Throughout the IBC2025 conference, top-level executives are beginning to concur that 5G has officially stepped out of the proof of concept realm and into real-world sports production scenarios.
“5G is here and real,” said Brad Cheney, VP of Field Operations and Engineering at Fox Sports, in the session “Game changer? The Impact of Private 5G on Live Sports Production.”
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, the Super Bowl.
“The goal was for 5G to be deployable, easy and not involve a lot of engineers. We are now able to do that. We needed an 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 Bowls and are replicating it at multiple events.”
5G has really started to deliver for live broadcast, confirmed Jake Kornblatt, VP of 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 [Return on Investment].
“At Taylor Swift concerts too, the younger generation is 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 was 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 the FIFA World Cup 2026 in North America and 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 referees, coaches and team members throughout the event.”
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 at NBCU. “That’s a huge challenge with scheduling and observability of operations. Preparation and having resiliency at every layer of your stack are essential.”
BT, a distributor for TNT Sports in the UK, has pivoted to encoding in the cloud. “The biggest pain point is the transition from broadcast viewing to OTT,” said Colin Phillips, Principal Architect IPTV at BT. “We constantly set new bitrate 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 – though we have been seeing bitrate savings up to 60% in our trials.”
Marcos Obadia, SVP of Global Engineering and Media Technology at 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 Indian domestic market.
“It’s a very complex operation,” said Prashant Khanna, Head of Production Services, Studios and Production Tech at 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 a much bigger scale would be extremely helpful.”
George Jarrett recently investigated the European Broadcasting Union’s contributions to the development of 5G.
EBU’s Noel Curran: “We have to be careful about entering the opinion space”
Public service broadcasting is both competing against industry behemoths and dealing with unprecedented political pressure, Noel Curran, CEO of the EBU, revealed at the IBC2025 Conference.
Women In Immersive Tech IT’s Muki Kulhan: “We want to burst these doors open and keep the conversation going.”
At the conference session “Industries of Tomorrow: How to Embrace Change and Ride the Wave”, IBC heard inspiring stories of women making a difference, sometimes against the odds.
3Vision’s Rafi Cohen: “Europe has just an 18% share of the global market”
Europe may not have a Netflix or a Disney+, but there’s still a lot going on in its streaming market, as an IBC2025 panel at the Content Everywhere session “How Europe is Redefining Global Streaming” has outlined.
Formula 1’s Ruth Buscombe: “AI capabilities make capturing video less labour-intensive”
One in eight people now watch Formula One. This once-dwindling sport has made a remarkable comeback, thanks to a focus on storytelling supported by technology advances. These insights were revealed by Ruth Buscombe, Race Strategist at Formula 1, speaking at the “Pushing the Limits: AI Innovation in Live Sports with Formula 1” session on the Future Tech Stage today.
Roku’s Tom Price: “The job is about making it easy for the user to find all their content”
At IBC2025, leading executives from Roku, Rakuten TV, and Streaming Made Easy have shared their expert summations that user experience and partnerships must remain at the centre of broadcast success.
