Australian sports media company Sports Entertainment Network (SEN) and Australian tech company RIOT Broadcast have created a new form of radio streaming — 5G Radio.
SEN is a sports radio network that covers everything from the Australian Football League to cricket to horse racing. The technology provides fans’ mobile phones with real-time audio commentary in-stadium. It also allows fans at home to sync their radio commentary feeds with any live TV broadcast.
RIOT Broadcast is a niche broadcast solution provider founded in 2021. Per the company’s website, “RIOT began as an idea. An idea to lead a hundred thousand stadium fans into a unison chant, led by audio instructions. Our fan engagement idea was as unique as our technological idea to achieve it. On the way to achieving our fan engagement goal, we realized our technological method is the next generation of radio.”
To learn more about their combined offering, Radio World interviewed RIOT Founder and Director Stephen Anning via email.
Radio World: What is SEN Stadium & SEN Sync?
Stephen Anning: SEN Stadium provides real-time audio in-stadium to mobile phones. It is primarily used for sports commentary broadcast in-stadium. Latency is imperceptible — it works over both 5G and Wi-Fi and operates with no additional stadium hardware required.
SEN Sync is used by sports fans watching TV at home. It allows them to synchronize the radio feed with their uniquely delayed TV broadcast, giving them an alternative sports commentary in sync with their TV.
RW: Who started the company, and who are its owners? How big is it?
Anning: SEN was started by CEO Craig Hutchison in 2006 and is now an ASX listed public company. Craig is a prominent Australian sports journalist, commentator and media personality. SEN reaches an audience of over 3.5 million people each week over various platforms, and owns a portfolio of radio stations, sports teams and media assets across Australia and New Zealand.
RW: What is the business opportunity here for your company, how does it make its revenue?
Anning: We feel that major sports radio broadcasters in the USA will be very keen to adopt this technology, as will stadiums, sports teams and major sports leagues. The technology has added significant value to the SEN brand in Australia, increased advertising appeal, fan engagement, listener numbers and opened up the radio market to those watching TV at home.
RW: What is the technology that makes this possible — walk us through the “air chain.”
Anning: This technology is built on numerous sub-technologies with a unique system design. We couldn’t do this without the significant recent improvements in mobile coverage technology, especially in-stadium. Our broadcast hardware is simple and can operate either from within a radio studio or at the stadium itself if desired.
The rest is done in networking and software design. In tricky areas, such as Android device latency, we went all the way down and wrote our own software libraries!
In other areas, we use pieces of open source technology and optimized them for our unique purpose. We therefore provide our own software development kits (SDKs) ready to embed into existing apps.
RW: How have you solved issues of latency?
Anning: Perception is everything. Reliability is crucial. We defined our own requirements for latency based on human perception in-stadium and the likelihood of troublesome mobile network conditions. It’s a trade off between speed, perception and reliability. After extensive testing and tuning the results are speaking for themselves and we’re really proud of it.
RW: Describe the delay aspect and why it matters.
Anning: In Australia, Foxtel TV is around 4-5 seconds behind a live event. Other TV networks range from 7-60 seconds behind. Therefore, to synchronize our real-time radio with any TV broadcast we have to incorporate adjustable delays.
What’s amazing is going to a sports bar or airport and being able to pull up audio on your mobile phone to the TV in front of you.
RW: Why hasn’t this been done before?
Anning: Mobile coverage inside a stadium wasn’t reliable enough, and several layers of the technology simply didn’t exist. That said, our SDK’s are backwards compatible as far as an iPhone 6 and Android 7.
There have been several prominent attempts at this around the globe using just Wi-Fi or proprietary networks. Hearing Augmentation is a common parallel with our technology and similar to our previous generation. Unlike hearing augmentation, however, our solution operates with near-identical latency over 5G as well as Wi-Fi while having drastically improved audio stability in a crowded network.
SEN Sync is an extension of SEN Stadium, so it has also never been done before. Sync could have been possible previously for longer delay times, but being able to vary latency from 0-120s to match TV is definitely unique.
RW: Who is using this system, and for what purpose?
Anning: So far, this technology has been adopted from several angles:
- Radio sports broadcast
- Stadiums (providing a selection of local listening options)
- Major sports leagues (providing a platform of all major broadcast listening options in-stadium)
- Live referee microphone broadcast
- Biased commentary: Sports teams here in Australia are using the technology for biased commentary both in-stadium and at-home via the sync to TV
RW: What else should we know about it?
Anning: It’s highly reliable, especially under network stress. It’s also highly scalable without limits on listeners.
Real-time biased commentary in-stadium has really opened up a new dimension for fans and teams. Fan engagement has thrived due to the increased connection between the fan and their team. There is demand for biased commentary for all teams involved with the technology so far, further increasing the demand for more niche radio content.
For stadiums with poor PA system intelligibility (especially when crowded) this technology solves the clarity issue. Latency falls right at the front of a typical stadium impulse response at a typical listener seat; it gives you an in-ear direct sound while you still notice the bleed of stadium PA reverberance, it’s quite a nice experience! Technically it’s not hearing augmentation, but it’s doing the same thing in this use case.
We’ve noticed a lot of sports radio use cases for the SEN Stadium and SEN Sync technology, varied based on the sport and the vision of the broadcaster.
For more information, contact stephenanning@gmail.com or SEN Australia.
