While the French football team left the South Africa FIFA World Cup under a cloud, France Telecom subsidiary GlobeCast has its head held high after a successful tournament in which it provided contribution for 28 live matches in 3D. The games were transmitted around the world by satellite, displayed to cinema audiences and also received by major broadcasters including ESPN in the USA, which launched its 3D channel ESPN 3D in time for the tournament.
Contribution from the stadia to the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) was performed as separate left eye and right eye streams using JPEG2000 compression. At the IBC, Sensio equipment converted two HD SDI signals into one HD SDI side-by-side (Frame Compatible) output and this was encoded with an Ericsson E5780 HD encoder in MPEG-2 at 40Mbps in 27MHz of bandwidth using DVB-S2 modulation, uplinked via Intelsat to London, with fibre back-up into London and Frankfurt. From London the signals were redistributed worldwide.
Because some cinema projectors could only work with 720p HD (Frame Compatible 3DTV) GlobeCast also decoded the MPEG-2 stream in London to convert the content into this HD format, taking care of some specific audio configurations as well. For the rest of the market the signal was delivered as 1080i50 HD. Broadcast/Pay TV customers for the GlobeCast 3D contribution feeds included ESPN in the US, Sky PerfecTV in Japan, CCTV in China, SBS in Australia, TF1 in France and Sogecable in Spain.