Live sports broadcasters can deliver 4K experiences from 720p sources. The high-efficiency solution enables to reduce CDN costs by up to 50%
Global broadcasters of live sports events face a significant challenge: Fans expect 4K experiences on their screens and are ready to pay premium subscriptions for it, but too often broadcasts are still captured in the field at lower resolutions such as 720p.
Delivering ultra-high-definition (4K) quality to televisions and mobile screens requires more data and compute, and bridging the gap between producers and consumers by upgrading studios, cameras and networking is complex and expensive. This economic and operational bottleneck creates a frustrating experience for dedicated fans. As a result, broadcasters risk both premium revenue and viewer loyalty.
Add Quality, Control Bitrate
Here’s a breakdown of the real-time video pipeline addressing the 4K live challenge:
Stage 1: The NVIDIA RTX Video Super Resolution transforms 720p source to 4K. This is done while avoiding hallucinations, such as distorted faces or texts, that compromise other AI quality enhancement models.
Stage 2: Beamr’s Content-Adaptive Bitrate technology (CABR) analyzes each frame, enabling real-time optimized compression. This brings a key advantage to the 720p to 4K pipeline, allowing bitrate control and reducing CDN costs by up to 50%, while preserving the key visual details of the 4K image.
We demonstrated a complete live broadcasting pipeline on NVIDIA Holoscan for Media, a real-time AI platform for live media. This demonstration won the TV Tech Best of Show award at IBC Show 2025.
Beamr’s CABR technology has been integrated into Holoscan for Media through its reference developer container, Media Gateway, enabling a SaaS solution that can be deployed both on-premises and in the Cloud.
Watch our presentation at IBC 2025
Monetization and Reduced Costs
For live sports broadcasters and streamers, this pipeline delivers key advantages:
- Unlock 4K Monetization: Deliver end-to-end premium 4K quality that can drive higher-tier subscriptions and new revenue streams without costly infrastructure investments.
- Reduce Delivery Costs: Leverage CDN-friendly solution to cut delivery and storage costs by up to 50%.
In the future, such a unified pipeline of GPU-accelerated video compression in real-time can enable other AI-enhancements, besides super resolution, such as adding metadata to the video or allowing search capabilities.
Book 1-on-1 meeting with Beamr’s video experts team
