Tens of thousands of people took advantage of the opportunity offered by the City of Vilnius and Telia to see blooming sakuras online

7 terabytes, or 7 000 gigabytes (GB) – this is the amount of data transmitted by a camera with communication equipment set up by Telia in Chisinau Sugihara Sakura Park in the centre of Vilnius per month, which ensured live broadcasting of Japanese cherry blossoms in 4K resolution. This is a record amount of data sent by one mobile communication card per month in Lithuania.

“We have customers transferring extremely large amounts of data via unlimited mobile Internet. But most of the time, they download data, meanwhile equipment, which ensured live broadcasts of blooming sakuras, uploaded data for most of the time. The average daily traffic of this data was 200 GB, adding up to 7 terabytes per month,” says Saulius Kalasnikovas, Video Surveillance Solutions expert at Telia.

He counted that this was the amount of mobile data that, on average, 2-3 thousand people transfer per month.

Such an impressive amount of data was generated due to the fact that the camera that broadcasted sakura blooming live was a 4K resolution camera, which is four times more than the standard Full HD, which the majority of people is now accustomed to. Therefore, having turned on the broadcast on a large 4K TV screen, individual blooms could be counted on the screen, even though the camera itself was installed at a height of about 7 meters.

Kalašnikovas said that ensuring an uninterrupted 4K resolution broadcast via mobile connection was a challenge even with Telia 4G LTE network, which is the fastest in Lithuania. “This broadcast took place on a real network, which was used by our other customers at the same time. So, we had to find a solution to ensure that such a data-intensive broadcast is smooth and does not affect other users,” says a Telia expert.

Tens of thousands of people took advantage of the opportunity offered by the City of Vilnius and Telia to see blooming sakuras online.

“Since this year, the sakura park, which has been the attraction of Vilnius residents in spring, had to be fenced due to the risk posed by quarantine and mass gathering, the annual tradition of selfies with sakura blooms in the background had to be changed to live broadcasts at home. Taking into account the interest which people showed in the idea, the experiment was a real success – this year, technology allowed transferring positive emotions which sakura blooms bring every spring to be spread in homes of Vilnius residents or even hospitals, reaching those, who cannot physically see them,” says Eglė Radvilė, Adviser to the Director of Vilnius City Administration on IT matters.

The section of a website created by the City for quarantine (https://karantinas.lt/sakuros/) alone had more than 30 000 visitors and was the most popular page on the entire website. The sakura park was also broadcasted live in the Facebook group #susijungiam, and it was also available on TV screens on Telia TV zero channel.

About 80 spectators at a time watched live sakura blossom broadcasts at a time, with an average viewing time being about one minute. Blooming sakuras were broadcasted from the 9^th of April till the 7^th of May.