The 18-month Live + Wild project recently completed its fifth and final 5G transportable mobile network test at yet another extreme UK location. LiveU has been a commercial partner throughout the DCMS (Department of Media, Culture and Sport) part-funded project, which won funding from the department as part of the 5G Create program: “5G Create is an open competition within the 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme. Up to £30 million of government funding will be available, aiming to explore and develop new use-cases and 5G technical capabilities.” There have been multiple programs across many verticals.
“Live + Wild” is a consortium led by multi award-winning Candour Productions, based in Leeds. Partnering with Candour is a telecoms innovation company aql, who’s also powering many global brands, and additionally, MTN Safety who has been supporting the team in extreme environments. This collaboration was born through an opportunity created to test how 5G can help filmmakers deliver live and fast turnaround video content from remote, challenging locations.
Patricia Doherty, Producer Director, Candour Productions and Live + Wild Project Director, said, “I heard about 5G’s potential and the funding window when I was researching a different film. This was a very fast turnaround documentary, right at the start of the first lockdown. It was called A Day in the Life of Coronavirus Britain and had to be filmed, edited and onscreen within three days. I spoke to UK5G advisor Paul Wilson who informed me about the funding window and we discussed the increased bandwidth and lower latency of 5G and how that could potentially benefit Candour while filming fast-turnaround documentaries when we need to get footage very quickly back to the edit. We were filming all over the UK and the biggest challenge was getting that footage where it needed to be. We came at Live + Wild from a film maker’s perspective as a potential user. We wanted to explore what 5G can do for us as filmmakers and this fitted the criteria for the DCMS bid, which was the creative industries vertical.”
Candour approached 5G mobile operator aql with the idea, which they jumped at. aql, it turns out, is powering four other DCMS 5G Create projects.
Professor Adam Beaumont, Chairman and Founder of aql, stated “For us, this 5G Create project embodied both 5G-enabled creativity and also the creativity with the technology itself. Normally, mobile networks are optimised for fast downloads, with the upload being much slower. In this instance, we optimised our network to allow fast upload of live streams from the cameras. This is a key differential to being able to support filming and high-resolution content creation over 5G. Using our dedicated networks also means that it’s possible to film large spectator events without fighting with the spectators for scarce mobile bandwidth where everyone is connected to the same network.” He continued, “Now we’ve created a simple-to-deploy mobile platform as part of an all-terrain vehicle, we’re going to look at how we can convert this to an all-electric platform and also a smaller “network in a box” solution. All built using UK or European supply chain.”
Live + Wild consisted of five separate trials: an initial test event sea cliff climbing; covering the Helvellyn Triathlon; the Dark Sky trial at the Kielder Observatory; cave exploring around Settle, Yorkshire; and sea kayaking. From each trial there was a very high-quality live stream, a documentary and an overall “making of” film being created. Doherty explained they were testing both the live streaming capabilities, taking into account the very high-quality, bandwidth-intensive footage requirements, as well as how very large files could be sent. As she said, “We’ve used our crafted storytelling skills to try and create more documentary-style footage but live streamed. That was a tall order, but we learned a lot in the process.”
Doherty continued, “The tests were chosen to be very different from one another. Some of the areas I had previously visited whilst climbing and caving – the sea cliffs and Ribblesdale’s caving system particularly. I wanted to make this hard for us to give 5G a real workout. We worked closely with aql at the outset and they provided me with bullet points about using 5G, what it likes, what it doesn’t and how we could deliberately create different, challenging scenarios. It was also scheduled across 12 months so we’d also experience massive variations in weather.”
aql’s portable 5G off-road, vehicle-based network technology can be set up in a matter of hours, courtesy in no small part to what has been learnt via using it in such testing conditions. Range varies, with up to several miles possible depending on location, with the high-end cameras used during these shoots connected to a variety of LiveU units, including the multi-camera LU800. Live + Wild used remote production for four of the events – carried out in Leeds at aql’s historic and well-connected HQs, with a small on-site team and gallery producing the Dark Sky event from Kielder. For the remote productions, signals were bonded at the 5G base station and then a variety of backhaul links were used to get the streaming back to base, often using several per event. This included mobile LTE “4G” and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite connectivity as well as fixed-line broadband.
Upesh Chavda, Senior Technical Operations Engineer, aql, explained the vital nature of IP bonding to the project, “Based on our experience at the sea cliffs event in Wales, our first event, it was approximately 5:30 in the evening that we started having issues with the mobile networks in terms of their signal because we were in such a remote area. By using IP bonding we kept the connection stable and resilient. We had some of our backhaul networks drop out and bandwidth drop significantly, but because of our consistently stable 5G connection to the LiveU, and the bonded backhaul, we could make it work. Essentially, we were using a VPN over multiple backhaul networks, to our distributed Mobile Core, keeping the signal consistent, which is critical for live events.”
Andy Brown, VP 5G Delivery at aql added “One of the biggest learnings has been that we (aql) can set up a 5G network rapidly in places where there’s currently little to no connectivity and we now understand how we can support the media industry. The insights we’ve gained from this are significant. To be able to see the creative output of our technical endeavours has been highly rewarding. We’ll be working with LiveU on other projects.”
Bill Brigden, aql’s CTO, commented “What’s remarkable is, whilst we’ve had to do a huge amount of work to ensure compatibility with many of the remote devices with our network, the LiveU products simply connected and worked flawlessly, using a single 5G SIM and achieving huge upload speeds.”
Doherty concluded, “We’re really happy with LiveU. We hadn’t used it before and it was great and very, very important to Live + Wild. It was clear from early conversations LiveU technology had to be in the workflow. And speaking with the company, it very quickly became clear the level of collaboration they were willing to commit to. It was very user-friendly in terms of the simplicity of setting it up and using it. We used a variety of units, including the multi-camera LU800 and the LU600 and compact LU300. It’s great there’s that range because sometimes you need to use a very small unit whereas other times the multi-camera capabilities of the LU800 took centre stage. At the triathlon, a member of our team had an LU300 on his bike for the 39-mile cycle stage and he didn’t mind at all. We had multiple feeds at this event. We put a unit in a fixed position nearly at the top of Helvellyn and with the lens we used, we got a rock-solid almost 360-degree view of a large section of the fell run.”
LiveU has been involved in many 5G trials, covering different aspects, around the world, including at an EU level. Live + Wild, and what we’ve all learnt from that, is a significant addition to our knowledge bank and further validation of all the work we have done across 5G and beyond.
