5G + 8K Opening-Ceremony Broadcast: World Police & Fire Games, Chengdu

The brief

The 2019 World Police & Fire Games opened in Chengdu, and the ceremony needed a genuine live 8K broadcast — not upscaled 4K — spanning the main stage, the surrounding carnival zone and the athletes themselves. A live event of this scale leaves no room for a second take: the signal has to hold in true 8K from the first cue to the last, across performers, moving crowds and wide stadium shots that push an 8K chain to its limits.

What we did

We delivered the ceremony with China's first 5G+8K ultra-high-definition broadcast vehicle fleet, deploying five 8K cameras to cover the stage, the carnival zone and the athlete areas at once. The 8K signals were encoded in real time and carried live over a 5G link, with a dedicated technical director cutting the program feed and engineers holding redundant encoding and transport paths ready throughout.The production ran in partnership with China Telecom Chengdu and Sharp. Every camera position and every link was tested and rehearsed in full 8K before the ceremony began, because a live opening ceremony gives you exactly one chance to get it right.

The result

A stable, genuine live 8K broadcast of the opening ceremony — one of China's earliest 5G+8K productions delivered at this scale. Five-camera 8K coverage brought the stage, the crowd and the athletes together in a single ultra-high-definition program, while the same feed was down-converted simultaneously to 4K and HD so every screen received the best picture it could show. The 8K masters were retained for on-demand and large-format display use, and the broadcast helped demonstrate what a 5G+8K vehicle fleet could do at a real international event. For a ceremony watched at home and in the arena, the result put the same ultra-high-definition picture in front of every kind of screen at once.