First Europe-wide 5G Broadcast trials delivering Eurovision Song Contest in Italy, France, Germany and Austria
EBU member organization RAI opens its doors to the first pan-European 5G Broadcast showcase delivering the Eurovision Song Contest live to 5G Broadcast enabled personal phones. Rai in Turin joins ORS/ORF in Vienna, France Télévisions in Paris and ARD/SWR in Stuttgart who are also deploying 5G Broadcast to deliver live Eurovision Song Contest content to their viewers around Europe. New trials at ESC showcase how live content could be distributed to mass audiences over 5G.
ESC: 5G Broadcast trials in Turin, Vienna, Stuttgart and Paris
The Eurovision Song Contest every year brings together tens of millions of viewers in the largest live world music festival and provides an ideal opportunity to showcase 5G Broadcast, a technology designed to bring the coverage and reach of broadcast to every mobile device through its use of existing digital terrestrial television transmission networks. Media dominates mobile network traffic and will continue to do so; 5G-Broadcast helps to seamlessly integrate a one-to-many technology within devices of the 5G mobile ecosystem guaranteeing high quality of service at a sustainable cost. When delivering live content to millions of users it also helps optimizing network resources without dimensioning cellular networks to manage those traffic peaks.
Consumers in the heart of Paris, Stuttgart, Vienna and Turin will have a firsthand look at an advanced live mobile experience. Each showcase live streams the Eurovision Song Contest in addition to local EBU Member services and dedicated content for the trials themselves.
Next step for the development of 5G Broadcast
Media is only one of several 5G Broadcast use cases. Broadcasters and other institutions and businesses around Europe are also testing 5G Broadcast with a view to using it for emergency warning systems and automotive applications amongst others. Broadcast/Multicast over 5G is not restricted to linear and live content distribution. For network operators and media content providers it offers a completely new range of business models for delivering content or data to large numbers of consumers complementing the service offer delivered via the cellular 5G mobile network.
EBU Members are assisted by technology providers Rohde & Schwarz – a global leader in broadcast transmitter and media technologies; Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. – the driving force behind the development, launch and expansion of 5G; Ateme – a global leader in video compression, delivery and streaming solutions.
Running throughout the week of events, the 5G Broadcast test transmissions consist of live content produced by Rai in Turin, encoded by Ateme at EBU HQ in Geneva and distributed to SWR in Stuttgart, France Télévisions in Paris, and ORS in Vienna. At each city, transmitters from Rohde & Schwarz will bring the signal over-the-air to test smartphones from Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. In addition, Rai in Turin will also conduct a showcase in the Rai Museum of Television and Radio.
5G Broadcast - the future of television
"Since 2019, ORS and its R&D team have played a pioneering role internationally in defining, testing and establishing 5G Broadcast. With the use of this innovative transmission technology in the context of the Eurovision Song Contest, we are showing how Austria can play a leading role in shaping a new TV era. In the future, we will continue to make our contribution to the international development of the most promising use cases and business models for 5G Broadcast," explains ORS Managing Director Michael Wagenhofer.
The 5G Broadcast solution is built on the 3GPP Rel-16 feature-set, operating in a Receive-Only Mode (ROM), Free-To-Air (FTA) and without the need for a SIM card (SIM-free reception). The 5G Broadcast dedicated mode will be demonstrated with a standalone broadcast infrastructure operating within the UHF band.