The media vertical sector is expected to be one of the leading adopters of 5G technology, due to its 100x faster gigabit-per-second speeds, ultra-low latencies and higher-reliability compared to 4G connectivity, as media mobile app developers can truly push the boundaries on features and functionality in any novel mobile application. 5G will offer them unprecedented opportunities to capitalise on the capabilities of a new breed of applications that entail fast ultra-high-resolution video (4k/8k) streaming with high frame rates, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Extended Reality (XR), 360o immersiveness, and more, offering a more realistic, more reliable and improved user experience. However, along with the opportunities and benefits, 5G networks also present some key challenges to media application developers, such as:
• Security & privacy issues: 5G may introduce loopholes in terms of security and privacy due to the greater number of connected devices and networks.
• Setup of viable 5G-based mobile app business models: careful thought needs to be made by mobile app strategists to develop novel business models that will benefit the most from the potential of 5G.
• Testing & verification: to minimise operational deployment issues, mobile app developers need to thoroughly test and validate their applications in a 5G environment before porting them to actual public 5G networks. However, not only is it costly to own and operate a 5G Experimentation Facility just for this purpose, but also mobile app developers may not have the necessary skills to setup, run and maintain such 5G testbeds.
Therefore, there’s the need to provide a 5G-based secure and trusted experimentation playground through which media mobile app developers would have the opportunity to test and validate their applications in an integrated, open and cost-efficient manner, so as to remove operational uncertainties and reduce market entry barriers prior to being ported and deployed in industrial public 5G networks.

The vision of 5GMediaHUB is to enable EU achieve its goal of becoming a world leader in 5G, by accelerating the testing and validation of innovative 5G-empowered media applications and NetApps from 3rd party experimenters and 3rd party NetApps developers, respectively, through an integrated, open and fully featured Experimentation Facility. This will significantly reduce the time to market barrier, thus providing such actors that are primarily from SMEs, with a competitive advantage against their rivals outside EU.