TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS
LIVE TV
One is audio. Digital audio has to date typically been on
FGPA or DSP chipsets, giving the big audio consoles the zero latency that the industry requires. As McCue points out, one frame of video latency is acceptable, 48/1000ths of audio delay is not, and the time it takes for signals to get to the cloud and back again means that in-ear mixes for presentation at an event, for instance, cannot be routed via the cloud. “Even 10 milliseconds is too much, and we’re sometimes
up to 1300 milliseconds end-to-end,” he says. “There’s a big opportunity for a hybrid audio solution that has hardware on the ground connected to software in the cloud and manages discrete timing planes, manages inter-instance transport, and manages phase-coherent audio transport. That doesn’t exist and it needs to exist.” Another bugbear is cost. “We did some models trying to
Fan engagement with 5G
The 5G VISTA project is a government-backed initiative involving the DTG designed to test and demonstrate the potential that 5G broadcast technology has to deliver digital experiences for fans at live events. Its goal is to show that its FeMBMS technology works in a proof of concept early next year, and thus gain manufacturer support from the likes of Quallcom to add the chipsets required to make it work into consumer smartphones. That perhaps sounds like a big ask, but there is a significant financial incentive to get this right. “We did a design using the system for Twickenham Stadium as a reference and worked out that we would need two antennas to cover the entire area with a cost in the region of £200k” explains Alex Buchan, Strategic Technologist, Spectrum and Security at the DTG. “That is massively cheap to provide a premium in-stadium video service essentially. We looked at what Verizon did in the US providing their 5G Multi-View service at selected NFL stadiums using mmWave technology. Network enhancements at the Tampa Bay Stadium cost over $80 million dollars incorporating 281x mmWave base stations, 70 miles of fibre, and an upgraded distributed antenna system (DAS). While not all required for 5G Multi-View, it gives an idea of the cost of providing sufficient
capacity in densely populated areas like stadiums and how 5G Broadcast can offer significant cost savings” FeMBMS is the Further evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service, a technology specced by the 3GPP as ideal for providing 5G broadcast services directly to mobile devices. “The sticking point has generally been the lack of devices that support it and the lack of a business case to drive that onto the handset,” says Buchan. The industry partners backing VISTA (Video in Stadia Technical Architecture) are looking to change that by showing the feasibility of delivering viewing experiences direct to fans who will be able to see multi-angle views of the action, views from areas that cannot be seen or behind the scenes, and additional information about the event. FeMBMS overcomes the problem of a lack of bandwidth at live events by delivering the content from a single source to many users in a genuine broadcast model, rather than one to one as per any streaming solution. This means that quality of service is maintained regardless of the number of users and at low cost if the chip manufacturers can be persuaded of demand. A demo in September using recorded footage from the British Touring Car Championship showed an invited audience that the technology works. Now the team is trying to line up a live demo for the spring period with a range of candidates from sport to live entertainment in the running.
build some comparisons with AWS and others and it’s very difficult to price,” says Greig. “It’s a work in progress and there’s a big learning curve due to its by-the-minute pricing structure. In some areas it’s really good and really competitive, but you can add one thing, the data usage changes, and it ruins the model.” AT NEP UK, Cowan agrees, which is why the company
is looking at private data centres with centralised production capability. “You can have an amazing set-up that is as efficient a possible and in terms of bang for your buck it’s brilliant, but if a production comes along and asks for one more multi-viewer suddenly you’ve over subscribed that set up and you have to ramp up a whole new other one which you’re using a tiny amount of resource of but you have to pay for the whole thing,” he says. “Private cloud gives us more control; we know what we want, we know how much resource we’ve got, we know how much we can flex that resource, and we know how to account for that when it comes to the commercial side of things.”
CONNECTIVITY: A WORK IN PROGRESS For all the zeitgeist-friendly buzz around 5G, it has yet to make serious inroads into any real world productions. Sky has completed some tests with using 5G for cellular contribution, both with its netball coverage and in Sky Germany, while it is now over three years since BT Sport showcased the first live trial of remote production broadcast live over EE’s 5G network. Further progress seem stymied by the lack of guaranteed spectrum for broadcast. David Shield, SVP Global Director of Engineering at IMG,
agrees. “Where we are with 5G is that a) you’ve got to have the coverage and b) we’ve seen neither sight or sound of the network slicing capability we are going to need to reserve bandwidth and we will need that if there is any type of crowd around. So, at the moment it sits slightly on the back burner,” he says. BT’s Jamie Hindhaugh agrees, saying that network slicing to
create virtual pipes is key because if you haven’t got security of contribution then it won’t be used. He cites tethering and the prospect of increasing fan engagement in the stadium as the main use cases. “That’s probably the thing that really excites me the most about 5G; the fact that you can talk to your audience in the stadium and bring them into your editorial
Winter 2021
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