Telia, TV2 Denmark and BB&S Develop 5G-Connected Lamps for TV, Film Production

Danish mobile operator Telia has joined forces with TV2 Denmark and Copenhagen-based lighting company BB&S, to develop 5G-connected lamps for television production and film-making, with the aim of improving cost efficiency in broadcasting.

Telia Denmark’s 5G program head Claus Berthou Madsen said it has looked at the potential business value of 5G for customers and their industries and found applications for content distribution and production.

BB&S provides lighting rigs for Hollywood productions and TV studios all over the world. More than 100 lamps are used in studio lightning, and each lamp is connected by a power cable and a control cable. Together with TV2 and Telia, it successfully tested a lightning set-up using only one lamp and 5G connectivity to control lightning and all lamps wirelessly.

The simple set-up will significantly save costs as well as provide up-to-date performance data from each lamp to optimize the lighting. It will also be possible to remotely control the lighting from the office in Copenhagen instead of being on-set in Hollywood.

Morten Brandstrup, head of News technology at TV2, said this will give broadcasters new opportunities compared with 4G/LTE, which has the problems of signal delay and data-capacity scarcity. He added that 5G will enable broadcasters to have people in several locations in a live interview set-up and produce large live events without the traditional production truck at the venue.

As we have written on a number of occasions recently, the advent of 5G involves not just a higher speed of mobile data transmission but a quantum jump in the kind of services that can be provided, particularly in the realm of Internet of Things. Mobile operators, as they roll out 5G, are looking for new IoT applications that they can make their own, via technology partnerships in most cases, and thereby not only make revenue but distinguish themselves in extremely competitive marketplaces. This is especially the case in the most developed economies.

This example from Denmark is instructive in that in involves an application—movie and TV lighting—which despite its quite specialized nature is of vital importance to a sizable industry that is itself experiencing significant challenges relating to revenue and expenses. The introduction of the 5G-enabled IoT into this sphere promises to bring about some changes that should have major effects on cost and logistics.

Using 5G signals to monitor lighting is, of course, desirable in that it increases the efficiency of the devices. The remote control aspect of the system increases ease of use and may also reduce the number of personnel needed to operate the equipment, which could bring about cost savings for production companies.

Beyond that, however, the larger benefit lies in the ability to control lighting for Hollywood productions, as well as for those in various locations, remotely from Denmark. The costs relating to on-location production and travel are punishing for movie and TV projects; with the Telia-TV 2-BB&S system, directors and lighting operators could be spared the need to travel, and the lighting equipment would not need to be moved as often as now. Since BB&S is already well established in the motion picture industry, Telia has picked an appropriate partner with which to attract new clients for this IoT application. 

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Business With an Innovative Music Payment Plan

Mobile operator Telia Norway said that customers with a business subscription can now use its Music Freedom service without burdening their employer with the cost, by paying the NOK 49.00 (US $5.10) monthly charge themselves using the Norwegian mobile payment app Vipps. The aim is to stop corporate subscriptions from being restrictive.

Music Freedom separates data used for streaming or downloading tracks from the allowance provided in the subscription. It works with Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, Beat and Audiomack, via mobile application or browser. Music Freedom includes use in the EU/EEA and Switzerland.

Vegar Heir, commercial director at Vipps, said Telia is an early adaptor of new payment methods and is one of the first mobile operators to offer its customers the option of recurring payments.

The increasing blurring of the boundaries between personal and business use of mobile devices poses some challenges for both mobile operators and mobile users. BYOD usage patterns encourage employees of companies who are on business plans to use their devices for ubiquitous personal purposes such as music streaming. Of course, this can create problems for the employers when it comes to dealing with the charges, getting reimbursement from employees and maintaining corporate morale.

Telia Norway is offering an app-driven solution to this problem by allowing a kind of split billing in which the employee pays the monthly charge directly, as an individual, for music streaming from Spotify, Apple Music or whichever service, despite the fact that the rest of the data consumed is paid for the company. This way, there is no conflict, and both employer and employees are financially whole. The partnership with Vipps, the mobile payment platform, enables the functionality of the payments possible in what appears to be a seamless manner.

Music Freedom, true to its name, should provide enough freedom to keep corporate subscribers happy, which in turn should increase loyalty and subscriber acquisition in future.

Tarifica is a global SaaS company and a market leader in the real-time collection, analysis and delivery of telecom plan and pricing data worldwide. Through a mix of AI, modeling and market expertise, Tarifica tracks hundreds of thousands of plan and pricing data points daily. No other company tracks more. Tarifica's mission is to continuously convert data into the dynamic intelligence that fuels opportunities for its clients, the world's leading operators, regulators and consultants. 

Learn more about Tarifica at www.tarifica.com.

Telia Company Offers Crowd-Movement Service for Cities

Sweden-based international operator Telia Company is launching City Vitality Insights (CVI), a new subscription-based service meant to help cities across the Nordic and Baltic regions to improve the urban experience for both locals and visitors, while providing an accurate way to measure the impact of city planning decisions.

CVI uses anonymized and aggregated mobility data from Telia’s network to depict and measure crowd movement patterns in different parts of a city. This allows cities to quantify the impact of events and enables data-driven and sustainable city development decisions. CVI is currently being rolled out in phases across the Scandinavian and Baltic countries. In Finland, some cities have already started using the system, whereas in Norway and Sweden, cities will be able to start using the service later in the spring.

Telia Company said that it only uses grouped movement patterns for the service and irreversibly anonymizes the data; individuals cannot be identified, because all personal information has been removed.

A telecom company of the size, scope and sophistication of a Telia possesses vast resources of user data, which can be utilized in various ways. With the rise of so-called Big Data, opportunities now exist for operators to monetize user data. Most often we hear about selling the data—scrubbed of identifying aspects for privacy protection—to other companies that use it to improve their marketing of products.

In this case, however, Telia is aiming for a more public-spirited use of aggregated mass user data. The target consumers of the data are municipalities, which will presumably use it to improve decision-making in urban planning. CVI could help cities cater more effectively to the tourist trade, as well, and could even bolster security and public-safety efforts. Ultimately, it could help municipalities allocate their resources more appropriately, thereby saving them money.

For operators, including those with more limited footprints and smaller networks than Telia, selling anonymized aggregate user data to cities and other political units can be a way to gain an extra stream of revenue from user activity while adding a dimension of relevance in the marketplace and even brand enhancement from public service.

It is, of course, important that the data be genuinely scrubbed of any elements that could identify users, because actual or perceived privacy violations are, as we have seen on numerous occasions, very bad for the public image of operators. 

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 If you have any questions about this article, feel free to contact our Editor-in-chief John Dorfman at jdorfman@tarifica.com

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