Radio 3 broadcasts a concert with 5G and cloud live from the Thyssen

El Niño de Elche together with guitarist Raúl Cantizano performed this Saturday in a peculiar concert at the Thyssen Bornemisza National Museum in which Radio 3 and the Technological Innovation team RTVE They have come together, again, to take another innovative step by broadcasting it thanks to the use of 5G and the cloud.

The broadcast has been used to simulate an “emergency” deployment with few equipment and personnel, but with the highest quality and broadcast channels possible.

The program strangeheterodoxies, about the complex disciplines that make up the difficult and broad artistic field, could be heard and seen live, with the emblematic painting by Francis Bacon Portrait of George Dyer in a mirror as a witness, thanks to the possibilities allowed by 5G, cloud implementation or virtualized systems for the emission of signals to different broadcast platforms.

José María Goicoechea, communications director of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, highlights that “the most varied Radio 3 programs have aired through the Villahermosa palace, such as It all starts today, System failure, Sandwich time… or live music with well-known names such as Izal or Silvia Pérez Cruz, who have had the museum rooms as a stage. We have been delighted to receive Radio 3 at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum for many years now in a cultural collaboration that is always fruitful, always enriching and always stimulating.

In a small and complex space due to the pictorial works or the presence of the visiting public, the Radio 3 and Innovation teams have had to adapt, under the watchful eye of George Dyer, to achieve a challenge, to make conventional radio broadcasting possible and give it image and more presence on other platforms with minimal equipment and maximizing the possibilities offered by innovative resources.

Tomás Fernando Flores, director of Radio 3, highlights that "it is important to highlight with our young audience the importance of the great Spanish cultural institutions, bringing young audiences to these spaces with new proposals. Also our commitment to innovation in formats, languages and technologies through Radio 3 and Radio 3 Extra."

Workflow

Coverage was achieved with 4 5G mobile phones, one in “motion” and three others in fixed positions. The audio of the broadcast was that of the Radio 3 mixing console, the same as in conventional FM, captured on one of the mobile phones via cable. All signals, received through the mobile application TVU Anywhere of TVU Networks installed and configured on the mobile phones for the type of broadcast that was going to be carried out, they were synchronized, managed and mixed remotely, by an RTVE director located in Toledo, with the virtual production system in the cloud. Producer from TVU.

The resulting broadcast was distributed, simultaneously and live, in RTMP for the Radio 3 website and social networks, for the Radio 3 APP, RTVE Play, YouTube and for an SDI television decoder installed in Torrespaña for broadcast on linear TV and ingest for archiving and subsequent use.

Carmen Perez Cernuda, Deputy Director of Innovation and Technological Strategy at RTVE, stressed that "for us it is a pleasure to participate in these activities that unite Technology and Culture, although on this occasion the fact that the event room is small has posed a significant challenge, which has made it impossible for us to use a professional camera to send the audio to the TVU mixer set up in the cloud and has forced us to propose a workflow based solely on mobile phones."

The limitations were also an advantage, they allowed this broadcast to be simulate an “emergency” broadcast. “We thought that we had to cover an unforeseen news story that was happening in a place far from our usual teams or work centers and that we could take advantage of something as common anywhere as a mobile phone, that of any person present, to have live images and sound,” he says. David Corral, head of Content Innovation at RTVE.

“With the systems that we are testing, it is easy to link these mobile phones through a simple QR code and be able to generate a signal, mixed as we have verified remotely from anywhere, with low latency and sufficient quality, to have content in a linear or digital broadcast waiting for conventional media to arrive, such as camera equipment, backpacks or terrestrials, which, in addition, can complement by providing more resources to the broadcasts,” adds Corral.

The involvement of different RTVE departments in the same project, such as Radio 3, Innovation or Territorial Centers, has become a common complicity that allows us to face pioneering experiences with guarantees and maintain RTVE's commitment to creativity, culture and access to it.