October 19, 2020
By Streaming Media Editorial Staff, Tim Siglin Contributing Editor
Short Cuts

5G Use Cases for Video Streaming

Learn more about 5G and video streaming at Streaming Media East.

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Read the complete transcript of this video:

Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen: Let's start talking a little bit about 5G. It's still something on the top of everyone's mind. In fact, we have an upcoming cover story in Streaming Media magazine that looks at the trends in 5G.

Gordon Brooks: What we're seeing in 5G is, the B2C stuff is coming, but a lot of the B2B stuff is already there. Right? And so we're doing a production field test where we're taking,content from a major broadcaster--this one happens to be in New York--and we're moving it on Zixi over the internet into AWS. We're moving it from AWS into a different region into the AWS Wavelength zone. And then we're pulling it with a my5 device in Boston, and then we're displaying it with about 200 milliseconds of latency, and it's working extremely well, and it's all 4k. And then we're taking that content and we're doing a back. They've been running for quite a while now. These workflows that you think of as traditional workflow--because it's going to an IRD--I think of it as taking it to an MSO or affiliate. Those kinds of workflows for distribution and contribution are are going to be the first things to go for the media industry on 5G, and maybe we'll see contribution, business, transport, and distribution adding up to well more than a half of how people think they're going to use 5G.

Tim Siglin: And I think that's important that it does add when you aggregate those together. And even if you're talking about in-venue delivery as being part of the production process, the majority there is beyond direct-to-consumer. But I also think that understanding whether it can be used for contribution and distribution is something that we have to educate the marketplace for. Will that education be people looking at the tests that you've done and performed, or will that be them going out and trialing their own solutions? How do you think we educate the market to understanding that it's much more than just the contribution side?

Gordon Brooks: The first one we'll probably go live with is a distribution workflow to IRDs. And I think the way we'll educate the market is actually doing it in production and then talking about it. I think you'll see all the major cloud providers, all the 5G. We kind of look at the four Cs: content, carrier, cloud, and cellular, which is 5G/4G. It's how all those things come together for how you think about the the partnerships and how you get 5G to work. We'll do white papers, and we'll do things like that, but I think what we're going to do is get people live and then get the word out, and then give people opportunities to platform and show them how it works. And because it's not simple, it's not not just turn on 5G, there's a whole ton of nuances to this that we've never seen before that we're learning about as we go and put these in production. And we'll go out and share that information.

Tim Siglin: And also the variabilities of the types of 5G, because we've got an mmWave and the like.

Gordon Brooks: And just things like, you're going to have 5G and you're going to have 4G LTE advanced. And then you might have internet as your tertiary, and how do you do adaptive bit rates? Well, we do it in our software, or maybe you do it with HLS. But you have to really think about that. And then how do you do hitless failover? Or how do you do bonding? All very different things that most people have not seen before. So it's fascinating stuff. It really is.