Enjoy the 5G Vista: Inside the Successes and Challenges of the 5G Broadcast In-Stadium Project Led By the DTG

Enjoy the 5G Vista: Inside the successes and challenges of the 5G Broadcast in-stadium project led by the DTG By Heather McLean, Editor

Wednesday, March 9, 2022 - 18:02

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The DTG has been the leader of a consortium named 5G Video In Stadia Technical Architecture, or 5G Vista for short, which aimed to develop a 5G-based platform to broadcast live sports events and enhanced content in stadiums and similar locations.

The project, which was focused on using further evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service (FeMBMS) also known as 5G Broadcast is one project incubator within 5G Create, run by the UK government's Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS). It won £1.3 million funding just over one year ago towards the project's £2.3 million total cost to find out about how to create and enable the 5G backhaul that will be integrated into today's broadcast systems - from glass to glass - to deliver exciting content for in-stadium viewers of live sporting events.

Recently in February 2022 5G Vista completed a successful trial at a live football match at the 30,400-seat MK Dons football stadium in Milton Keynes, UK. A group of fans at the match between MK Dons and Ipswich Town on 12 February were able to try out a prototype of the 5G Vista app, which provided content for them over a 5G Broadcast network integrated into the TV broadcast network.

Here, we speak to Alex Buchan, strategic technologist from the DTG and project lead, about the successes and challenges for Vista, and what comes next.

Your original objective was in two parts: to test and demonstrate the technical feasibility of using 5G Broadcast technology, and to also work out the consumer benefits. Talking about the technical side firstly, did you achieve that?

Yes. I've been involved in various working groups and meetings about this technology for a long time, and it was always focused on how public service broadcasters like the BBC could use this to deliver BBC1 to TV's in people's houses. But there were never any mobile network operators involved, and yet there were obviously a lot of benefits for using it in a mobile network, for example because [network operators] could really save on capacity and costs for serving places like stadiums.

So this whole project was about showing the commercial use cases for that for a mobile network operator, and then also driving mobile phone uptake [enabled with FeMBMS], because there's no mobile phones that support it; or there wasn't before the project started.

Further evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service (FeMBMS) is a further development of the LTE broadcast mode eMBMS in 3GPP Release 14. It enables 100% of the transmission capacity to be used for broadcasting services

From a technical side what we were trying to achieve was to work out how we integrate camera solutions into the 5G Broadcast network, and then we needed to understand how we would install all that at the stadium.

So [the question was] how would we actually broadcast the content out to the fans in the stadium? [To find that out] we needed to create a whole end to end network from [broadcast] cameras through to the [end users'] phones, glass to glass.

So we did that. We brought in [additional] partners [to the consortium] from TV production and from camera coding, which were Imaginary Pictures and Ateme; we added them into the project and then we integrated their side of it into the Rohde & Schwarz broadcast side of it, and then we used O2's spectrum to send it out and we installed it all in the stadium.

So technically speaking, we created the end to end solution, which was what we wanted to do.

How about the consumer-facing side of the project? How has that gone?

The final part was the commercial side of it, so what do fans think of it? What would they pay for it? How would they pay for it? Do they see themselves using it? What else would they use it for? If they weren't in the stadium, would they use it outside the stadium? And what scenarios could they see themselves using it in?

At the start of the project, we convened a sports fans focus group. We asked them what they thought of this as a concept. We didn't have any app we could show them it was right at the start of the project and they were a bit like, No, I don't want to watch something else while I'm trying to watch the game, it would distract from what I'm there to see, and I've paid the money for . But by the end of the project, once we had them in the stadium and we showed them the app and they were watching it there, they really got it and they understood what this adds to the game.

When things like a shot [at the goal] happened, they could look at it from a different [camera] view. Or when someone got tackled off the ball or something like that, they could see it and they could find out what happened. They all really understood that when you're at a match, there's things that happen and you miss them, and then you've missed them and you can't see them again.

This is about combining that sofa experience with the live experience as well, so they really got it. It was a real achievement for the project, I think, that they really understood it.

So all round, really good successes for the project.

We've written all our findings into a report that's going to be ready by the end of March.

Your original idea was to test the technology, work out how to create the glass to glass network, and then to also demonstrate the consumer benefits of using 5G Broadcast, but you've actually also developed as a by-product of this research a content-based app for consumers?

Yes. We developed an app, and then the technology [for the backhaul] provides a means to do that without having to spend millions of pounds on [increasi

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