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networking of devices of all sorts. The US Open, like many other sporting events, is a massive undertaking with multiple locations, scores of networked devices and dozens of miles of cabling. 5G has the potential to turn these bulky military-style operations into something that is more flexible, more audience friendly – and cheaper. “The US Open is one of the biggest live production environments in the world,” says Joe Sheehan, senior sales and business development executive of MediaKind (formerly Ericsson Media Solutions). “There’s just a tremendous amount of technology, people and resources go into these things. Even a small amateur event takes a tremendous amount of fibre and resources. They’re hoping that 5G can reduce those operational costs.” 5G networked production also has the potential to improve the fan experience. “Right now, there’s a limitation on how many viewpoints you can watch – we have one main screen,” says Sheehan. “But the goal over time would be to put more cameras on the course. You as a fan might be able to follow Tiger Woods throughout the whole tournament via a camera dedicated to just him – or whoever is your favourite. You could have a completely customisable fan experience, whether it’s through an app or through your provider.”
Naturally, Fox Sports had concerns. Was the network going to be stable? Have issues of latency been resolved? Can we really get broadcast quality video over these networks? “When you look at 4K video, you’re looking at 12 gigabits per second of raw video coming out of these cameras. Could we really compress it at the camera point and get it back to the production truck in a live environment? This was a perfect storm for use case, where we could try out all this and see if it worked.” TEEING OFF Fox Sports kicked o the project planning meeting packed full of vendors and very curious production technologists. “The meeting was a lot bigger than normal,” Sheehan laughs, “because we had so much interest in this project. We had a lot of engineering discussions and whiteboarding and finally we pulled together the trial. We brought all the vendors in and did the test, and it worked.” In the testing phase, the team was seeing 1.5 gigabytes down, 800 megabytes up with extremely low latency and no packet loss. But could they pull it o with the unpredictable conditions of a live event? “You’re outside with all this pre-beta equipment in all this dust and heat and rain and you wonder if it will survive. You don’t
ON THE FAIRWAY While Fox TV stationed two cameras at hole 7 on the course, the rest of the kit – from Intel and Ericsson Media Solutions – for the 5G trial travelled in style on a covered golf cart.
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