VIENNA—Big Blue Marble has announced that its Nakolos platform is the first end-to-end 5G Broadcast solution worldwide to implement the complete feature set introduced with 3GPP Release 19, achieved in collaboration with ecosystem partners Bitstem, TRedess and SYES.
The milestone follows two years of active standardization contributions with organizations including the European Broadcasting Union and Broadcast Networks Europe, and for the first time enables broadcasters and broadcast infrastructure providers to validate and deploy all major Release 19 enhancements in real-world environments, Big Blue Marble said.
U.S. broadcasters are also considering the use of 5G in ATSC 3.0, with many low-power TV broadcasters advocating a switch from ATSC 1.0 to 5G Broadcast after 1.0 sunsets.
Built on a carrier-grade, 3GPP-native architecture, Nakolos has evolved continuously from Release 14 through Release 19, according to Big Blue Marble. The platform now supports a complete set of new capabilities that directly address the economic and operational realities of 5G Broadcast rollout, including Time Frequency Interleaving (TFI), which enables the reuse of existing transmission sites while improving signal robustness; CAS-Muting functionality, which allows existing DVB-T2 infrastructure to be repurposed for 5G Broadcast transmission, substantially reducing initial deployment costs; and support for the new early-deployment frequency bands B112, targeting the U.S. market, and B113, targeting Europe and other global markets.
In combination with Release 19-compatible transmitter solutions from TRedess and SYES, and the new Bitstem 5GR receiver platform, released in conjunction with this announcement, customers can now validate and deploy complete interoperable 5G Broadcast chains under real operating conditions rather than in isolated proof-of-concept environments.
“Release 19 represents a concrete step forward for commercial 5G Broadcast, not a future promise,” said Johann Mika, chief innovation officer at Big Blue Marble. “The features introduced in this release give network operators a credible path to cost-efficient deployments using infrastructure they already have. With Nakolos, they can begin that transition today, ahead of the first generation of commercial 5G Broadcast-enabled consumer devices.”
Devices should be commercially available within the next few years, said Big Blue Marble, which is positioning Nakolos “as the platform for operators who need to be infrastructure-ready before mass-market adoption begins.”
