IBC2025: 5G finally winning for live sports
Rewind to last year and 5G was still more proof of concept than real-world scenario. Not any more.
“5G is here and real,” said Brad Cheney, VP, Field Operations & Engineering, Fox Sports at the IBC2025 trade event in the Netherlands.
Fox has been trailing 5G for transmitting feeds as part of an outside broadcast for the best part of a decade. Now 5G is a staple of its sports coverage, including at the US’ biggest event, Super Bowl.
“The goal was that 5G had to be deployable, easy and should not involve a lot of engineers. We are now able to do that. We needed upload of 120Mbps constantly across the network because that gives us the response our broadcast teams are used to. Together with Verizon we achieved that at two successive Super Bowl and are replicating it at multiple events.”
Fox Sports' Cheney (middle), Verizon's Kornblatt (right) (Image credit Adrian Pennington)
5G delivers, from Super Bowl to FIFA
5G has really started to deliver for live broadcast, confirmed Jake Kornblatt, VP, Verizon Business. “Previously, when I’ve come to IBC, 5G was proof of concept. Now there are actionable use cases in sports and connected venues delivering real RoI.
“At Taylor Swift concerts too the younger generation are not just taking pictures but streaming live to Insta or Facetime to bring that experience to people who aren’t in the venue. That is what our upload capability does. We see the same thing in sports.”
At Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, Fox Sports were returning video to iPads over 5G under 200ms. “We run hundreds of belt packs from Bourbon Street onto the field with no latency, no trading off multiple sets of gear and no loss of communication – that was not possible before,” said Cheney.
Verizon has deployed private 5G across all NFL venues. “On the fan side this enables cashless checkout, accelerated access, facial recognition – all things that maximise revenue for teams and leagues and improve fan experiences,” said Kornblatt. “We provide critical gameday connectivity for teams and broadcasters including Fox Sports. The same tech can be taken internationally to NFL games in Dublin, Madrid or London. We even have a private 5G demo here at the IBC in Hall 14.”
Verizon is the official telco partner for FIFA World Cup 2026 in North America & Mexico. “FIFA is one of the most tech heavy companies there is,” Kornblatt said. “We will be with them step by step to deliver the greatest show on earth and that includes connecting refs and coaches and team members throughout the event.”
Record-setting with live sport streaming
In the session "Live sports at scale: Breaking new ground with emerging technology," the focus was on how sports broadcasters can deliver more content to more platforms faster than ever.
“The Paris Olympics had over 60 concurrent streams at any time and 300 events on any day,” explained Mansoor Fazil, Director of Global Platform Engineering, NBCU. “That’s a huge challenge with scheduling and observability of operations. Preparation and having resiliency at every layer of your stack is essential.”
BT, a distributor for TNT Sports in the UK, has pivoted to doing encoding in the cloud. “The biggest pain point is the transition from broadcast viewing to OTT,” said Colin Phillips, Principal Architect IPTV, BT. “We constantly set new bitrates records for our network. Last season we had 33.7TB of Premier League football over our network. Managing those volumes has been a key concern for us as a telco. We have though been seeing bitrate savings up to 60% in our trials.”
Marcos Obadia, SVP Global Engineering and Media Technology, TelevisaUnivision said, “There are still a lot of manual conversations that have to happen to ensure the experience is flawless from subscriber management to encoding.”
JioStar reaches a billion people with cricket broadcasts in dozens of languages for the India domestic market.
“It’s a very complex operation,” said Prashant Khanna, Head, Production Services, Studios & Production Tech, JioStar with understatement. “Can you react to the first moment a viewer issue arises and address that constantly and instantly. There are so many variables at play unlike in a traditional linear environment. Here you run in multiple directions to see what could be causing the issue. The ability to identify that sooner and allow fewer people to do it at much bigger scale would be extremely helpful.”
AI on the brink of transformation
If there’s one type of content almost immune to the impact of AI it is live sports. Mike Darcey, former COO at Sky predicted that the authenticity of live sport will become even more distinctive in the age of AI.
“Tier 1 sport is the only distinct, non-replicable content around and going forward it only becomes more and more standout among an infinite pool of other content.”
Nonetheless, AI is being used to supercharge production behind the scenes and spruce up presentation onscreen.
Warner Bros. Discovery CTO Avi Saxena explained, “We cannot have an army of humans tagging live content for every goal, yellow card or record being broken. We can and are using AI to detect key moments. Cues can be based on the tone of a commentator’s voice or spectators’ interactions. We can scale that to any sport or country.”
Warner Bros' Discovery CTO Avi Saxena (image credit Adrian Pennington)
For example, medal alerts during the Paris Olympics coverage alerted fans when a gold medal was about to be won, allowing them to watch the moment and then return to their original stream.
Saxena said WBD is developing a AI tool to enable fans to replay key highlights of live matches just 3-5 seconds behind the live stream.
“AI is transforming the world in ways no-one envisioned,” said Saxena. “Media and AI intersect in a very unique way. These are features in our products at different scales, under active development and some experimentation.”
WBD is investing in hundreds of innovations in AI throughout its business from content creation to consumption, he said.
He identified metadata as the key. “The amount of metadata that can be extracted is insane. It has jumped from a few hundred data points to millions and millions. The problem is to optimise ways to extract it all and then activate it in our products.”
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