Fansided

NBC Sports 5G video integration is great news for a wide variety of sports fans

By Derek Helling

BEVERLY HILLS, CA - AUGUST 03: (L-R) Primtetime Host Mike Tirico, President, NBC Olympics Production and Programming, Jim Bell, and Short Track Speed Skating Analyst Apolo Ohno of ''The Winter Olympics' panel speak onstage during the NBCUniversal portion of the 2017 Summer Television Critics Association Press Tour at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on August 3, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
BEVERLY HILLS, CA - AUGUST 03: (L-R) Primtetime Host Mike Tirico, President, NBC Olympics Production and Programming, Jim Bell, and Short Track Speed Skating Analyst Apolo Ohno of ''The Winter Olympics' panel speak onstage during the NBCUniversal portion of the 2017 Summer Television Critics Association Press Tour at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on August 3, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images) /
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Next year will be a big one for NBC Sports, as it will be streaming several major sporting events. The development of 5G video will make those experiences more seamless for audiences.

Fans who have streamed live sporting events are familiar with the constant spoilers on their Twitter feed, as the people on their timelines share reactions to moments that haven’t yet occurred on the stream. Some relief to the problem of lag time in online video is coming, however, with NBC Sports 5G video.

With events like Super Bowl LII, the 2018 Winter Olympics from PyeonChang, China, the 2017-18 NHL regular season and postseason, and the 2018 World Cup of men’s soccer on the docket for NBC Sports to stream in 2018, the pressure is on NBC to deliver a high-quality product around the world for its streaming audience.

According to Alex Silverman of Cablefax.com, that interest could be aided by an advancement in technology. The biggest benefit for the audiences who will be watching these events is an improvement in the stream’s quality with 5G video. Ericsson TV and Media CTO Mark Russell clues fans in to how that will work.

"Part of the reason that your Twitter feed is so far off your main screen TV, some of it is to do with the network and some of it is to do with the way the underlying mobile streams adapt to how different streams are coded and distributed. We’re putting a lot of energy into those fundamentals to make sure that latency is minimal. It’ll never be exactly synced with your TV, but it’ll get awfully close. That in combination with the network itself we think will give you a nice fundamental way to distribute content everywhere on every device."

If this technology gets implemented into NBC Sports’ streaming platforms in time for these sporting events, the bottom line is that the buffering and gap in time between the real event and when that action is displayed in the stream will reduce.

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Streaming a live sporting event will never deliver an experience that is identical to viewing the event in person. With the introduction of 5G video, however, it’s going to be more realistic than ever.

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