Riedel's Easy5G platform now carries onboard camera feeds for DTM, moving one of Europe's best-known touring car series onto private 5G for in-car video transmission. The German motorsport operator Riedel Communications supplies the technology; DTM provides the race cars and the cameras bolted to them.

That combination matters because onboard footage is the most demanding content a racing broadcast produces. Feeds come from cars doing close to 300 km/h, bouncing across kerbs, and swapping grid positions by the second. Legacy wireless links have handled this job for years, but they demanded dedicated RF engineering and bespoke kit for each circuit.

Riedel pitched Easy5G as a simpler proposition: a private 5G network, deployed per venue, that onboard cameras transmit into directly. No surprise that a company selling 5G infrastructure thinks 5G is the answer. The proof sits in the picture, and DTM has now put that picture on air.

Why motorsport keeps adopting private 5G?

Motorsport has become a useful proving ground for private cellular, and for an obvious reason. A race weekend packs thousands of spectators, dozens of teams, timing systems, telemetry and broadcast crews into one venue, all competing for spectrum and all needing reliability measured in milliseconds, not minutes.

Private 5G lets an organiser run its own network instead of fighting for capacity on public infrastructure. Onboard cameras benefit most. A single race car can carry multiple cameras, each streaming simultaneously, and the aggregate bit rate climbs quickly once you cover a full grid.

DTM's adoption follows a familiar pattern across series that have made the same move. Formula 1 and other championships have already trialled or deployed private cellular for everything from pit-lane analytics to spectator services. Riedel's contribution is packaging the technology so a race series can deploy it without building a mobile operator's worth of expertise first.

What does this change for broadcasts?

For viewers, the change should be largely invisible — which is rather the point. Onboard cameras keep rolling, directors keep cutting between cars, and the feed keeps arriving. The difference sits underneath: a network that Riedel says scales more easily across venues and supports more camera streams than the point-to-point links it replaces.

The vendor's marketing, as ever, promises flexibility and future capability. The verifiable fact today is narrower and more useful: DTM is transmitting live onboard video over a private 5G network supplied by Riedel, and the series is treating it as production infrastructure rather than a trial.

That distinction matters. Plenty of private 5G deployments in sports have stayed stuck at pilot stage, demonstrated at one event and quietly retired. DTM has gone the other direction, integrating Easy5G into the regular broadcast chain for its onboard coverage.

Who is Riedel and why here?

Riedel Communications, based in Wuppertal, Germany, has spent decades in the awkward corners of live production: intercom systems, signal routing and communications for events where failure is public and immediate. Motorsport, with its safety radio traffic and timing-critical broadcast feeds, is home turf for the company.

Easy5G extends that business into cellular infrastructure. Rather than selling race series a network and wishing them luck, Riedel positions itself as operator and integrator — it stands the network up, runs it for the event, and hands the customer working video streams. That managed-service model is precisely how private 5G has found its way into venues that have no intention of becoming telcos themselves.

For DTM, the calculus is straightforward. The series competes for broadcast attention against championships with larger budgets. More onboard angles, more reliably delivered, improves the product without touching the cars.

What comes next?

The deployment sets a template other series can copy, and Riedel has every commercial incentive to replicate it. Each new venue on a calendar is another private network to build, operate and invoice. Whether Easy5G spreads beyond motorsport into general outside-broadcast work will say more about the platform's maturity than any spec sheet.

For now, DTM's onboard cameras speak 5G, and the pictures speak for themselves.