Broadcasting is emerging is one of the first major verticals for 5G adoption, with remote production gaining most of the early interest. On the one hand, the Covid-19 pandemic has put some projects on hold and deprived broadcasters of live sports as a major source of live content involving remote production in the field. But then the temporary prohibition of large production crews during lockdowns imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic has given a stimulus to small-scale remote production conducive for uploading audio/video (AV) content from the field over cellular networks.
Even before the pandemic, there was growing interest in use of smaller teams and even unattended cameras to expand coverage to more locations and smaller events for which remote production could not previously be justified. Such efforts were being hampered by the limitations both of existing equipment and of LTE, given the exacting demands of broadcast-quality video.
While there is obvious benefit in obtaining pictures from casual smartphone users who happen to be at the right place at the right time, broadcasters are more interested in the potential for combining high quality with more widespread coverage, and that is where 5G comes in, combined with concomitant trends such as virtualization and use of software-defined networking. These are common to broadcasting and 5G, so there is scope for synergy here as the former completes its transition towards digital IP-based operation both for production and distribution.
The relationship between broadcasting and the mobile industry has been transformed since the comparable period of 4G evolution around a decade ago. Then there was antagonism as broadcasters were fighting a losing rearguard action to defend their terrestrial spectrum against marauding mobile operators, as they saw it. Now that game is over, there is agreement that terrestrial broadcasting will effectively converge with cellular via the High Tower High Power (HTHP) overlay model, and harnessing 3GPP technologies such as eMBMS. This has been evolved in recent 3GPP releases to align far better with broadcasters’ requirements, and there will be 5G enhancements in Releases 16 and beyond.
First will come remote production, since that has already started with 4G on a limited scale. Such sentiments appear to be confirmed in a survey just published by Nevion, a Norwegian vendor of IP media transport and virtualization products.
This found that 92% of broadcasters declare themselves ready to adopt 5G inside their own services within the next two years, and 39% in the first of those years. At the same time a sizeable minority, 46%, have already tested 5G’s capabilities within their organization, even if they are unable to access commercial services yet.
Almost two-thirds of the broadcasters surveyed singled out remote production as the most interesting immediate use case, while 29% said they would consider using 5G for video contribution from the field. Contribution is the industry term used to describe the process of transporting video from either a studio or remote production center after preprocessing and some compression of the raw feed, to the broadcasting head-end. At the latter it then undergoes final processing and encoding ready for distribution, often at varying resolutions and formats, to the consumer’s TV or connected viewing device.
Broadcasters in the survey agreed that the infrastructure was not quite there yet for ramping up 5G-based remote production on a large scale, while also conceding that 4G did not quite cut it. But there was growing interest in use of 5G as a flexible way to bring signals back from the venues or more isolated remote locations to the central production facility or head end ready for distribution.
BT Sport in the UK is a good example of a broadcaster at the leading edge of cellular adoption grappling with remote distribution issues during the Covid-19 pandemic. This month, Jamie Hindhaugh, its COO, described 5G as the “missing link” for remote production in a podcast on Broadcast Tech Talks, a resource for the TV industry.
This was backed up by its director of mobile strategy, Matt Stagg, who argued that 5G could usher in a major grass roots democratization of sports broadcasting by extending coverage to smaller, lower league or collegiate events. The main opportunity was the use of untethered cameras by smaller sports clubs or events currently left out because they cannot attract the big sponsorship deals that would enable coverage either on conventional TV or even YouTube.
While noting the interest in using cellular for remote broadcasting in view of current social distancing requirements during the Covid‑19 lockdown, he noted that in practice most broadcasters were currently restricted to 4G, or for that matter WiFi where available. That included BT Sport itself, which has been forced to adopt 4G and WiFi for some remote contribution, but experiencing problems as a result of those networks’ best effort status. As Stagg put it, 5G was needed to enable flexible broadcast-grade remote production.
Even with 5G, bonding of multiple circuits will be necessary to provide sufficient bandwidth to transport high quality AV. Indeed, broadcasting in general will be one of the most demanding use cases, requiring high capacity and bit rate as well as low latency in many cases, with even greater challenges as it moves on to Ultra HD and Extended Reality (XR).
Meanwhile, there are vendors specializing in remote production with the help of bonding and we reported on one of them two issues ago, LiveU. The company’s top end LU800, a multi-camera field production unit supporting up to four fully frame-synchronized AV feeds, can bond up to 14 connections. As we noted, LiveU’s equipment has been deployed over early 5G services in the US, by Fox Sports for example, to bring 4K HDR (High Dynamic Range) content back from single production units at smaller venues.
While such examples demonstrate how 5G can succeed where 4G largely failed, the future of remote production lies in exploiting synergies between broadcasting and mobile architectures under virtualization and SDN. The objectives for both broadcasters and mobile operators are to enable more rapid and flexible deployment in the field at lower cost, while meeting demands for capacity, speed, and low latency.
So far progress has come more from the mobile industry side, especially via the 5G PPP, a joint initiative between the European Commission and European ICT industry. One of the projects in the second phase is called 5GMEDIA, and is designed to help broadcasters migrate towards more flexible and cost-effective production workflows by replacing dedicated networks and systems with software-based functions residing on commodity hardware, aligned with 5G.
The aim is to move away from dependence on traditional OB (outside broadcast) vans requiring large teams on location reliant on expensive dedicated satellite or fiber connections when the latter are available. These are also too cumbersome and slow to reach locations where breaking news is occurring, with increasing reliance on user generated content often uploaded in poor quality from smartphones. Furthermore, roving professional reporters are often confined to slow and unreliable internet connections in the field, forcing them to pre-record items, which again can impede coverage of rapidly evolving events.
This 5GMEDIA project has been developing procedures for 5G-based remote production that conform with established standards, such as the SMPTE’s (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) standards for uncompressed video transport – ST 2110 Professional Media Over Managed IP Networks.
These specify carriage, synchronization, and description of separate elementary raw essence streams as they are called, for real time production and playout.
5GMEDIA has also developed a scenario for mobile contribution from smartphones where the aim is to ‘professionalize’ user-generated content, as well as enable journalists to submit footage from the field without a dedicated camera. An app is used to connect to the 5G Media network for streaming live back to the broadcasting center, with the main innovations including real time encoding on the smartphone ready for transmission and a cognitive service function to enrich the footage with additional relevant information, such as labels identifying location and names of people in the video via facial recognition.
It also provides broadcasters with metadata describing the items, drawn from a database. This is clearly work in progress but aiming to combine the flexibility and reach enabled by mobile devices in the field with the broadcast quality of OBVs. Inevitably this will be a compromise, but at least the hope is that 5G will reduce sacrifices in quality imposed previously by low bandwidth and high latency.
We should point out also that WiFi 6, incorporating the latest round of WiFi standards, will achieve similar gains in performance as 5G, so that will no longer be just best effort either. Accordingly, given that WiFi has become virtually ubiquitous in many public venues for example, that will be used increasingly for media applications, including uploading of user generated AV content from such locations. WiFi will have less utility though for remote production in the field outside public venues.