Video will ‘unquestionably’ be better on 5G

A report claims 5G will unlock new opportunities for video technology, such as improved VR that doesn’t cause nausea and broadcasting applications that ditch the wires.

Research and development company InterDigital and market research firm Futuresource Consulting have produced a report making a series of predictions as to how 5G will change video with new innovations, emerging use cases, and immersive experiences by 2027, when 5G subscriptions are apparently forecast to hot 4.4 billion globally.

Predictions include the idea that in-studio TV broadcasting could get easier with 5G enabled camera signal delivery, removing the usual wired and wireless combination set ups. This could apparently be cheaper as well as neater. For TV broadcasting outside of the studio, 5G is expected to extend the bandwidth and boost reliability of LTE-enabled video cameras transmissions.

For many, the excitement t of exploring the brave new world of the metaverse will always be tempered by the fact that they get nauseous as soon as they stick on a VR headset. The report claims 5G’s support for low latency, more reliable, high-density data will help alleviate this, while linking future VR devices to cloud-based GPUs via a 5G connection could help reduce hardware costs.

Meanwhile new codecs such as Versatile Video Coding (VVC) and Deep Neural Network Video Coding (DNNVC) are enabled by 5G and apparently support more efficient transmissions of UHD content at lower costs.

“Significant engineering and innovation has shaped the emergence of 5G and we are beginning to realize the benefits of this enhanced wireless ecosystem, particularly for video and video-enabled experiences,” said Henry Tirri, Chief Technology Officer, InterDigital. “This report in partnership with Futuresource Consulting highlights myriad applications for 5G in the video realm where consumers are demanding increasingly ubiquitous and immersive experience. For fifty years, InterDigital has developed foundational wireless and video technologies and contributed to the critical standards that bring us each a step closer to immersive, realistic experiences in new realms like the metaverse and beyond.”

Simon Forrest, Principal Technology Analyst at Futuresource added: “Unquestionably, all existing video applications will be ‘better on 5G’. The challenge now is for industry to develop new audio-visual experiences that can happen ‘only on 5G’.”

The obvious riposte when firms postulate on how 5G is going to improve video, usually on mobile, is that while it might be possible to deliver UHD content, the fact the higher quality would hardly be perceptible to the human eye on  a mobile screen means it isn’t a very convincing use case for 5G. This report to be fair to it does go into some more practical applications such as reducing physical cabling for TV studios, which while might not sound as sexy does seem like a genuinely useful thing to deploy.

Get the latest news straight to your inbox. Register for the Telecoms.com newsletter here.