Sky Italia taps Viaccess-Orca for VR trial

Sky Italia is tapping Viaccess-Orca, Harmonic and VideoStitch to deliver a virtual reality platform that it is testing to broadcast basketball in a trial that will be showcased at next week’s NAB Show in Las Vegas.

Segments of the recorded broadcasts from the trial will be shown as part of Viaccess-Orca’s “Virtual Arena” demo during the show.

Specifically adapted to sports content distribution, with an emphasis on boosting fan engagement, the VR solution trialed by Sky Italia is compatible with industry standards, according to the companies involved.

According to Viaccess-Orca, the platform is pre-integrated, which allows content owners and pay-TV operators, such as Sky Italia, to quickly deploy services.

Harmonic provided Sky Italia with video delivery infrastructure components, including the ProMedia Xpress WFS multiscreen transcoder and packager for Ultra HD transcoding in MP4 and MPEG-DASH formats, as well as the ProMedia X Origin media server. These have been integrated with VideoStitch’s Vahana VR live 360° video stitching software. In addition to managing the entire VR ecosystem, Viaccess-Orca is providing its Virtual Arena”platform, which includes the Connected Sentinel Player for secure playback and cloud-based Voyage TV Everywhere as a Service for interactivity and analytics.

“Viaccess-Orca offers the industry’s most complete solution for premium 360° live and on-demand streaming, providing a level of flexibility, immersiveness, and content protection that is simply not available anywhere else,” said Alain Nochimowski, executive vice-president of Innovation at Viaccess-Orca.

“Partnering with Sky Italia and our technology partners on the trial, we look forward to bringing a virtual reality experience to the home very soon.”