NEWS: 5G Competition offers £30m for creative industries

New timetable for £30m 5G Competition

A new timetable has been created for the £30m competition to develop creative uses of 5G technology, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport has announced.

There are now two competition windows of eight and sixteen weeks respectively. Both begin from April 6, with applications for the 8-week competition due by June 1st, and the 16-week window open for entries until July 27th.

There are also changes to the dates for shortlisting and interviewing candidates to reflect the disruption caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, and the timetable will remain under review because of the pandemic.

Application forms and documents are available here.

The aim is to fund and test new uses of 5G - which has potential speeds of up to 10 ten times faster than 4G - in creative sectors such as film, TV and video games.

The competition was announced by Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden as part of a £65m package of measures aiming to test 5G connectivity across different regions and industries, to run alongside the commercial rollout of 5G technologies by mobile companies.

The 5G Create contest is an open competition in which the government hopes to attract bids from a variety of industries and to encourage development of new business models and opportunities. It will run from early March until the end of June.

A series of events to encourage participation in the competition were held across the UK.

Tim Davie, Co-Chair of the Creative Industries Council and CEO of BBC Studios, said:

‍"The Creative Industries Council is delighted that DCMS is launching 5 Create. We have been advocating a funded competition along these lines, as an exciting opportunity for UK creative companies to develop innovative products and services using this transformational technology.

"5G offers innovative opportunities right across the sector from film and TV to games, music, fashion and advertising. We hope that start-ups and well-established companies alike will bid for the available funds."

Other measures announced covered funding for projects in rural Dorset, Nottingham's historic Sherwood Forest, West Mercia, North Yorkshire, and south east Wales, as well as initiatives for spectrum sharing and connectivity in manufacturing.

UK technology company Zeetta Networks will also lead a consortium project in Bristol investigating three industrial 5G use cases.