5G-MAG (Media Action Group) reference tools: Putting 5G in action for media

Content providers are increasingly using the internet to deliver content to users. Users can also enjoy this content on a wide variety of devices anywhere and at any time. The increasing consumption of high-quality mobile video over 5G networks is set to demand sophisticated and robust streaming service architectures and implementations ready to cope with traffic loads and meet the requirements and expectations of content owners. The ongoing standardization of 5G is an opportunity to provide the media industry with the right tools to operate the 5G media platform. With this in mind, 5G-MAG (Media Action Group) has kickstarted the 5G-MAG reference tools project to develop common open-source reference tools to support the implementation and interoperability of 5G media technologies. In this paper, we present the current architecture of the 5G-MAG reference tools implementing client components in the context of 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) release 16 5G media streaming and 5G broadcast. Moreover, we provide detailed insights on the first two use cases “Long-Term Evolution (LTE)-based 5G Broadcast” and “broadband-broadcast seamless switching” and give an outlook on future work on use cases such as “targeted ad-insertion” and “regional content insertion.” We also show how the tools serve as a reference or integration platform for traditional broadcast networks and services including a DVB-I service layer or the alignment with the service layer of ATSC 3.0.