How Machine-Generated Media Could Change the Way We Think

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One reason we appreciate and are moved by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel chapel or Vincent Van Gogh’s wheat field paintings is because we can relate to the blood, sweat and tears — and years, in the case of the Renaissance Italian — that went into them.

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Can the same be said of machine-generated art? Does the product of generative AI have any depth of meaning?

Armchair philosopher L. M. Sacascas, blogging at The Convivial Society, has gazed into the abyss and got nothing back but a shrug.

If nothing else, the rise of generative AI tools like DALL-E 2 this year has changed the discourse around the technology from Cyberdyne Systems slavery to more benign issues like whether copyright law needs to be changed.

But Sacascas and others are more concerned with what AI media will do to our imaginations in the longer term.

There are those who argue that AI tools will actually enhance our imaginations by conjuring visuals or sounds that we might not have even dreamed of.

But Sacascas is unconvinced. He quotes digital artist Annie Dorsen; “For all the surrealism of these tools’ outputs, there’s a banal uniformity to the results.”

Dorsen went on to write that “when people’s imaginative energy is replaced by the drop-down menu ‘creativity’ of big tech platforms, on a mass scale, we are facing a particularly dire form of immiseration.”

AI is the manifestation of something Andy Warhol saw all those years ago: the commercialization of art, its mass production rendering shock images like assassinations or execution chambers, as banal as wallpaper.

Paraphrasing the words of Dorsen, Sacascas and philosopher Bernard Stiegler: When industrial technology is applied to aesthetics, conditioning of the same “substitutes for experience.”

That’s bad, they argue, not just because of the dulling sameness of a world of infinite but meaningless variety. It’s bad because a person who lives like this “has forgotten how to think” and is “incapable of forming an inner life.”

AI-generated images may be technically amazing — but there isn’t room for the happy accidents or the blood, sweat and tears that inspired so much of what we hold up as high art from the past.

“They may startle or surprise, which is something, but they do not then go on to capitalize on that initial surprise to lead me on to some deeper insight or aesthetic experience,” Sacascas writes.

Tech commentator Rob Horning has made a similar observation in his recent comments about generative AI focused on ChatGPT.

“AI models,” Horning observes, “presume that thought is entirely a matter of pattern recognition, and these patterns, already inscribed in the corpus of the internet, can [be] mapped once and for all, with human ‘thinkers’ always already trapped within them. The possibility that thought could consist of pattern breaking is eliminated.

This also hints at how, as Sacascas wrote last summer, we seem to be increasingly trapped in the past by what are essentially machines for the storage and manipulation of memory.

“The past has always fed our capacity to create what is new, of course, but the success of these tools depends on their ability to fit existing patterns as predictably as possible. The point is to smooth out the uncanny aberrations and to eliminate what surprises us,” he says.

Dan Cohen, another blogger on AI art, agrees. “The best art isn’t about pleasing or meeting expectations,” he wrote. “Instead, it often confronts us with nuance, contradictions, and complexity. It has layers that reveal themselves over time. True art is resistant to easy consumption, and rewards repeated encounters.”

In contrast, all AI tools are designed to “meet expectations, to align with genres and familiar usage as their machine-learning array informs pixels and characters.”

This is in tension, says Cohen, “with the human ability to coax new perspectives and meaning from the unusual, unique lives we each live.”

Proponents of AI art — artists producing artworks with AI tools — can and do explain the process by which they arrived at the prompts that yielded the final image, but Sacascas dismisses this as like “talking exclusively about the shape of the brush or the chemical composition of the paint.”

You can’t discuss or critique an AI image in the same way that you would dissect a painting or symphony that has been made by someone. What’s missing is a deeper understanding of the image precisely because the viewer of the artwork knows that there’s a person behind its creation. It is that knowledge — the shared knowledge of having inhabited the same world as the artist — from which richer meaning about the human condition is derived.

He argues this in relation to “high art,” like a painting by masters Pieter Bruegel the Elder or Rembrandt van Rijn.

“What I find, whether or not I am fully conscious of it, is not merely technical virtuosity, it is another mind,” he says. “To encounter a painting or a piece of music or poem is to encounter another person, although it is sometimes easy to lose sight of this fact.”

He argues, “I can ask about the meaning of a work of art because it was composed by someone with whom I have shared a world and whose experience is at least partly intelligible to me.

“Without reducing the meaning of a work of art to the intention of its creator, I can nonetheless ask and think about such intentions. In putting a question to a painting, I am also putting a question to another person.”

The same argument extends outside of AI-generated media and to the volume of visuals, videos and text we are bombarded with daily.

Sacasas has previously written about how skim reading characterizes so much of our engagement with digital texts. He calls it a coping mechanism for the overwhelming volume of text we typically encounter on any given day.

So, likewise, might we settle for a scanning sort of looking, he suggests, “one that is content to bounce from point to point searching but never delving thus never quite seeing.”

Does that happen when we watch TV, for example? Do you skip seconds or minutes of the latest binge-worthy show in order to simply catch up? What happened to savoring the drama and all its on-screen elements?

Filmmakers like Damien Chazelle, James Cameron and Alejandro González Iñárritu have all given us three-hour movies as if to test our patience in cinemas where we can’t just leave. You could argue nonetheless that in each case (Babylon, Avatar: The Way of Water and Bardo) it is the sumptuous visuals that will leave more of an impression than any deeper emotional meaning.

Sacasas doesn’t reference movies but his words can be applied: “This suggests that there are surfaces that may arouse a desire to know more deeply but which do not have the depth to satisfy that desire. I think this is where we find ourselves with AI-generated art.

“Why does this matter? Because without that profundity of feeling of connection with another person, then there is nothing but surface. Nothing in fact but loneliness which fatally undermines the reason humankind produces art in the first place.”

Essentially, he is saying that without the blood, sweat and tears of artists we have no culture, or none worth having.

The problem, as Sacasas sees it, is that we need these encounters with depth of meaning to “sustain us, to elevate our thinking, judgment, and imagination.”

So the exchange we are offered is this: in place of occasional experiences of depth that renew and satisfy us, we are simply given an in finite surface upon which to skim indefinitely.

 

Next-Gen (Generated) Creativity: The AI Imagery and Text Tool Combo

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Breakthroughs in text-to-image and language modeling technology such as DALL-E 2 have astonished us this year. OpenAI lead researcher Mark Chen speaks to The Atlantic’s Ross Andersen at the Progress Summit 2022, and says that while AI democratizes art for all, artists are producing the better final product.

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Chen describes the process of training the tool on several hundred million images, a combination of licensed and publicly available media, which — importantly — have text (metadata) descriptions so that the AI associates word prompts with the images.

DALL-E 2 knows what individual objects are “and is able to combine things in ways that it hasn’t seen in the training set before,” says Chen. “That’s part of the magic of AI, that you can kind of generalize beyond what you trained it on.”

There’s an art to training neural networks, too, he implies. “You want to make these them big enough so they’re basically have enough base intelligence to be able to compose all of these elements together.”

If there’s an art to scaling these big models, there’s also an art to writing prompts. Evolving from single-sentence descriptions, creators are now attaching concepts like the mood they want or very specific details or textures. Prompts can now run for several paragraphs.

“I think it’s really about personalization… all these adjectives that you’re adding [into a prompt] helps you personalize the output to what you want. It makes sense that prompts have grown in length and in specificity. It’s a tool to help people create the content that they want for themselves.”

Addressing the controversial issue surrounding whether artist’s should be recognized, or paid, when their work is used to inspire an AI artwork, Chen defends OpenGI’s approach, saying the organization works closely with the art community.

“Our goal isn’t to stiff artists or anything like that. Throughout the whole release process we want to be very conscientious and work with the artists and have them provide feedback.”

However, Chen also suggests that artists who use generative tools will still be able to rise above the crowd and make money because their innate talent means that they are better at using them. DALL-E 2, in other words, is — like a paintbrush or a video camera — a tool.

“With DALL-E we found that artists are better at using these tools than the general population. We’ve seen some of the best artwork coming out of these systems basically produced by artists,” Chen says.

“With AI you always worry about job loss and displacement and we don’t want to ignore these possibilities but we do think it’s a tool,” he continues.

“You know, there are smartphone cameras but it really hasn’t replaced photographers. [Instead] it allows people to make the images they want.”

Chen then turns to Chat GPT-3, OpenGI’s AI algorithm that turns text prompts into whole written articles, or scripts, or poems.

One idea would be to combine GPT-3 with DALL-E 2 “so maybe you have a conversational kind of interface for generating images,” says Chen.

Artist Don Allen Stevenson joins the presentation at the 16-minute mark and runs through some of the ways AI tools can be used, essentially as a way to boost the ideation process. He says there are entire departments in animation that can benefit from using AI such as creating background characters, composing scenes, concept art, environment design, and reference modelling. Out Painting, a technique used in DALL-E 2, can extend and scale an image automatically in ways the artist may not have imagined.

He also explains how you can use Chat GPT-3 to generate better prompts. There are examples, too, of how these techniques can produce, rapidly, the virtual worlds which will populate the metaverse.

 

Bridging the Irish Sea for Fate: The Winx Saga

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Fate: The Winx Saga, produced by Archery Pictures (Operation Mincemeat, Riviera and The State) combines a heady mix of magical adolescence, teen rivalry and monster threat, in a coming-of-age series set at a magical boarding school. 

Within its first month of release after its Netflix debut, Fate was watched by 57-million subscribers, prompting the streamer to renew the series for second season which has now aired. Returning to Ireland to shoot, the seven-part series was produced during Covid, and ClearView Flex formed an invaluable bridge between the Dublin-based creative leads and a team of editors in London.

We sit down with Pete Oldham, post supervisor for the show, who operates freelance in this capacity principally serving indie and broadcast drama productions in the UK. Oldham’s credited with recent hits including Billie Piper’s I Hate Suzie Too, divorce drama The Split and the maternity ward comedy This is Going to Hurt starring Ben Whishaw. Principal photography on Fate season two took place between July and November 2021 with editorial continuing until February of 2022. Locations included Killruddery House and Ardmore Studios in Bray and Montpelier Hill (better known as The Hellfire Club to Dubliners)

Can you share how your team used ClearView on Fate: The Winx Saga? 

Oldham: “On the first season, we’d started to use ClearView Flex in the final sound mix and it just seemed bulletproof. When it came to season two, we set it up as a remote link for the offline edit bridging our editors in London with the shoot in Dublin.”

Without a collaboration tool – what would you have done? 

“The alternative was to move the London-based editors to the directors, producers and execs in Dublin which would have been less feasible.

“In TV drama it’s not unusual for a show to be finishing photography on the last episode while the first episode is nearing its final edit so facilitating sessions between editors and show-runners is important,” Oldham says. “Whenever it doesn’t make sense to have both parties in the same room sharing ideas, then ClearView Flex is the perfect solution.”

What are some of the challenges with remote collaboration and how do you address them?

“I find it helpful to dry run everything before a producer or a director turn ups for a session– just to get them familiar with how ClearView works before they go into a proper attended meeting. Paying attention to simple things, like if someone is travelling and there is an issue with the hotel firewall, we can solve it ahead of time with a dry run.

“I still think it is great to be in the same room when you can, but with all the tech advancements and experience people now have behind them, I don’t see remote going away.”

What are the benefits of ClearView Flex?

“We’ve used a few other remote tools, but we come back to ClearView for the reliability. It is really robust and it seems more advanced. Also, from a producer or director point of view, it is just web based so that is all helpful. I will definitely use ClearView Flex on another project anytime there is a similar remote editing challenge.”

TikTok, From Inception to International “Incident”

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TikTok has just been banned from all devices issued by the House of Representatives, as political pressure continues to build on the Chinese-owned social video app. Are its days numbered?

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The app has become a political issue… not just in the US, but in China too.  

In the West, TikTok’s Chinese ownership has stoked persistent and longstanding worries about its vulnerability to exploitation and manipulation by the Chinese government. 

But in China, its success is considered a threat to the Communist party by offering alternate news and communication that the state there has taken considerable steps to control.

In a New York Times article “How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis,” Alex Palmer profiles the fortunes of the Bytedance-owned phenomenon. “The company is caught in the middle between the old era and the new — too Chinese for America, too American for China,” he finds.

“Despite decades of trying, no Chinese company has ever conquered American society like TikTok,” Palmer adds. “It’s difficult to imagine a Russian or Iranian company — or, increasingly, even another Chinese company — pulling off a similar feat.

“TikTok is considered a Trojan horse — for Chinese influence, for spying, or possibly both. In China, meanwhile, a broad crackdown has sought to rein in high-flying tech companies and their founders, out of fear that, with their influence, independence and popularity, they were becoming alternative power bases to the Chinese Communist Party.”

How It Started, How It’s Going

ByteDance was founded in 2012 by 27-year-old Chinese programmer Zhang Yiming. It launched with an AI-driven news app that, in Zhang’s words, “let every user, at every moment, see their own front news page.” 

Called “Toutiao,” it also contained the seeds of the algorithmic model that TikTok would later ride to global dominance. While other content platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, required users to manually accumulate friends and connections, whose posts then populated the user’s feed.

Toutiao, didn’t care whom you knew, only what you liked. Based on how a user reacted to a piece of content — reading the whole article or just a few sentences, pausing on a particular paragraph, swiping back up to read something again, leaving a comment — Toutiao’s underlying technology began to generate a picture of who the user was and what they wanted.

The app hit one million daily average users only four months after it started. By mid-2017, it had passed one million daily average users. Zhang had saturated the Chinese domestic market and sought international expansion by acquiring Musical.ly, which was already on the phones of millions of American teenagers. The $1bn deal in November 2017 also led to a rebranding to the more internationally friendly and neutral TikTok.

Ironically, TikTok’s success led to the first signs of Chinese government clampdown. In late 2017 ByteDance announced that it would hire 2,000 new “content reviewers,” with preference given to Communist party members. The company also shut down the gossipy Society section of its apps and created a new vertical called New Era, featuring state media coverage.

Data Security and Diplomacy

As detailed by Palmer, a new 2017 Cybersecurity Law and National Intelligence Law, required “Any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence work in accordance with the law,”… and to “maintain the secrecy of all knowledge of state intelligence work.” 

In 2021, two new laws on data security asserted the extraterritorial reach of the Chinese state over any data on Chinese citizens anywhere in the world.

“At the end of the day, the Chinese state holds all the cards,” Jordan Schneider, China analyst at the Rhodium Group, tells the paper. “Firms and their leadership have learned that pushing back too much on government demands can have severe consequences.”

TikTok itself is not available in China — users there must access a different ByteDance app, which follows Chinese government directives on censorship and propaganda.

US social media firms weren’t worried – at first. Palmer says, “Musical.ly had swept up a preteen audience and then stagnated; there was little reason to think TikTok would fare any differently. Besides, TikTok was not really a social network at all. The reason people wanted to be on Facebook, Snap or Instagram was because their friends were on it.”

ByteDance was also spending billions of dollars advertising TikTok on Facebook, Instagram, Snap and other social media platforms.

The Villain Era?

By mid-2019, TikTok had eclipsed 100 million daily average users worldwide, and minted its first bona fide superstar in the artist Lil Nas X, establishing TikTok as a launching pad for musical fame. 

The pandemic drove the app’s popularity into overdrive. According to reporting in the Chinese business press, TikTok gained 110 million daily average users between March and April 2020 alone. 

That success which shows no sign of slowing has prompted calls for the app to be banned.

According to a memo obtained by NBC News, reported in The Guardian, all lawmakers and staffers with House-issued mobile phones have been ordered to remove TikTok.

“House staff are NOT allowed to download the TikTok app on any House mobile devices,” NBC quoted the memo as saying. “If you have the TikTok app on your House mobile device, you will be contacted to remove it.” 

In August the government issued a “cyber advisory” labelling TikTok a high-risk app due to its “lack of transparency in how it protects customer data”. It said TikTok, “actively harvests content for identifiable data” and stores some user data in China. 

According to Reuters, at least 19 US states including Maryland, South Dakota, South Carolina, Nebraska, Texas, Alabama and Utah  have partially blocked the app from state-managed devices over security concerns. 

There are also concerns that TikTok could be used to funnel Chinese government propaganda, whether promoting content favorable to Beijing or by suppressing views deemed objectionable.  

A half-way house agreement whereby US-based Oracle would oversee the app’s data, ensuring that the personal information of American users was stored only in the United States, has done little to assuage concerns.

Banning TikTok is not without precedent. The Indian government has banned it and dozens of other Chinese apps on national security grounds, following border clashes with China. 

“Few lawmakers or regulators even understand TikTok. The app’s opacity has also offered a shield. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, TikTok does not share data with researchers or allow outsiders to study the platform.”

In the US, any similar move “would require a strong and well-developed legal theory, taking into account First Amendment concerns and the distinction between objectionable publishers, which cannot be banned, and a foreign-owned platform,” says Palmer. “An outright ban, especially one targeting Chinese companies writ large, risks looking like Sinophobia.”

Washington also has Meta in its ears. According to emails viewed by The Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has hired one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to lead a nationwide public relations campaign against TikTok. The firm, Targeted Victory, has placed opinion columns and letters to the editor in regional newspapers, encouraged journalists and politicians to dig into TikTok and helped spread damaging news stories.

The overall aim is to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” a director for the firm wrote in a February email.

If TikTok has escaped the scrutiny faced by other Chinese companies (or even other American social media giants), it is in part because the user base skews so young. According to the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of 13-to-17-year-olds in the US use TikTok. 

Palmer says, “Few lawmakers or regulators even understand TikTok. The app’s opacity has also offered a shield. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, TikTok does not share data with researchers or allow outsiders to study the platform.”

Any element of “reds under the beds” paranoia has not been assuaged by the app itself. Forbes found that Chinese state media accounts were flourishing on TikTok, often by promoting attacks on specific US politicians and the state of American institutions in general. Forbes also reported that a team at ByteDance headquarters planned to use TikTok to track the location of specific American users — exactly the nightmare scenario that critics had warned about. 

Over the summer, BuzzFeed reported on leaked audio from dozens of internal company meetings revealing that, contrary to TikTok’s public assertions, data on American users was still routinely accessed by China-based employees. 

“Taken together, these stories have only amplified concerns that TikTok cannot be trusted with its power over American data and attention spans,” writes Palmer. 

TikTok says its data is not held in China, but in the US and Singapore.

In a statement released after the Congress ban, TikTok said the move was a “political gesture that will do nothing to advance national security interests”.

Zhang Yiming himself has taken a back seat from his role of CEO, and reported to have spent most of his year in Singapore.

The Chinese government has also recently taken a stake in a ByteDance subsidiary. According to the NYT, though the size of the stake was small — just 1 percent, divided between the China Internet Investment Fund; China Media Group, controlled by the Communist Party’s propaganda department; and the Beijing municipal government’s investment arm — the implications were unavoidable. 

“The Chinese government took one of three seats on the subsidiary’s board, wielding a level of influence incommensurate with its nominal stake. To turn a blind eye to the potential risks posed by a company like TikTok is to ignore the political, economic and social infrastructure of control that the Chinese government under Xi has spent more than a decade constructing.”

 

Means of Measuring 5G Video Performance

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Earlier this year, subscriber numbers to 5G surpassed 700 million globally with more than 200 communications service providers having launched commercial 5G services, according to Ericsson’s latest Mobility report. According to Omdia, global 5G subscriptions could soon reach 1.3 billion on track to hit 2 billion by 2025, as charted by the GSMA’s Mobile Economy 2022 report — or one-quarter of all mobile connections.

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It is video that makes up the majority of mobile data traffic, some 69% Ericsson reported in its June 2022 report, but with more people watching more videos for longer periods of time that puts even greater strain on mobile networks.

Mobile data analyst Opensignal provides a Video Experience Metric as a means of comparing operator performance. There are an array of reasons why users could have a bad viewing experience: the video takes ages to load, pauses every other minute to buffer, or the resolution may be downgraded along the way.

“Network speeds may seem like the obvious culprit… but there are many more factors that determine users’ video experience,” the analyst says. “If we want to understand what’s really happening on our networks as we watch videos, we need to take into account a host of video specific technical parameters as well.”

Stalling occurrence, for example, measures an interruption in playback after a video begins streaming, referring to any instance when the picture isn’t moving. Buffering is perhaps the most widely known user frustration related to video streaming. In the simplest terms, it refers to the amount of time spent when the video streaming stopped to load the next video segment.

“By measuring real-world video streams directly from the world’s largest video content providers at a mixture of resolutions, our metric provides an accurate view of what everyday people actually experience when streaming videos on their data connection,” OpenSignal claims.

In its latest report on the 5G Mobile Network Experience Awards, it suggests there is clearly no single answer to the question of who is leading in 5G. Some operators fare better in providing 5G services across a vast area but may not be offering the fastest speed. Others rank high across experiential measures such as 5G Games or Video Experience but show limited improvement year over year.

 This is a global report and the analyst highlights markets with modest incomes but mass populations — India, Brazil and Indonesia — as potentially accelerating production of more affordable 5G devices and paving the way for greater 5G adoption.

In India, the auctions for 5G spectrum finished earlier this year but already nearly 10% of smartphones in the country are 5G-capable: “A sizable opportunity for a country with over one billion mobile subscribers,” the analyst notes.

There’s also the question of digital divide. Will 5G narrow or widen the gap? Some of its latest analysis focuses precisely on the 5G urban rural divide in Italy, Austria, and Germany.

While 5G still has plenty of potential to grow and challenges to tackle, it could be as soon as three years time when we see a first pilot of the next mobile generation — 6G.

 

Culture Is Being Atomized by TikTok. Is That a Bad Thing?

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Did 2022 signal the end of the dominance of tech and media giants that for a decade have looked pretty unassailable?

“One day we may well find it shocking how a handful of internet players shaped such a relatively shared experience,” writes Delia Cai in Vanity Fair.

The reason: TikTok. The social media platform’s continued rise and all-consuming influence is beginning to upend the way we receive culture, and even political messaging, over the internet.

It’s own peculiar way of serving up content outside of the “social” friends networks on which Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were based is rewiring the rules of the internet itself.

Cai says, “TikTok has now come unnervingly close to delivering the product that the original Web 2.0 visionaries only dreamed of: unlimited, fully customized content tailored to passive consumption, without the bothersome searching or following or liking or hearting or profile dressing.”

Reportedly, TikTok is on track to make nearly $10 billion in ad revenue this year (more than twice as much as in 2021) based on a model that upends the current status quo.

She thinks TikTok is gunning for Google search engine and Amazon’s ecommerce business and that the platform’s influence on the music industry, publishing, fashion, and Hollywood has only just begun.

“TikTok’s crucial point of difference is its much-vaunted tailoring,” says Cai, which has “delivered a decisive blow to the centralized feeds of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube et al.”

These competitors are trying to imitate TikTok, pushing the future of social media into one of inexhaustible niches. “If everything is trending somewhere, how can any trend be real? The days of manually choosing whom to follow and what Netflix genres you’re interested in will be rendered quaint; soon we’ll simply be escorted down the internet burrow supposedly of our choice, and quite happily so.”

Cai isn’t defending Internet 2.0, which has — to paraphrase — force-fed us a diet of Kardashians and cat videos. You can find that or similar on TikTok, no doubt, but there’s a suggestion that TikTok’s seemingly random video serving will offer something more diverse going forward. At the same time it risks levelling everything to the same moral equivalence without the weight of “friends” to balance and validate the content.

There is some pushback from those TikTok refuseniks who do want friends to tick their likes, dislikes, their world view.

“The fantasy of opting out of an algorithmic herding beckons so urgently that apps like BeReal appear as benevolent saviors here to rescue us from our mindless feeding, to return us back to where everyone else is.”

After Tests and Improvements, 5G Network Slicing Opens Up to Broadcasters

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There are signs that operators will commercialize 5G network slicing over the next two years, finds the new 2022 “5G Network Slicing Operator Survey” from consultancy Heavy Reading. The emphasis initially will be on enterprise services, but broadcasters are also keen to use the technology to improve coverage of live events.

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Network slicing is a mechanism to isolate a segment of the 5G network end to end in a local area for the specific requirements of a customer.

Rethink Technology Research predicts that network slicing will add revenues of $16.1 billion by 2029 over above what 5G infrastructures would have earned otherwise.

Its report further identified manufacturing as likely to generate the biggest slice of network slicing revenues by 2029 at 19% of the total, with energy/utilities and healthcare joint second on 15% each and M&E media/entertainment on 7%.

Yet “the surge” in revenues will not really begin until 2024 when there is substantial base of 5G Standalone infrastructure to build on.

Standalone (SA) represents the full 5G infrastructure including RAN (Radio Access Network) and Core, which is essential to unleash the full capability of network slices to enable differentiated services catering for multiple user groups and applications sharing the same physical network,” explains Rethink.

Broadcasters are keen to use 5G slicing to augment coverage and reduce the costs of outside broadcasts such as sports matches, mass public celebrations or news gathering. By their nature these are congested areas in which wireless bandwidth is in short supply and for which the only option until now has been expensive uplink by satellite.

Tests over the past couple of years among broadcasters and telco operators appear to confirm that the technology is on the verge of being viable for practical use.

Ericsson and Telstra Broadcast Services (TBS), for example, trialed 5G SA Slicing for Australian broadcaster Network Ten around live coverage of a major horse racing meet in Melbourne.

TBS regional chief Karen Clark said the tests clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of 5G slicing for uplink of live, premium video feeds “to produce high bandwidth, low latency television from a congested venue, without the need for traditional wired infrastructure.”

Paramount (Australia and New Zealand) also partnered on the project. Its VP of technology, Dean Wadsworth, claimed the success of the trial “demonstrates that coverage of live events can be enriched with reliable links from roving crews, which can be more cost-effective.”

All parties point to exploring further opportunities in the near future.

Yet such event-based scenarios are deemed the lowest priority among telcos, as reflected in a Heavy Reading survey conducted last summer. Principal analyst Gabriel Brown suggests this may reflect the challenges with addressing demand that is short term/transient in nature with a relatively immature technology stack.

“Short term, network slice instances will have greater requirements on automation. Perhaps as slice management technology matures, this use case will rise higher on operator priority lists.”

A survey of staffers at telcos (or communications service providers) by Heavy Reading earlier this year found that the industry had a job to do to educate potential customers about the benefits of the tech.

Less than a third of respondents said “most customers understand the concept and see value in it,” which implies that two-thirds did not.

“Operators, and their vendor partners, will need to invest in customer education to demonstrate the value of network slicing,” advised Brown.

As an aside, Telstra and Ericsson partnering with Qualcomm Technologies just recorded a new 5G download peak speed benchmark of 7.3Gbps achieved at a Telstra live mobile site located at the Gold Coast, Queensland Australia.

This improved peak speed capability further will help Telstra to deliver network slicing. By adding improved peak speeds and capacity, Telstra says it can deliver more capable network slices to more customers.

Network slicing could potentially be used to reduce, control and uplift the video performance of major streaming services like Netflix and Google.

As Heavy Reading’s Brown explains, most of the traffic on broadband networks is generated by customer demand for services from OTT. Approximately 56% of global network traffic is generated by six companies, according to Sandvine.

“In mobile networks, it is logical to consider how network slicing may be able to improve the performance, efficiency, and user experience of the most in-demand services or enable new service experiences offered by these types of providers (e.g., virtual reality gaming, metaverse meetings, or similar).

“This is, however, a thorny topic, given issues related to net neutrality and because, in some markets, some telecoms are actively lobbying regulators to levy charges on OTT internet companies to carry traffic.”

Asked if they anticipate working with internet companies “to use network slices to deliver and monetize high volume OTT services,” Heavy Reading’s survey revealed that 40% of respondents say their company plans to do this, ahead of a more equivocal 31% that may do so, depending on the business case.

“Presumably, the thinking is that network slicing will provide a capability that improves the service, and the operator can somehow charge the OTT provider for this or monetize the customer via a revenue share,” surmises Brown. “In this analysis, it is tempting to ascribe this 40% result to wishful thinking by telecom respondents.

“An alternative analysis, therefore, is to be aware that what is normal in terms of telco and OTT working relationships today will not necessarily stay that way.”

As application performance requirements become more stringent, and as customer expectations increase and new services emerge, there will be a need to rethink and re-architect how telcos and internet companies interact. In mobile networks, 5G network slicing will potentially allow a closer working relationship that benefits customers.