LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS AMERICAS 2017: An inside look at the war in Syria via augmented reality and an on-the-field view of sports stars are a few of the experiences 5G is set to bring to the table, media and telecoms executives said this week.

Speaking on the panel session, Video and Entertainment in a 5G World, Eric Black, CTO Digital for NBC Sports Group Digital, said the technology will enable networks to deliver higher quality video, in addition to low latency.

Both capabilities in turn will allow companies like NBC to offer enhanced fan experiences, such as new on-the-field views, and increase user engagement, he said.

5G also has the potential to open up more time for consumers to view content with the rise of innovations like self-driving cars, Weijun Lee, top strategic technology executive for ZTE’s CTO Group, noted.

Additionally, the massive amount of user data that runs over 5G networks will help content providers enable a more natural interaction between consumers and their media, Lee said.

That means delivering the right content in the right format at the right time, he added.

“The goal is to get the content to the user,” Black said. “It’s not just about linear networks, it’s about how do you get beyond linear networks? How do you start pushing different pixels out to different people, start to personalise content?”

While 5G won’t happen overnight, Lee said content providers can use existing technologies such as massive MIMO and QAM to improve radio frequency efficiency and free up more bandwidth for content delivery.

Ericsson’s CTO and head of strategy and technology for TV and media, Mark Russell, also said development of adaptive bitrate technologies, which he called the fundamental enablers of mobile entertainment, is set to take off in a 5G world.

“It’s not really related to 5G per say, but it is getting a high video quality, good quality latency, good quality error rate, an adaptive bit rate foundation both for the encoding and transmission of the content as well as the accepting of it on the devices,” Russell said. “That’s sort of been the phase we’ve been going through as an industry in the last three, four years. I think we’ll start to see that really accelerate now that we’re getting a superhighway to put all that stuff over.”