A view from our CEO, Cameron Speirs: Reflecting on a phenomenally successful, award-winning IBC2023 for Neutral Wireless.
We’ve just concluded our participation at IBC2023 – the world’s leading [media] content and technology show held each year in Amsterdam. And what a show it has been for us!
Our state-of-the-art private 5G Network-In-a-Box (NIB) solution was a key enabler for several of our industry partners at IBC — who are as excited as we are by the benefits that private 5G is now bringing to wireless broadcast and production workflows. Neutral Wireless 5G-for-broadcast deployments were showcased at the BT M&B, Cisco, LiveU, and Sony stands, and our team supported each of these key partners in their endeavours to promote their products and services. This was in addition to us delivering our own Media Accelerator project on 5G Motion Capture for Live Performance & Animation along with our project partners: AMD, d&b, Cisco, Curing Kids Cancer, Goldsmiths University, Noitom, Outernet, The Scotland 5G Centre, University of Strathclyde, and Vodafone.
We also chose IBC2023 to launch “nibOS” – our GUI-based NIB configuration, set-up and performance dashboard tool. Neutral Wireless’ nibOS provides our customers with an accessible and intuitive method of interfacing with our 5G RAN and 5G Core: enabling customers themselves to deploy quicker (“5G in 5 minutes”) and to more easily support their own wireless connectivity requirements. To further help our customers to gain the most from our NIB eco-system, we have also developed a series of short training courses tailored to the private 5G-for-broadcast use case.
We have always been confident that our private 5G NIB can be delivered reliably and cost effectively in support of broadcast production, and this was no better exemplified than in May 2023 when we collaborated with BBC R&D to design and deploy our Neutral Wireless NIB technology during The Coronation of King Charles’ III. Our network was rapidly ‘popped-up’ (eight cells in total) and provided a corridor of private 5G connectivity along the length of The Mall (~1.2km). Once the network was operational, it enabled the national and international media news gathering outlets to connect and then wirelessly transmit their real-time video content from anywhere along the entire length of The Mall. What resulted was the world’s largest temporary deployment of a private 5G network for media broadcast purposes.
Back to IBC 2023, and we were delighted that our innovation and deployment efforts in private 5G were enthusiastically recognised by our media and technology peers. Firstly, our technical paper describing the King’s Coronation project was chosen as the winner of the IBC best technical paper award. Then the delivery of The Coronation use case itself (in May 2023) won the IBC Content Creation [Innovation] Award. Finally, a third award (‘Best of Show’ for TVBEurope category) came the way of Neutral Wireless as part of our collaboration with BT M&B, BBC R&D, and Zixi, investigating “Wireless IP” and low-Earth orbit satellite workflows for live broadcast production.
To round off an already quite remarkable IBC2023 show for Neutral Wireless, we were also delighted to showcase Apple iOS17 devices (iPhones and iPads) connecting to our private 5G NIB. This is an important milestone as high-end mobile phone handsets are increasingly being used for POV video and indeed, increasingly, as recording tools at formal and impromptu video news gathering events. It means that we are now able to connect several mainstream mobile handsets along with other more traditional broadcast user equipment to our private 5G architecture.
We are now convinced more than ever that private 5G-for-broadcast has come of age for media content production, and we are delighted that Neutral Wireless is providing both thought leadership and an expanding private 5G ecosystem based on our software-defined radio NIB architecture.
Innovation and demonstration as described above is very often a “team sport”, where striding forward involves collaborating towards a common goal. And here at Neutral Wireless, we are fortunate and grateful to our friends and peers who have been key partners with us along the journey so far. It’s hard to call out everyone, but some of the other key collaboration partners that have not already been mentioned above include: StrathSDR, Tay5G, AW2S, Amarisoft, Alpha Wireless, Haivision, Open Broadcast Systems, BBC News, and QTV.
To enquire about acquiring a Neutral Wireless private network, please feel free to get in touch with our sales team at info@neutralwireless.com.
