By Dr Amal Punchihewa Consultant and Advisor, AIBD

Asia-Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIBD) organised a regional webinar on 5G that was held on Thursday 25 March 2021 at 1.00 PM Malaysia Time (GMT+8), especially for its members. The theme of this fully virtual event was “A Decade of Innovation and Disruption: Impact on Broadcasters”.

The two-hour event had two presentations; one from Mr Chetan Sharma, CEO, Chetan Sharma Consulting and Mr Darko Ratkaj, Senior Project Manager of European Broadcasting Union, followed by a panel discussion with three additional panellists, viz. Mr Aamir Riaz, Programme officer, ITU Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, Mr Parag Naik, Co-Founder & CEO at Saankhya Labs and Mr Thomas Lamanauskas, Partner, Envision Associates, UK.

The webinar aimed to educate and inform the Asia-Pacific broadcast and media community including AIBD members on the potential of 5G for their media and broadcast operations, opportunities, and challenges that 5G will offer the Broadcasters. The two presentations from Chetan and Darko were on the topics of ‘5G – A Decade of Innovation & Disruption’ and ‘5G opportunities for broadcasters’ respectively that provided the foundation for the panel discussion.

5G as of today can provide a physical layer for media delivery and also technically, 5G can broadcast. However, stakeholders need to address the availability of the equipment and user adoption or in general the service layer. Currently, there are no regulatory frameworks or business models that are suitable for the distribution of media, especially public service media (PSM) because the public service media in many countries comes with regulatory obligations.

As key outcomes or the takeaways from the AIBD 5G webinar were the creation of the awareness on how 5G can facilitate high bit rate video services as demand by emerging services such as UHD, understanding that 5G can facilitate some contribution networks for broadcasting, creation of awareness that 5G can serve niche unicast or narrowcast services for media and entertainment such as venue-casting, especially for sports events and awareness that 5G would be capable of supporting AR/VR immersive and interactive value-added media services. Broadcasters from Television, Radio and New Media from Asia-Pacific and beyond benefited from the 5G webinar by enhancing their knowledge and understanding, especially in the context of broadcasting. Among the over a hundred participants on each Zoom and Facebook, the platforms included technologists, engineers, producers, and content creators. In conclusion, 5G will offer both opportunities and challenges to the broadcast industry in an increasingly connected and intelligent future and both mobile and broadcast industries have to work hard collaboratively to gain true benefits.

The article can be accessed via link https://bit.ly/3mGtPp1

You can listen to the session via link https://bit.ly/32Q03p