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Consumer Use Cases for 5G

What are the best possible consumer applications and services use cases for 5G? Jason Thibeault, Executive Director, Streaming Video Technology Alliance, USA, mentions two important words that are at the core of 5G for network operators: “interactivity and immersive.” He asks Carlos Hernandez, Chief Revenue Officer, SSIMWAVE, “What are we seeing provided today in terms of experiences to users?”

Hernandez says that ultimately there is still some distance to go in terms of getting consumers caught up to the fully interactive and immersive abilities offered by 5G. However, he talks about the ways that SSIMWAVE is at the forefront of researching how the brain processes visual content, especially regarding VR 360. “But we need to get to 4K,” he says. “We need to get to HDR. And I think that progression is going to happen very soon. But it definitely has to be managed in terms of quality.”

“And I would think you would need more on the devices themselves, right?” Thibeault says. “[5G] doesn't automatically enable these immersive use cases because we now have to build the devices and the software and the workflows to do the use case.”

“Maybe, maybe!” Sean Gardner, Head of Video Strategy & Market Development, AECG, AMD, interjects. He talks enthusiastically about how advances in cloud capability allow users who have outdated equipment to still take advantage of the full resources of 5G. “Once you move all that content up to a cloud,” he says, “now you have the ability to do what you would like and the ability to start removing some of the processing that you have to have on the Customer Premise(s) Equipment (CPE) side and move that to the cloud. Now you can have a greater quality of experience.”

Gardner highlights the ways that cloud gaming can benefit from this process. “Once you move the Xbox or PlayStation into the cloud…[you] just need a decoder, or it's essentially a KVM, it's an input and output…now all of a sudden, I've removed the barrier of the hardware. And I think that's where it starts to get really exciting. Some of these applications don't have to wait for [improvements with] the end equipment, as long as they have the 5G connectivity.”

Learn more about 5G at Streaming Media West 2022.

Watch full-session videos from Streaming Media East 2022.

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