Sports franchises and gaming segments have been at the forefront of integrating ultra-high definition (4K/8K/16K) immersive experiences to not only enhance engagement rates but also drive D2C (OTT TV & video services) customer acquisition. Historically, the high cost of AR/VR headsets, content production (processing power, latency, and refresh rates), and userexperience limitations (motion sickness, heavy devices on the eyes, etc) have resulted in low consumption and penetration of UHD content repositories.
However, with the advent of venues like the Sphere in Las Vegas, there has been steady rise in live immersive events i.e. music concerts, sports, film & TV awards etc. In September 2024, Nexus Studios, in collaboration with Pixitmedia and AWS, curated 450-seconds of 16K film titled “For Mexico, For All Time” pre-configured with the UFC306 at Riyadh Season resulting into ticket sales of US$22mn with 16,024 patrons.
Our team recently invited Nexus Studios and AWS along to a webinar to discuss how they built a scalable, cost-efficient hybrid infrastructure capable of delivering a 144-million-pixel immersive experience.
Data archive, GPU render availability, and cost-efficient workgroup collaboration remained the key priorities
Ryan Cawthorne, Head of IT and Engineering at Nexus Studios, highlighted that historically they have been engaged across low to mid octane UHD (8K/12K) projects with upscale to 16K but haven’t rendered media asset to 15,360 x 8,640 pixels resolution at scale. Furthermore, one of the core priorities for Nexus Studios was archiving this significant amount of data without offsetting concurrent project performance and throughput.
Watch Pixitmedia’s Beyond Limits: Nexus Studios’ 16K Cloud-Optimized Pipeline for the Las Vegas Sphere webinar for more insights on the deployment. Click Here
Rendering in 16K required close to 200 GPU availability, along with scalable infrastructure to meet the capability volatility. Although Nexus Studios has been an early mover towards embracing a hybrid cloud infrastructure (utilizing their existing legacy back-bone), leveraging Pixitmedia’s data orchestrator, Ngenea, and high-performance software-defined storage, Pixstor , this project was characterized by:
- Seamlessly integrated on-premises and cloud data collaboration
- End-to-end converged workflow for creatives with a user-friendly interface (including single click scale up functionality)
- Cost-effective orchestrated data management (archive, exchange, re-usability etc), with negligible deduplication costs. View Pixitmedia’s Ngenea capabilities
- Dynamic routing of data and file workloads to unused GPUs to offer sustainable rendering performance – every time
- Global access to media asset repositories (raw file, data, rendered images) (View Pixitmedia’s Pixstor functionalities)
- Exploitation of Global Namespace, a unified structured data repository to ease workgroup collaboration across teams
- Multi-layered simulations (SD/HD/4K/8K) and iterative reviews across the rendering lifecycle
- Autoscaling (cloud burst) and on-demand optimization, tightly integrated with operating system agnostic (Windows, Linux, Mac) render management toolkits (AWS Thinkbox Deadline 10)
Turn 16K “Hype to Reality” with a collaborative best of breed technology ecosystem
As revealed by Kevin Booth, Visual Compute Director AWS, sports franchises will accelerate UHD immersive experience projects leveraging a hybrid cloud infrastructure (as pricing is based on collective compute run-time) to accelerate premium quality of engagement (QoE) and single live event ROI.
The 16K Noche UFC use case at the Las Vegas Sphere emphasizes the necessity for a robust discovery, planning, and adaptive infrastructure re-engineering lead times. Ongoing data and metadata efficiencies, along with a collaborative best-of-breed technology vendor ecosystem, are key for streamlining creative workgroup collaboration for sustainable execution of high-octane immersive experiences in the future.
