Globecast has worked with Orange to create a remote production trial of 4K contribution over 5G on behalf of France Televisions Overseas.
The trial took place during ultra-trial race the Grand Raid 2021 in October 2021.
All 4K local production was driven by France Television’s local subsidiary Réunion La 1ère and La Solution RF with more than 10 cameras and three drones, providing four native 4K feeds and which were upscaled to HD 1080p signals.
Live coverage from the Réunion La 1ère production truck at the start line was sent straight to Paris, while the finish line feeds were remotely produced at Réunion La 1ère premises first, then sent to Paris. This was the first ever 4K content live broadcast from La Réunion.
Once it arrived in Paris, the content was then uploaded to playout in the cloud, with Globecast managing the global channel media supply chain for OTT distribution via CDN.
According to the companies, the 5G trial was initially planned to work in parallel, but as the race unfolded, Orange and Globecast’s 5G Non-Standalone ‘bubble’ covering the stadium finish line was employed to deliver two 4K live contribution feeds to a pop-up channel.
Following regulatory approval for the trial, Orange deployed a new 5G antenna mounted on a mast on a truck directly connected via fibre into their core network. Tests at the finish line using mobile terminal shows bandwidth up to 1 Gbps downlink and 150 Mbps uplink.
Samy Nicolas Bouchalat, director of marketing anticipation, Globecast said, “We initially wanted to manage the 4K pop-up channel creation test from the 5G contribution trial as two separate things. However, when we saw the initial results, we decided to use 5G for remote production connectivity. So, at the finish line, we used an aggregator to combine the very impressive 5G ‘bubble’ bandwidth with that from the fibre to create completely hybrid and secure contribution feeds. It worked extremely well and showed what the future holds.”
