The DVB-I standard for online service discovery enables seamless integration of 5G Broadcast delivery. The Media Web Symposium at the Fraunhofer FOKUS institute in Berlin saw demonstrations of live 5G Broadcast service instances integrated in the service list of the continuing German DVB-I Pilot project.
Fraunhofer FOKUS is a research institute based in Berlin. The 11th annual FOKUS Media Web Symposium saw 230 participants from over 20 countries participate in the conference, workshops, and tutorials.
Among the topics under discussion was DVB-I, an open standard for network-agnostic service discovery of audiovisual media services. It enables compatible applications, devices and displays to discover lists of available services and details of how to access them over various networks.
The DVB-I standard provides a service layer that can combine online services with those distributed over traditional broadcast networks, like digital terrestrial television.
This can potentially include delivery over 5G Broadcast networks, which can be transmitted from tall towers or mobile masts.
5G Broadcast, technically known as LTE-based 5G Terrestrial Broadcast, is part of the 3GPP family of standards. It can be used to deliver broadcast television and radio services to fixed and mobile devices and displays. The same signal can support any number of receivers within a wide reception area.
The demonstration by rbb, the Berlin and Brandenburg arm of German public broadcaster ARD, showed how a DVB-I service list can announce multiple service instances, including 5G Broadcast transmissions from the Berlin-Scholzplatz broadcast tower, which can be prioritised and selected by devices capable of receiving them.
In the longer term, DVB-I offers the prospect of enabling the combination of the best attributes of broadcast, mobile and online infrastructure, with the potential to be a global standard for bringing them together.