Latin America’s largest public television network delivers immersive and personalized sound with
MPEG-H Audio.
This marks another milestone in Brazil’s journey of moving free-to-air digital TV towards an immersive and personalized media experience with the SBTVD TV 2.5 standard. A study put TV Cultura only behind BBC One as the public broadcaster with high-quality content geared towards an intellectually and technologically demanding audience. The broadcaster reaches 2.000 municipalities and 27 states in Brazil with its content.
On March 1, regular 24/7 transmission in MPEG-H Audio was launched on the CulturaHD channel after a year of intensive tests and trials at the broadcaster’s São Paulo headquarters. Currently, it covers the city of São Paulo and will soon be extended to the entire state, followed by nation-wide distribution. Enabling MPEG-H Audio comes with a stack of benefits for broadcasters. In addition to the enhanced user experience, a significantly less complex production process, consistent loudness handling, and a future-proof investment are some of the most attractive benefits. “The opportunity to not only deliver our content with immersive sound but also to provide personalization options made implementing MPEG-H Audio on our main HD channel an easy decision,” explains José Maria Martin, Technical Coordinator of TV Cultura. “We look forward to expanding the distribution until we reach country-wide coverage.”
“We are really pleased that the CulturaHD audience can now experience some of the unique capabilities that set MPEG-H Audio apart from other codecs,” says Marc Gayer, Head of the Business Department and Deputy Division Director Audio and Media Technologies at Fraunhofer IIS. Soon, viewers can unlock these options on modern TV sets and set-top-boxes using an easy-to-navigate interface. It will also become possible to enable accessibility features like audio description and dialog enhancement through such a device’s preferred audio settings.
TV Cultura management set up a screening room at their São Paulo facility that is dedicated to the new setup and helps their staff and visitors experience and monitor the enhanced service. It is equipped with a 5.1+4H immersive loudspeaker system powered by a Denon AVR which supports MPEG-H Audio. “We are delighted to have a quality control room dedicated to MPEG-H Audio in our headquarters. It lets us share the personalized and immersive experiences that our viewers now have access to and explore the new opportunities that come with them. Ultimately, it helps us deliver programming that is on an entirely new level. We look forward to working with more and more industry partners and consumer electronics manufacturers to drive the adoption of MPEG-H Audio in Brazil,” states Nelson Faria Jr., Technical Director of TV Cultura.
In order to deliver this enhanced Next Generation Audio experience to their viewers, the technical team from TV Cultura enabled the generation and distribution of a TV 2.5 broadcast signal by adding a Linear Acoustic Authoring and Monitoring System and the Kyrion 5000e encoder by Ateme to their current infrastructure.
Taking this step cements TV Cultura’s role as a technological leader keen to create exceptional content for their audience. Their commitment to using the most sophisticated tools to deliver outstanding programming also facilitates the transition to TV 3.0, Brazil’s next generation broadcast system.
