Sky Deutschland pushes ahead with pioneering 5G trials for in-stadium app and e2e broadcasting By Heather McLean, Editor
Monday, November 29, 2021 - 15:23
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Sky Sport implemented a 5G business to business proof of concept (PoC) trial for the Sky Multiview App in cooperation with Vodafone at the Bundesliga Match of the week, Leipzig versus Dortmund
Sky Deutschland recently conducted two trials of live sports broadcasting using 5G technology, furthering its ambitions to make more efficient broadcasts as well as open up new in-stadium revenue streams.
As part of Sky Sport's 5G activities, it implemented two successful 5G cases. On 6 November with Vodafone at the Bundesliga Match of the Week, Leipzig versus Dortmund at the Red Bull Arena, an in-stadium app was trialled, and on 10 November with Telefonica O2 at the handball Bundesliga Match of the Week Flensburg versus Berlin at the Flens-Arena stadium, the focus was on an end to end cloud production, building on a similar trial carried out by Sky Sport and O2 last year.
In-stadium app for new angles
Sky Sport implemented a 5G business to business proof of concept (PoC) trial for the Sky Multiview App in cooperation with Vodafone at the Bundesliga Match of the week, Leipzig versus Dortmund.
On the in-stadium app, Reitano comments: You're watching the match and while you're watching it we are offering you five different feeds, so programme highlight, tactical feed, tactical cam, and more. The magic is really that when you tap on one of those feeds, you have a latency of below one second.
It worked really well, he continues. So you're watching the match [live in the stadium] and while you're watching it, you can have extra angles, more content, different content, all below one second latency, which is why we used 5G for this. It's really, really, really fast.
Normally you can't send even a text message out of a full stadium, but now we're here experimenting with five streams over 5G; you can discuss video assistant referee actions and everything.
This Bundesliga trial between Sky Sport and Vodafone was the first PoC of its kind in Europe based on mmWave technology (26Ghz, creating the fastest possible 5G network)
The app used new mmWave technology (26Ghz) to create 4+1 signals video swapping per click on max. 0.5 sec delay (I-frame rate every 25 frames) via a temporally build basic in-stadium app with support from Smart Mobile Labs. The mobile device used was the Xperia Pro provided by Sony.
At the end of the day, 5G opens up from my point of view more value for the customers and will definitely be something we'll see more of in 2022 onwards, I'm 100% sure. And that's why we're testing
This was the first PoC of its kind in Europe based on mmWave technology (26Ghz, creating the fastest possible 5G network). Says Reitano: This is the next step on how we might deliver in the future a new and great in-stadium experience highlights, data, graphics - for our Sky customers while they watching a live match, in person.
The Sky Multiview App trial used: regular 3G HD-SDI coax ingest; world-class low latency encoding
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Sky Deutschland pushes ahead with pioneering 5G trials for in-stadium app and e2e broadcasting By Heather McLean, Editor 
