The BBC has won this year’s Technology and Innovation Award from the European Broadcasting Union for developing a private 5G network. The annual award is presented to an outstanding technical solutions developed by EBU member organizations.
   

The BBC’s private 5G network in the UK can be deployed where needed and has been used successfully for news contributions at national events such as the Coronation, which involved multiple crews, a large aggregate number of cameras, and video signals in UHD TV, said the EBU.

The award’s runners-up included:

SRG’s SLS (Self-directed Lighting System) for broadcast studios and event locations, an automated system that controls the highlights, guide lights, and fill lights for a programme, automatically taking into account the relative positions and movements of the cameras, objects, and people.

RAI’s 5G Audio-Visual Broadcast Network. Led by RAI Way with project partners RAI/CRITS, Politecnico di Milano, Rohde & Schwarz, OpNet, Nokia, Mainstreaming, Kinecar, and Impersive, the project developed a ‘cooperative network’ of 5G-Broadcast and a CDN to carry a programme, with the user’s reception  adapting to whichever is the most reliable component. For programme production, a 5G private network was used to carry near time-synchronised contributions from different sources.

ORS’s Nakolos – leveraging 5G Broadcast and Broadband for unlimited high-quality distribution. ORS and partner Bitstem developed a lightweight middleware for the Android ecosystem that allows application designers to integrate 5G-Broadcast compatibility with fallback from and to CDN broadband directly in their application.

The EBU also announced the winner of its Young Technology Talent of the Year Award, which went to Jaime Sánchez Roldán from the University Politechnica de Valencia. He developed an Open Source LTE-based 5G Broadcast Platform, which has contributed significantly to the advance of 5G-Broadcast technology in Spain and Europe, said the EBU. The platform is also notable for the new algorithms used and features included that improve performance. Sánchez Roldán has also made a major contribution to the 5G-MAG project, which is encouraging the development and use of 5G systems.