LIVE-G

Booming demand for high-quality, reliable live video

Video media consumers value low-delay streaming of live events such as sports matches and concerts, as well as the ability to switch between channels at the click of a button. But broadcasters are technologically hindered in meeting these demands, and it is expensive to acquire the live streams and deliver them to broadcasters’ control rooms. As a result, delays that are seconds – and even tens of seconds – long are common.

The rise of an ideal enabling technology

5G mobile connectivity technology offers important improvements over 3G and 4G, including higher reliability and data throughput as well as much lower latency. As a result, it is a strong enabler of high data rate and mission critical applications in IoT, AR and VR and enhanced mobile broadband – including low-latency, end-to-end contribution and distribution for live event broadcasting.

Making full use of 5G’s biggest advantages

In creating an end-to-end, 5G-based pipeline for live-streamed video contribution and distribution, the LIVE-G consortium will tackle five innovation goals:

• investigate the use of 5G bandwidth ‘slices’ in contributing optimal live video over public and private 5G networks;
• develop optimal encoding and transport protocols for low-latency, high-quality video contribution over 5G;
• explore the potential of multicasting over 5G to reach more viewers with reduced IT resources;
• develop optimal encoding and transport protocols for optimal multicast distribution of video;
• enable rapid switching between live camera feeds by a large audience.

Higher-quality streaming, larger audiences, greater functionality

In the course of the project, the LIVE-G consortium will contribute to domain know-how by creating patents, reports, papers, new technologies, algorithms and software modules. Even more, the project will produce a demonstrator to illustrate how far delays in live video streaming can be reduced using 5G for contribution and distribution in both lab and real-life environments.

“LIVE-G will design and build an end-to-end technological pipeline, including video coding, transport and delivery techniques, that can be used for optimal video contribution and distribution over 5G networks.”