Trickbox Provides Live Three-Dimensional Stream for Historic 5G Cellular Demonstration

Trickbox was recently selected to deliver a low latency, broadcast quality, two-way video call to enable a live three-dimensional image stream at a press event, which resulted in a first-time technical achievement.

The stream, located at opposite ends of the UK, was used to produce a life size three-dimensional image, with which the presenters and guests at the event could interact. A return feed completed the call. As there was no access to static IPs or the ability to perform any port mapping due to the large scale network address translation (NAT), we were unable to deploy a traditional point-to-point link and had to find an alternative solution.

We used a Haivision Media Gateway on Amazon Web Services to relay feeds between endpoints, eliminating the need for any network configuration. While this effectively doubled the latency, it was still well within limits to perform a two-way call. This, combined with  high-efficiency HEVC encoders/decoders and Secure Reliable Transport (SRT), allowed us to keep the latency down and produce a bandwidth-efficient, reliable stream. In addition, care was taken to deploy the Media Gateway logically as close to the IP network as possible, again to reduce the latency between the 5G endpoints. As 5G is still in the test phase, we had to design and deploy the solution in the demo network during the test days. This required us to fine tune the technology to work reliably on the new infrastructure.

The final results spoke for themselves. The 5G network and the video transport solution performed perfectly and wowed both the press and the client’s employees.

This proof of concept paves the way to deliver more and more broadcast content via cellular networks.