ABSTRACT

More than three-fourths of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2021. Mobile video will increase 9-fold between 2016 and 2021, accounting for 78 percent of total mobile data traffic by the end of the forecast period. Hence, Media distribution will remain to be the most relevant traffic on cellular networks.

However, different to Managed services approaches in earlier Releases in 3GPP, new enablers are necessary to support both Over-The-Top (OTT) and managed media services over 5G networks.

This presentation summaries the findings in the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in the context of 5G Media Distribution and addresses new opportunities and services including media production, immersive media, APIs for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), support of browser and mobile terminals architectures, capability discovery and additional use cases.

Based on the new 5G service architecture, this document provides an overview of how advanced media services can be mapped to the 5G architectures and how service and content providers leverage 5G enablers for new media services.

The MPEG-I Immersive Media architecture, including rendering based service layers as well as networked-based media processing, are expected to be a building block in the 5G media architecture. Some special use cases are highlighted including 6DoF services including network-media processing, mapping of AR services to 5G media distribution, as well as new enablers for managed media distribution services.

INTRODUCTION

Immersive Media will play a major role in the coming years. According to a forecast from IDCi, the market for AR/VR will have a size of 215 Billion USD by 2021.

By 2021, it is also expected to see massive adoption of 5G-based services, so just by the timelines, these two technologies will naturally go hand in hand. At the same time, the demand and challenges for immersive services are expected to be addressed by the 5G system: lower latency, higher throughputs and ubiquitous access.

In this paper we will address some efforts to harmonize immersive 5G and immersive media through open standardization approaches. Figure 1 provides an evolutional approach from Virtual Reality (VR) towards integrated VR and Augmented Reality (AR).

Nowadays AR and VR are more or less separate applications. It is expected that entire scenes, such as entertainment events, accessible with an AR device, will become so realistic and interactive that they’ll be nearly indistinguishable from reality. In this context, VR becomes one mode of consumption of a larger AR service.

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