LiveU is delighted to be a member of the 5G-TOURS H2020 project consortium and support the vision of improving tourism and city life using 5G and advanced technology.

LiveU changed live newsgathering forever with the invention of cellular bonding technology. Today LiveU’s world-leading portfolio of live IP video solutions is synonymous with professional live broadcasting and video production. LiveU’s native 5G HD/1080p60 and 4K HEVC solutions enable broadcasters of all sizes to acquire and share the highest quality live video reliably on any viewing platform.

In the context of the 5G-TOURS European project, LiveU is involved with the Itinerant Orchestra experiment in which musicians located in the main concert hall play together with other itinerant musicians walking in the street. Each itinerant musician is followed by one (or more) camera operator, shooting their performance and providing cues to stay in sync with the main orchestra performance. LiveU is partnering with TIM, which provides the 5G network and RAI, which is producing the whole event. The music has been composed especially for these trials by the renowned Andrea Molino.

The high-quality AV signal is transmitted via the LiveU units equipped with the 5G network to the main control room in the concert hall where it is processed and mixed; the spectators in the concert hall watch the itinerant musicians playing, as a real-time virtual presence, on LED walls while listening to their performance, mixed with the local orchestra, until they enter the concert hall and join the orchestra.
This use case requires stable 5G bandwidth and more importantly – stable latency. The synchronization between the musicians is critical and depends on these stable parameters. LiveU transmission uses either single 5G modem or dual 5G bonded modems to achieve this synchronized stability at a low enough latency.

LiveU was involved in the past in commercial projects related to tourism, enabling various kinds of applications that can be expanded and become mainstream today thanks to 5G technology.

For example, back in 2016 LIVEU enabled a ground-breaking advert for Virgin Holidays (more info in this link). On another occasion, Graubünden Tourism used LiveU to bring together the most hectic and peaceful places in Switzerland via an electronic live billboard at Zurich Central Station, transporting stressed-out city dwellers to the Graubünden village of Vrin (watch it in this link).

Another unique case was live streaming to Twitter of a scuba diver connected to a LiveU unit on the boat (watch it in this link). Imagine what opportunities 5G can bring to watching scuba divers or any other extreme sports professional streaming live from all over the globe.

LiveU’s participation in the 5G-TOURS project provides an excellent opportunity to explore the potential of 5G networks and collect useful insights and experiences for the project use case. 5G-TOURS allows LiveU to learn with great partners how to further enhance these use cases toward safer and richer city experiences.