As Verizon deploys 5G, or fifth-generation cellular network technology, in city after city this year (16 at last count, most recently portions of New York), Joshua Ness, senior manager of Verizon’s 5G Lab in the New York metro area, views television households as major beneficiaries of these deployments, alongside smartphone users. Accordingly, Ness and his colleagues at similar facilities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Cambridge, Massachusetts (outside Boston) are holding demonstrations and debriefing sessions with representatives from various industries, including TV and entertainment. “They want to know how 5G impacts how they run their operations, and how they will go on to serve their customers,” Ness tells MediaVillage. “As consumers get access to 5G experiences, it will be incumbent upon service providers and content creators to produce the type of content people will expect.”
Ness (pictured below) recently served as a featured speaker at the annual NYC Media Lab Summit, which took place several weeks ago at the Metrotech complex in downtown Brooklyn. More than 1,000 people attended the event, with Ness discussing 5G implications before a packed audience.
When it comes to the population of households now watching billions of hours of content and applications through smart TV sets and TV-connected devices (estimated to be between 75 and 80 percent of all U.S. households by Nielsen and other research agencies), their access to 5G-powered