Niclas Ericson, director of Fifa’s television division, has confirmed world football’s governing body is working on 8K production for this summer’s World Cup national team tournament in Brazil.
Fifa is already developing 4K broadcast initiatives in partnership with Japanese electronics company Sony. Ericson said the governing body has now linked up with Japanese public-service broadcaster NHK for 8K production, according to the Advanced Television website.
“With NHK of Japan we are also working on 8K production,” Ericson said. “This will include a few matches but is a very different arrangement, with a handful of cameras – only a few exist. But it does mean that we can down-convert the 8K camera work to 4K, and make those images available for the 4K productions.”
Ericson said Fifa is still exploring how this might be achieved technically and in a cost-effective way that would allow broadcasters “if they wished, to take the material.”
Ericson added: “We have had lots of discussions with our broadcasting clients, and looking at whether we can put the 4K signals onto a ‘world feed’ and if we were to do this who might take the signals, and what would we need in terms of fibre and satellite capacity to do this. Needless to say there are many Asian broadcasters willing to do this. It will be interesting for us to see how this works out, and discussions are taking place now to see how much interest there is. As well as this we will be making delayed images available should they wish to have them, and we will produce two movies of the events.
“We are in discussions now with potential carriers of what we describe as a ‘world feed’ (in 4K) and we recognise that the industry is also struggling with whether to handle 30 fps or 60 fps, but we want to do the very best we can. We hope that there will be a few Asian broadcasters, and then in the Middle East as well as Europe, will take the 4K feed, as well as (media group) Globo in Brazil, and perhaps some cinema exhibition around the world.”