Ateme is partnering with SES, Videolabs and IERT for the first end-to-end UHD satellite broadcast transmission using the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard, the company announced. The test transmission is using an SES satellite positioned at the 28.2-degree East orbital position and is relaying a 4K UHD video stream using VVC. Versatile Video Coding offers a 50% efficiency improvement over HEVC, the company says.
   

Source UHD video is being encoded with VVC and encapsulated in MPEG-TS using Ateme’s Titan Live video processing platform. The streams are modulated using DVB-S2 and broadcast via an Astra 2E transponder that covers all of Europe, the company said.

On the receive side, the signal is being demodulated by a DVB-to-IP gateway. It is then forwarded to the VLC player that displays the video in real-time using the OpenVVC decoder from IETR.

The test demonstrates key benefits of VVC, including optimized bandwidth efficiency, increased audience reach and improved QoE (quality of experience). VVC, a versatile new standard that covers a variety of applications—from broadcast to OTT delivery, improves on High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) compression efficiency by 50%, said Ateme.

The Joint Video Experts Team developed VVC. The team consists of experts from ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG.