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Rohde & Schwarz’s enhanced 5G BSCC 2.0: “Agility meets innovation”

Rohde & Schwarz's Aziz Taga talks exclusively to TVBEurope about the new Broadcast Server & Control Centre (BSCC2.0), which supports TSoIP, DASH, HLS, and CMAF.

Rohde & Schwarz has announced an enhanced version of its Broadcast Server & Control Centre (BSCC), which supports a wide range of streaming platforms.

BSCC2.0 enables broadcasters and telcos to employ 5G when delivering “one to many” streams. It builds on the success of its predecessor, which was launched in 2019 in order to raise awareness in the market of what 5G is capable of. “Now, we’ve taken the opportunity to go a step further by creating BSCC2.0, which I would describe as where agility meets innovation,” Aziz Taga, Rohde & Schwarz’s product manager for 5G Broadcast, tells TVBEurope.

“Content creators and owners need flexibility in delivering their content,” he continues. “In order to reduce their cost and avoid unnecessary coding they want to be able to distribute content in a certain format, for example, Transport Stream over IP, or if it’s OTT content, then they could use DASH or HLS. BSCC 2.0 gives the content providers the possibility of distributing their content to many sites at the same time, with an easy way of distribution and scheduling.”

BSCC2.0

Rohde & Schwarz says BSCC2.0 represents a new and radically different approach to 5G Broadcast / Multicast operations management. As well as supporting TSoIP, DASH and HLS, BSCC2.0 also supports CMAF, a hybrid distribution between HLS and DASH. “In addition, 2.0 enables carrier aggregation and a whole feature family which is called carrier management,” adds Taga. “That means from a single unit you can control multiple frequency bands from multiple sites at the same time. You can have multiple chunks and you can do the bundling. It also supports an open interface, an X-MB interface that is predefined in 3GPP Release 14. The interface is based on a RESTful API, which is an open API, allowing content providers to easily distribute and inject their content to the network.”

One great example of BSCC2.0’s potential is how it can enhance sports fans’ experiences via its stadium-cast capabilities. The idea is that the in-stadium viewer will have the same experience as a fan watching at home. “BSCC2.0 can be used to give the stadium fans additional views, they can watch multi-angle streaming, listen to the commentators, and access feature sets that aren’t currently available in the stadium,” explains Taga. 

“The idea is to combine both experiences, so if a fan is in the stadium they would have a tablet or a smartphone and watch multi-angle streams with six, eight, ten different angles and they can select the angle that they want to watch. We are even looking beyond that and the potential of including microphones on the players’ shirts, where the fan can hear the discussions between players, or with the referee, or the player and the trainer, and so on. This solution is available for any kind of sporting event or any kind of venue, be it a music festival, or even a wedding.”