Moving live pictures from place to place was once a feat so spectacular that the European Broadcasting Union invented the Eurovision Song Contest, which has become so well-known that not many people realize its name derives from the continental broadcast distribution system of the same name.
As so often, though, the sheer R&D budget of consumer electronics has almost trivialized the once-tricky, and several generations of cellphone technology have been winning work from geostationary satellites, so much that the sight of a dish on a truck has become a rarity.
According to Daniel Pisarski, chief technology officer at LiveU, contribution via cellular networks for broadcasters is at more than 90%. “I’d probably even go a little higher there—there’s a lot of customers who still roll the van and load all the equipment in it—and they use bonded cellular,” he says.
That approach is LiveU’s day-to-day. “LiveU has used cellular as a primary form of transmission for 15-plus years, all the way back to pre-3G in the first rounds of development, through 4G, 4G LTE and five years ago when 5G was launching,” Pisarski adds.
The market, Pisarski suggests, has achieved a degree of maturity. “It’s now become fine-tuning, rather than the big changes we saw for the last 10 years,” he says. “We just launched an eSIM in LiveU IQ … we already have a four-camera unit. Can I plug in two monitors? Can I see the studio feed in the field?”
When IP networking is involved, Pisarski says, remote computing inevitably beckons. “That’s led us to focus on the cloud side,” he says. “You could have a vision mixer. We have a full-time recording feature that records every feed that can run in the cloud or on-prem. We have expanded on that because customers have said, ‘Can you help me more with my workflow?’ ”
Private 5G
The attractive idea of private 5G has sometimes been limited by technology built for long-term infrastructure rather than weekend events. Andreas Mohnke, business integration manager at Riedel, was involved in the company’s recent acquisition of private 5G specialists MECSware and the Easy5G system. “They’re reducing the complexity of setting up a 5G network very nicely,” Mohnke says. “When you set up a 5G cellphone network, normally it’s up to 3,000 parameters; Easy5G has 30.”
Mohnke describes that private network as “a wireless layer—you need an internet backbone to transfer the data. These base stations are connected over Ethernet. Then, anything that can plug in a SIM or an eSIM can play, and only these devices are allowed to play … it’s like a kind of hardened and more secure Wi-Fi.“
Range and bandwidth inevitably depends on the vexed issue of spectrum allocation, Mohnke says. “It depends on which band you’re allowed to distribute the signal,” he says. “The licenses you have for the frequency equal the amount of throughput you can do. We had a match-day test in Germany, which was fully crowded with 80,000 people, and we had a realistic throughput of 200 Mbps, bidirectional.”
Such numbers, Mohnke emphasizes, are often several times what public infrastructure can achieve—although gaining access to the spectrum can require experience. “We have a team which is very experienced in dealing with authorities,” he says. “The Europeans are facing some friction. But we see now a little movement in [harmonizing spectrum allocation] in all EU member states.”
At NAB Show in April, Verizon introduced a new mobile Private 5G Network framework designed for live content production, working with one of the world’s largest tech companies, according to Josh Arenberg, Verizon’s global leader of media and entertainment.
“Verizon has been collaborating with NVIDIA on a portable, environmentally controlled setup that enables broadcasters to manage dozens of camera feeds with intelligent video prioritization,” he says. “The AI tools work in tandem with human broadcasters to automatically highlight key moments, streamlining the production process and enhancing viewer engagement.
“Ultimately, we see the innovation around 5G and broadcasting as a single, converged ecosystem that blends the efficiency of broadcasting with the interactivity and personalization of 5G,” Arenberg adds. “5G already supports current industry use cases and it will only continue to improve. Innovations such as network slicing unlock endless possibilities for content delivery.”
Globally, 5G seems to be gaining traction with even the largest events. “The coronation in the U.K. was done with 5G by BBC,” Mohnke adds. “We met two wonderful guys—and we had intense, technical, deep discussions—at the EBU workshop in Munich recently. We’re all driven to see 5G be a success story. It’s good to be in contact and to talk to one another.”
Going Hybrid
Meanwhile, field equipment is increasingly able to blend 5G with other ways to connect. Mark Horchler, product marketing director at Haivision, describes the symphony of hardware and software that makes all this possible. “We’ve always done a bit of both,” he says. “Technically, we’re selling hardware products, but it’s [a lot of] software—all of our products you can access via web browsers, and last year we introduced our cloud platform, Hub 360.”
The clear intent here is to find a way to leverage all available infrastructure as required, Horchler says. “We have a range of bonded cellular transmitters, our MoJoPro app, and receivers,” he says. “All our transmitters have bonded cellular. We have several mobile modems and also they have Ethernet outputs as well, so you can connect the LEO satellite by Ethernet to the modem.”
That makes for flexibility and efficient use of available networks. “We had a French company covering people running up Mont Blanc,” Horchler recalls. “They were using cellular networks up to a certain altitude where there’s no coverage, then they’d use Starlink. So we’re seeing a hybrid 5G and LEO, which is not the same as traditional C-band but that has become useful for a lot of use cases.”
End-to-End Platform
Moving video over 5G—or an IP network running on any other transmission layer—will always require some amount of protocol. Zixi began as a protocol with broadcast in mind, although the success of 5G and IP in general has beckoned much more.
“Now, we’re a full platform with analytics and a lot of application-level features,” Phil Abbott, Zixi’s senior solutions architect, says. “The platform and the protocol are kind of symbiotic. We’re a network protocol, we wrap video streams [but] now have extra features for transcode and various video processing at the core.”
Making network transport of video practical has always demanded a concerted effort to make the technology usable. For crews in the field, time and appetite for network engineering is limited. “We’re making it all work for them so they can just use it,” Abbott confirms. “Can you dial in, say, the MTU on the server level of a protocol? Yes, your most savvy of engineers can, but the point is, we’re making this work for customers to leverage 5G, to leverage our protocol.”
The enthusiasm is clear, and Abbott adds that Zixi is continuing to innovate. “The CTO is the inventor, so we still have the brain behind the platform thinking up ways to make the protocol more resilient … but our features are video features—our ability to switch streams, to transcode,” he says. “And Zixi is extremely lightweight; we can run on a Raspberry Pi. People want to put the full broadcaster software on very lightweight compute—and you’re sending a handful of camera feeds? That’s nothing. And we’re doing a lot of testing with Starlink, with 5G, K-Band satellite.”
Much of this capability is built on fundamentals that might not exist but for the mass market, although constructing devices capable of implementing them all in a broadcast workflow is a challenge in itself.
Sukh Grewal, connectivity solutions specialist for Dejero, explains the company’s evolution. “Technically we’re a software company,” he says, “but we had to build the hardware, because … there’s not many manufacturers that can build multi-modem video transmission devices.”
That hardware will always be dependent on the available network, and Grewal warns that services sold to the public can be inconsistently described. “In the U.S., they’ve rolled out new fiber—they’ve probably put in real 5G,” he says. “As soon as you get to the outskirts you don’t get that. What is the telco’s return on investment? They rolled out 4G, and they hadn’t returned the cost of that before standing up 5G. They can’t charge us more because we won’t pay more, so how do they do that?”
One solution is to wait for the telecommunications providers to do the right thing. Grewal echoes the view, though, that private networks offer more certainty. “Tier-one sports will still use satellite trucks, and they’ll have our kind of tech as a backup,” he says. “[We can] take a 5G network and blend a Starlink, or we can do just Starlink if we want to. The BBC used [private 5G] for the queen’s funeral and we’ve done it for golf events. We stood up a private 5G network and put in two private 5G network SIM cards, and two public networks, and we were able to blend. We can set it up in two or three hours. It’s as plug-and-play as possible.”
Having made various types of radio networks feasible, the industry now seems set on making it easy, and 5G—at various levels—has made even public infrastructure sufficiently capable to play a big part. Perhaps the key innovation, though, is the option to hop between networks to optimize bandwidth, cost or both—all conveniences which make it easy to forget what live remote contribution once required.
