At the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham this summer, four camera operators followed race walkers around a one-kilometre city-centre course on electric monowheels– single-wheeled self-balancing vehicles.

It sounds like an eccentric solution to a fairly ordinary broadcast problem. In practice, it was a useful demonstration of how connectivity is beginning to influence the design of live production itself. Each operator carried a Panasonic mirrorless camera on a gimbal, connected to a LiveU LU800 field unit, while a private 5G network carried a continuous 20 Mbps 1080i50 feed back to the production facility. All four feeds were incorporated directly into the live production alongside the fixed cameras.

The cameras were the visible novelty. The network underneath them was the more important development.

Working with official host broadcaster Actua, Neutral Wireless deployed private 5G across Alexander Stadium and the one-kilometre race-walk course. The arrangement gave the production team a managed connectivity layer across both the stadium and a city-centre route, allowing them to put cameras into places where conventional cabling would have been impractical and where a motorcycle camera would have produced a different kind of coverage.

That makes Birmingham more interesting than another demonstration of “5G for broadcasting”. The technology was not simply providing another way of getting a camera signal from A to B. It helped determine what sort of production the team could build.

The race walk presented an awkward production challenge. The course was a one-kilometre loop through Birmingham rather than a contained field of play, so the production team needed reliable connectivity along the entire  route while keeping the cameras mobile and unobtrusive.

Actua could have used traditional broadcast RF. Instead, it chose to work with Neutral Wireless on a dedicated 5G deployment because it wanted to explore whether the technology could support the production concept. The monowheels were part of that creative decision: rather than putting camera operators on motorbikes, the team could move alongside the athletes and capture the race from a different position.

The important detail is that the network was designed around the route. Neutral Wireless deployed four 40 MHz cells using 80 MHz of spectrum, providing more than 75 Mbps of uplink capacity across the course, with each cell covering roughly 200 metres. The race-walk site was connected back to the master control room at Alexander Stadium, allowing the moving camera feeds to enter the same live production as the fixed cameras.

The network therefore did more than carry pictures. It made a different camera operation practical.

There is an obvious question. If 5G networks already cover most European cities, why build another one?

Because a public mobile network and a production network are designed for different purposes.

A public network has to serve a huge and constantly changing population. At a major sporting event, that population becomes particularly concentrated. Spectators are uploading video, broadcasters are working, athletes and officials are using connected devices, production crews are communicating, and thousands of phones are competing for capacity in the same physical area.

A live production has a narrower requirement. It needs particular connections to behave in a particular way, at particular locations, for particular workflows. The production team needs to know what those connections are supposed to do and needs to manage traffic and users when the environment becomes busy.

That is the attraction of private cellular. The network can be designed around the event rather than requiring the event to depend entirely on infrastructure designed around everybody else.

This distinction matters at a championship of this scale. SVG Europe reported that 40 TV and radio stations were on site, with more than 500 people involved in the media operation, with some national broadcasters also bringing their own unilateral production operations. That is a significant concentration of media activity around the same venue and event infrastructure.

The lesson is not that public cellular is inadequate. It is that ordinary mobile connectivity and predictable production connectivity are different propositions.

The technical details of Birmingham make this clearer.

At the stadium, Neutral Wireless provided two 40 MHz carriers around the field of play, alongside an additional 20 MHz service in the technical operations and media compound. A dedicated lower-priority APN was also used by broadcasters including NRK, YLE and STV to supplement bonded cellular workflows.

That creates a very different picture of private 5G from the familiar demonstration in which someone connects a laptop to a fast wireless network and runs a speed test.

The network becomes part of the production architecture. Different users can have different requirements. Different areas can have different priorities. A common private infrastructure can support several workflows while still keeping those services separated.

The Birmingham deployment also shows why private 5G should not be presented as a replacement for everything that came before it.

Public cellular remains extremely useful because it is already there. Bonded cellular remains useful because it travels with a crew. Fibre remains the obvious choice for many fixed high-capacity connections, and conventional RF remains highly effective for applications where it makes sense.

Private 5G adds another option: a wireless network whose coverage, capacity and access rules can be designed around the production itself.

This is where the Birmingham example becomes more interesting for production designers.

Connectivity has always imposed physical limits on camera placement. If a camera needs a cable, somebody has to get the cable there. If it needs a particular RF path, the radio system has to work within the available spectrum and geography. If it relies on public cellular, the production has to accept the performance characteristics of a network it does not control.

A managed private cellular network changes some of those constraints.

A camera can move through a larger area. A contributor can roam without being tethered to a fixed contribution point. A production team can create temporary connectivity around a venue, route or event site rather than treating existing infrastructure as a fixed constraint.

The race walk makes the creative consequence unusually easy to see. The monowheel cameras were not interesting because they happened to be using 5G. They were interesting because the network helped make a different camera operation possible.

That is the point at which connectivity stops being background infrastructure and starts influencing production design.

For AV professionals, this is a significant shift in how projects need to be considered.

The old separation between AV and networking was already becoming difficult to maintain as more production workflows moved onto IP. Private cellular pushes the relationship further because the network can influence not just how equipment communicates, but where equipment can operate and what production teams can attempt.

That puts networking much earlier in the design process.

A major event may need to consider spectrum, coverage and capacity alongside lighting, audio, video and rigging. A production manager may need to establish which workflows genuinely require dedicated connectivity and which can use public networks. An integrator may find themselves working alongside network specialists and RF engineers before the first equipment list has been written.

The procurement conversation changes as well. Instead of asking only how many cameras, displays or microphones a production needs, the project team may need to define the connectivity architecture required to make those systems work in the intended physical environment.

That has consequences for commissioning, monitoring, resilience and support. A private network becomes another piece of production infrastructure that has to work when the audience arrives, not merely something that performs well during a demonstration.

Who owns the decision about the network matters too. If connectivity determines where cameras can go, which contributors can move and which production workflows can be supported, it is no longer a late-stage IT service. It belongs in the production design conversation, alongside RF, audio, video and power.

There is a danger in making the technology sound more revolutionary than the evidence supports.

Private 5G does not make wired infrastructure obsolete. It does not eliminate RF, and it does not guarantee perfect coverage simply because the network is private. Nor does every event need its own cellular network.

What Birmingham does show is that private cellular has moved further into the production conversation.

The difference is between proving that a camera can work over private 5G and designing a production that depends on the network behaving predictably. The latter requires defined coverage, managed users, monitoring and recovery procedures, just as any other critical production infrastructure does.

Birmingham did the latter.

The network connected a moving camera system to a live production across a city-centre course while supporting other production and rights-holder workflows around the event. It was not sitting behind the production. It was helping define it.

The next step for private 5G in live production is not convincing broadcasters that wireless video works. That argument has largely been won.

The real job is getting production teams to treat connectivity as part of production design from the beginning. If the creative team wants a camera to move somewhere difficult, a contributor to roam through a venue or a temporary production to cover a large site without running a forest of cable, the network needs to be in the conversation at the same time as the camera, lens and transmission system.

That changes the role of the AV integrator and production engineer. The question is no longer simply, “How do we connect this camera?” It is, “What network does this production require?”

At Birmingham, four camera operators  rode around a city-centre race course on electric monowheels. The interesting part was not that they were using 5G. It was that somebody designed the network to make the production possible.