TVBEurope talks to Nevions Andy Rayner about the possibilities 5G technology offers all areas of the media industryBy Jenny Priestley
Published: October 8, 2020
TVBEurope talks to Nevion's Andy Rayner about the possibilities 5G technology offers all areas of the media industry
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Nevion is at the forefront of research into the opportunities 5G will offer broadcasters and OTT providers in the future. The company has been involved in two major projects: 5G Virtuosa, an EU-funded project exploring 5G and virtualisation in broadcast production, and 5G Verticals INNovation Infrastructure (5G VINNI) which is aiming to accelerate the uptake of 5G by providing an end-to-end facility to validate the performance of new 5G technologies.
According to Andy Rayner, chief technologist at Nevion, the company's involvement in both projects is a cost-effective way of doing what he describes as the horizon-based or future base work in 5G technology. Obviously there is funding involved which helps a relatively small company like Nevion in engaging in this work, he tells TVBEurope. Another key element for us is there are obviously lots of partners that we can work with in this space, both in the 5G provider space and the media related IP technology space, that allow us to actually do the best of breed trialling that's pretty important to us.
VINNI has got lots of tier one service providers from across Europe involved and Virtuosa, the project we've been leading ourselves, has enabled us to work with some extremely experienced media companies across Europe.
Rayner says that Nevion has learnt a lot from both projects so far, which is enabling it to roadmap its own products. While 5G is effectively being touted as already being available by some service providers, and there are some handsets that have got elements of 5G available, the elements that really provide the magic sauce for broadcast production are not really commercially available yet, he explains. So, what we are trying to do is actually test out and evaluate the capabilities that are going to bring real benefit for broadcast in advance of them becoming available on commercial offerings, both by service providers and other 5G equipment portfolio people. What we're trying to work out is how that integrates with a best of breed workflow.
We've all been talking about 5G for quite a while now, but Rayner is quick to stress that what we're currently calling 5G isn't actually 5G. Up until now, broadcasters have used what I call best efforts bonded 4G solutions, that's kind of a standard part of the broadcaster's toolkit. But it doesn't really address the full flexibility and requirements that we're looking to for the future for broadcasting, he says.
The production possibilities Rayner adds that one of the challenges broadcasters could face in terms of a 5G infrastructure is that some of the technology required for flexibility in broadcast is reliant on service providers also seeing it as a viable element to make available within their portfolio of offerings. One of the specific areas for broadcast that we're hopeful about is what we call quality of service, he explains. That's the concept where in 5G there is the potential of what's called network slicing, you can define a network slice and the parameters in which that network slice operates and the quality of service. That means you'll be able to achieve something you would have never been able to achieve on any wireless connectivity to date. And that's a guarantee of bandwidth.
That guarantee is key for new broadcast techniques such as remote production. Rayner believes the dream for broadcasters is the ability to arrive at an event with a number of cameras and microphones, and that's it you're on air. You can do it all through a remote gallery. Suddenly, lots of things become viable for broadcasters that haven't been viable before. And that's a key thing, he says. Where a broadcaster wouldn't have dreamt of doing multi camera coverage of an event, if they can literally roll up 30 minutes before with half a dozen cameras, everything's completely self contained over wireless internet, that's an immensely powerful proposition. Rayner adds that he can see 5G helping to democratise the process of broadcast production as 5G is much cheaper to work with than satellite or fibre.
In terms of distribution, Rayner says there are areas of 5G that need to be differentiated. One is the bandwidth, reach and latency of download-based media which 5G makes much easier. I think there are two tenets of 5G that are important for what I call linear consumption, he continues. One of those is the concept of some of the recent advances in the technology toolkit of 3G PP, allowing effectively proper broadcasts many consumers of the same stream, which obviously is a significant departure from the traditional mobile infrastructure requirement.
I think a lot of people are seeing 5G as possibly the replacement of digital terrestrial television transmission in general. If you talk to key broadcasters in the UK as well as other countries, broadcasters are looking to internet-based delivery as the main channel to the consumer in the next 10 years. Digital satellite, digital terrestrial, digital cable, whilst they are the main tenets of getting to our key audience at the moment, they are going to diminish significantly. There will still be requirements for efficient multicast
