An interview with Pavel Potužák, Aveco’s CEO.
1. Can you highlight the benefits and outlooks of 5G for the broadcast industry
2. Which TV technologies the deployment of 5G will facilitate?
3. Are you planning the transition to 5G after networks deployment? If yes, in which directions?
- Let’s be honest and say that 5G is damaging to the broadcast industry in a way similar to what 4G did. During the growth of 4G, broadcasters were forced to hand over their frequency bands, originally used for broadcasting, to the mobile industry, so that the mobile industry could transmit video content to viewers (nothing else requires so much bandwidth as video).
The bi-directional nature of 5G communication, together with the wavelength, requires a short distance between the mobile device and the cell tower base station, thus availability will be limited to areas with enough density of 5G base stations, with coverage extending at a certain pace.
5G is still in its testing phase and seems that there is a way for broadcasters to use 5G too, to distribute their channels, and that would somewhat weaken my initial statement.
From Aveco’s perspective of a manufacturer of MAM and automation systems, our products provide the ability to work anytime anywhere as long as there is an IP network, so 5G would be just an evolution of the existing means of connectivity.
- 5G promises higher bandwidth and lower latencies wherever available, and that is always appreciated by the media industries. As I wrote above, possibly 5G would be utilized for the distribution of TV channels so that broadcasters can compensate for the loss of frequency band. It will help remote production, as mobile backpacks will be able to deliver higher quality live video.
- Our situation is very simple, our products only depend on IP networking and the underlying layers are transparent to us. Thus, 5G will just expand the current choices among Wifi, 4G, metal cables, fiber and so on.
