It is always important to keep tabs on potential new use cases in the virtual reality industry. Deutsche Telekom is doing exactly that, as the service provider wants to stream the Basketball Bundesliga to its customers. This new streaming service will use 360-degree OTT technology and bring fans closer to the action.
Another Sports-Oriented VR Experiment
There have been numerous sports-related endeavors associated with virtual reality as of late. Unsurprisingly, most of those efforts pertain to the United States and Canada. In Germany, a new venture is currently getting a lot of attention. German telco Deutsche Telekom will experiment with streaming Basketball Bundesliga games in virtual reality. The first trial has been conducted successfully this past weekend.
More specifically, the first game was streamed free of charge to all participants. Viewers could enjoy the game in 360-degree and at a resolution of 6k. That latter aspect is quite important, as VR streaming is designed to bring fans a lot closer to the action itself. Without a decent image quality, that will not happen under any circumstances. All of this is facilitated by using tiled Baed Stream technology in conjunction with the Magenta VR application.
Deutsche Telekom’s VR division head Stephan Heininger adds:
“With Magenta VR and Magenta Musik 360, Telekom offers a wide range of excellent virtual entertainment formats, while always offering our users the highest streaming quality. In the future, even more live broadcasts streaming will enable the best VR experience ever.”
This large-scale VR streaming test has been deemed a success That is mainly because the content was accessible on all Android smartphones. Additionally, the service also supports the Oculus Go and Google Daydream VR headsets. Spanning multiple platforms has been a troublesome venture for the VR industry to date. It is a bit unclear if more games will be streamed for the foreseeable future. The first experiment shows there is a future for this technology.
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