Building on positive demonstrations during the Paris Olympics 2024, Italian public service broadcaster Rai and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) are conducting new 5G Broadcast trials during the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games (6-22 February), as EBU has claimed in a statement.

These pre-commercial trials aim to explore how 5G Broadcast can leverage resilient broadcast tower infrastructure to expand live, free-to-air delivery to smartphones and other end-devices. This is designed, especially, for demanding use-cases such as live coverage of major sports events and the delivery of essential services to mobile phones in emergencies.

Unlike conventional mobile streaming, 5G Broadcast looks forward to delivering the same content to unlimited numbers of users without congesting mobile networks or consuming user data allowances. It combines traditional terrestrial broadcasting (DTT) with 5G technology to try to achieve a high level of geographic coverage and a great number of addressable devices. The result is a single, standardized approach that can support live video and audio services, but also emergency alerts on any compatible mobile phone.

The Milano Cortina trials continue Rai pre-commercial, large-scale trials that have been running since early 2025. During this winter’s Olympic Games, the partners will evaluate reception, service robustness and user experience in the metropolitan areas of Rome and Turin and assess how broadcasters could integrate 5G Broadcast into hybrid distribution strategies.

“Major events like the Olympics are the ultimate stress-test for new distribution technologies”, affirms Gino Alberico, Director of the Rai-Centre for Research and Innovation. “With 5G Broadcast we can bring live content directly to compatible devices with broadcast efficiency – opening the door to better coverage, improved resilience, and new ways to reach audiences on the move”.

Antonio Arcidiacono, CTO at the EBU, adds: “Paris 2024 showed that 5G Broadcast can move beyond the lab, with demonstrations on hundreds of consumer devices. Milano Cortina 2026 is another important step: validating performance in a real operative environment, helping align the ecosystem, from broadcasters and network operators to chipset and handset manufacturers, around a shared, interoperable standard that can deliver live content day after day and simultaneously increase resilience in case of emergencies”.