner and technical creative director, Supersphere. “For Oculus Connect 5, there were some unusual requests. We needed to not only stream the all important keynotes for several hours each day, but we also had to stream more than 10 hours of esports tournament finals into Oculus Venues. We have expertise in immersive esports streaming, and used several tools, including the Blackmagic Design suite, to build custom environments in headset to give a richer esports experience for fans all over the world.”

Available inside the Oculus Go and GearVR headsets, the Oculus Venues platform allows users to attend live events in VR with all the sounds, lights and energy of really being there.

“Our technical workflow was a little different for each style of input. For some sources, especially those coming from graphics cards on the gaming computers, we would use a Teranex AV to upconvert from 1920 x 1080 to Ultra HD for inclusion in the overall 4K environment,” explained Diamond. “All sources would eventually feed into the ATEM 4 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K at the heart of our system. We used the ATEMs as the control center and as the primary switching environment for any immersive broadcast. We also routed ISOs and the line cut to the HyperDeck Studio 12Gs for recording.”

“For Oculus Connect 5, we pretty much used every feature the ATEM 4 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K had in its bag of tricks; advanced chroma keying, Ultra HD multi viewers and built in SuperSource were all core to our workflow. Additionally, esports by nature has a ton of sources, so the ATEM’s 20 inputs came in handy, and we were maxed out on our console at times,” he added. “Meanwhile, the Teranex AV is just an industry workhorse. It’s famous for ‘anything in/anything out,’ and it’s our Swiss Army knife for formats and conversions.”

The majority of the Blackmagic Design gear is housed in two flypacks purposefully designed for live VR, 360º, 180º and 4K streaming and built on a 12G-SDI infrastructure from the ground up. The flypacks are used on a weekly basis, traveling all over the world for events and shows.

“Our overall philosophy when building our racks is to merge new technology with proven technology and workflows. Multi cam, multi geometry immersive streaming is hard. The trick is to blend the new, sometimes very unusual tools with the stock and trade of broadcast,” said Diamond. “By doing that, we are able to hire talented, experienced broadcast professionals and leverage their decades of experience in producing great shows while bringing in enough new technology to allow the immersive elements to shine.”

He concluded, “Our business started encompassing a fair amount of multi cam immersive live streaming, and we needed to build a reliable, robust set of solutions that would let us do that at a professional level for demanding shows and clients. Blackmagic Design provides products at just the right intersection of price, feature set and performance, allowing a growing company to build professional grade solutions for high end projects.”

Press Photography

Product photos of ATEM 4 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K, ATEM 1 M/E Advanced Panel, Teranex AV, Smart Videohub 12G 40x40, HyperDeck Studio 12G, DeckLink 4K Pro, Teranex Mini Quad SDI to 12G-SDI and all other Blackmagic Design products are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/images

About Blackmagic Design

Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and real time film scanners for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability in post production, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI products and stereoscopic 3D and Ultra HD workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, UK, Japan, Singapore and Australia. For more information, please go to www.blackmagicdesign.com

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS–Harmonic will demo its latest portfolio of products for virtual reality, UHD and OTT distribution solutions at IBC 2016.

Harmonic will showcase cloud DVR and packaging capabilities of its VOS Cloud and VOS 360. The company will also demo new virtualized playout and delivery capabilities for its Spectrum media server product line.

In the virtual reality realm, Harmonic will show a 360-degree virtual reality experience powered by the company’s signature Harmonic PURE Compression Engine. Interested visitors are also encouraged to attend a paper presentation by Harmonic’s Vice President of Video Strategy, Thierry Fautier, who will explore news ideas in virtual reality and 360 degree immersive media. The paper presentation will take place Saturday, Sept. 10, at 10:45 AM.

To see all of Harmonic’s latest product demos visit their booth at 1.B20. The IBC Show takes place at the RAI in Amsterdam, Sept. 8-13.