The Olympic Games is always a platform for new records and ground-breaking achievements, but one of the most dominant features of London 2012 will be the evolution of sports television. The BBC, host broadcaster of the Games, has invested in enormous sums in trying to deliver the best possible coverage. And just a few days ago, the broadcaster showcased super hi vision, with pictures 16 times as sharp as HDTV.
Certainly, coverage of the Games has come an awfully long way in the last few years and owing to the fact that the event is only held once every four year, it offers a great demonstration of just how far TV technology has come. At Los Angles in 1983, high-definition technology was first introduced to the world.
Sport lends itself to superior picture quality and better coverage like no other entity, perhaps. And from a fans point of view, it is incredible to watch the pictures in such quality. Tim Plyming, the man behind the BBC's Olympic trials of the new TV system, hailed the work the team has done to innovate sports coverage.
"The scale of the Olympics is a great testing bed," he told the BBC. "Most of the big leaps in technology that we've known - from black and white to colour and from standard definition to high definition, and now to ultra-high definition - have all had their home at the Olympic Games."