Inside IOWN: Envisioning a high-speed, high-capacity future for live productions
As delegates arrived at the Las Vegas Convention Centre for 2025’s edition of the NAB Show last week, they found a media and entertainment industry in the midst of dealing with intrinsic changes to its nature, governed by a number of key themes: artificial intelligence, sports, the creator economy, streaming and the cloud. It could well be argued that the first two themes offer this industry in flux the greatest new opportunities yet, intertwined as they are – and will increasingly be – their future success is very dependent on the networks they are based on.
And, in a curious irony, the seemingly untrammelled growth of AI is rapidly reshaping the structure of networks by generating unprecedented demand for capacity and computational power. The threat from this strain is diminished quality of video experience as video becomes ever more online and mobile based. Yet a solution to this problem is emerging: IOWN, a project where sports video production is seen as a key use case.
So, what is IOWN? Led by comms and IT giant NTT – and supported by Sony, Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft and other leading technology firms – the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network initiative envisions a future global communications infrastructure capable of enabling ultra-high-speed, high-capacity internet services utilising photonics-based technologies. Or, as Lieven Levrau, senior director for the strategy optical networking business unit at Nokia and IOWN Global Forum technology steering committee vice-chair, says, a reaction to a world that is moving to “replacing electrons with protons”/
The initiative aims to address the almost exponentially rising demand for data and a commensurate rise in energy consumption due to the vast amounts of compute power required by AI and large language model (LLM) use cases. This network and information processing infrastructure includes terminals that can provide high-speed, high-capacity communication using technology focused on optics, as well as large computational resources.
A massive pointer as to the arrival of AI in video production arrived in the wake of the work done by telco Orange in delivering the video production infrastructure of the Paris Olympics. But how differently will the infrastructure for the Games in Los Angeles in 2028 look? Musing on how he thought LA’s network could be different to the one he managed, Bertrand Rojat, chief marketing & innovation officer at Orange Events, said in November 2024 that he envisaged a significant increase in the use of artificial intelligence in networks especially where it can be deployed improving the efficiency of operations and on incident management and prediction. He also highlighted that AI will add to video production network loads, a problem IOWN was set up to solve.
From a technological basis, IOWN comprises three major technical fields: an all-photonics network (APN), digital twin computing, and a cognitive foundation. The APN’s photonics and optics-based technologies are designed to achieve three performance targets: ultra-high capacity with data processing speeds around 125 times greater than current networks by volume; ultra-low latency offering near-instant transmissions with end-to-end latency reduced by over 200 times; and ultra-low power consumption with a goal of 100 times more efficiency than current transmissions, reducing carbon emissions by 45%. It’s likely most media and video production broadcast companies will be interested in these gains.
The consortium of technology firms driving IOWN has a timeline of mass commercial deployment of this new optical infrastructure by 2030 but it is already reporting its first proof of concept deployments placing an emphasis on updating reference architectures and developing early adoption use cases to demonstrate the value and feasibility of its technologies across the target industries.
To date the proofs of concept have encompassed transforming infrastructure through innovations centred on an APN; ‘revolutionising’ spatial experiences with communication technologies; and enabling real-time, long-distance connectivity, especially within data centres. In fact, the step change in transmission speeds promised by IOWN means media and production data centres could be positioned further away from broadcasting hubs in potentially cheaper locations.
The first area actively targeted by IOWN has been finance. This seem natural: an industry where time is literally money in terms of trading, and where an infrastructure that can cope with massively increased amounts of data from AI-driven applications and preserve or better connectivity is hugely attractive. The same can be said for video production.
Assessing the role IOWN could play in video production, Nokia’s Levrau said video production was a key use case for the project offering the industry many gains. The key would be, he said, to look at events such as sports in the round.
“You think about events and what happens? There lots of cameras and one needs multiple cameras. A lot of data needs to come out [onto the network]. Think about an event and somewhere in a field we need network capacity. Hopefully that capacity needs to go where it needs to go to the production side. You need to format so that different devices can [access the format] and then you stream it up.
“There is a lot of push and pull on the network and, typically, it happens most of the time over a flexible bridge network. A packet-based network is not cost efficient or energy efficient, so you want to put it in the optical layer. If you put it in the optical layer again, and you put it in an APN, you have the attributes that come with it: deterministic, bounded latency. You have flexibility in terms of capacity, and you have different drop points. So, if the capacity is up and down, you can change. When we are talking to production houses, they seem to resonate with that [concept] very well.”
Levrau declined to offer the specific identify of these houses but revealed that they were based in Japan and Europe, and that conversations had also taken place with companies engaged in delivering live video such as sports over 5G networks.
Moreover, he observed that while a financial industry deployment was a logical first step, Orange’s experience in Paris was of great interest. That said, Levrau acknowledged that it was very much early days and that unlike in verticals such as finance where IOWN’s capabilities were further down the track of commercial deployment, things were moving slower in the video production space. The Rome of low power terabit networks would not be built in a day and there was a chain of command process to follow with prospective end users.
“It’s do we have a problem? Yes. How can we solve it? Yes. Is there money? Okay, so you have to go through a few gates. But I think when the rationale is there and the money is there, or the pain points become harder, they will have to switch – this is just going to grow,” he said.
Crucial to making this a success is speaking a language that the video industry understands. For Levrau this won’t be just about data processing speeds, latency time nor Wattage gains in power consumption: it needs to be a conversation regarding total cost of ownership. As ever in the video industry, especially delivering sports broadcasts in increasing high quality with minimal delay, it’s one for the money, two for the show. It could well be showtime for IOWN before long.