Austria’s ORS is testing 5G Broadcast distribution for large live events regarding latency and hybrid distribution live on-site for the first time.
It will do so at Vienna’s Donauinselfest, the largest open-air festival in Europe, which is taking place for the 40th time this year.
According to ORS. every year between 2.5 and 3 million people flock to the Danube Island to experience their favourite artists live. From June 23rd to 25th, visitors can expect an extensive programme with more than 700 hours of live music and entertainment along the more than 4.5km long area of Vienna’s Danube Island.
ORS is conducting a live test at the festival through a collaboration with ORF and a long-time participant in the 5G broadcast trial, private radio station Kronehit. With the help of its partners, it is possible to transmit the live signal with low latency from the festival stage via the 5G Broadcast Core to the ORF headquarter at the Küniglberg and then send it back to the festival grounds with minimal delay, where it can be received by 5GBC enabled smartphones, both via broadband via CDN (Content Delivery Network) and via the 5G Broadcast transmitter on the DC Tower, Austria’s highest office tower.
Commenting on the test, Martin Holovlasky, CTO of Kronehit Austria, said: “As a private radio station, we are of course interested in new distribution technologies and have been part of the 5GBC trial project in Vienna for several years. The hybrid distribution of 5G Broadcast and Broadband is an important step forward to provide Kronehit content to our listeners on their mobile phones with the highest quality even in the dense crowds of a festival”.
Preparations for the tests were carried out by ORS together with Bitstem in collaboration with Insys VT. To perform low-latency tests for HD video streams the Nakolos middleware on the prototype smartphones was combined with a dedicated low-latency encoding solution from Ateme.
