Stations Can’t Wait on ATSC Mobile DTV Standard, Harris Says

“I don’t think the industry has the time to wait through a full standard process” that could run 18-plus months, Adrick said: “We don’t think ATSC approval is essential… and I don’t thing broadcasters can wait that long to get into the business.” Adrick spoke at a Harris-LG Electronics event here unveiling the companies’ new Mobile Pedestrian Handheld (MPH) mobile DTV system. The companies are demonstrating the system on private bus tours around Las Vegas all week.

Neither must Harris’ new solution get FCC approval, Adrick said. The system works within the parameters of what the FCC already has allowed for DTV broadcasts, said Adrick and other industry officials. Using it, broadcasters can deliver DTV signals to mobile devices like laptops, phones and vehicles. It will be backwards compatible with ATSC DTV tuners and won’t interfere with other broadcasts. The Harris-LG partnership is the 2nd such to surface lately. For months, Samsung and Rohde & Schwarz have been touting their A-VSB technology’s mobile broadcast benefits.

Broadcasters will have to decide very quickly which technology works best, said Harvey Arnold, Sinclair dir.- engineering. Sinclair is helping both partnerships demonstrate their systems at NAB this week. “You can’t make a decision based on what you see at NAB,” he said. Broadcasters must decide which system is the most robust, which makes the most efficient use of spectrum, which works best with a single frequency network and answer other questions, Arnold said: “That’s what broadcasters are going to have to find out fairly quickly.” Each system is seen having its own advantages. For instance, MPH appears to offer more bit efficiency -- so stations can transmit multiple streams in the same bandwidth. But A-VSB works well with single-frequency networks, Samsung has said.

It’s unclear how or when broadcasters will pick among mobile DTV solutions. Late Fri., a group of 8 broadcasters allied to push mobile broadcasting, but Ion CEO Brandon Burgess stopped short of saying the coalition would anoint a winner. “We're just trying to provide a platform to be more easily collaborative as an industry,” he said: “Sometimes it’s very hard for the industry to get things off the ground because there are so many voices.”

For now coalition membership is open only to broadcasters, Burgess said. So far, Ion, Fox, NBC, Tribune, Gannett, Belo, Gray and Sinclair belong. “We thought it would be prudent to keep it a broadcast entity,” Burgess said, urging other station groups to join but declaring consumer electronics makers will be turned away. “Bringing other entities into it might be a little premature,” he said. But eventually manufacturers will have to step up if mobile DTV is to succeed with consumers, he said. The problem is convincing manufacturers that there’s enough of a market to serve, he said: “You're never going to get good devices developed if you can only extrapolate to 500,000 units.”

Phone carriers shouldn’t see in-band mobile broadcasting as a threat to mobile video services they're rolling out, said Adrick. Local mobile broadcasts can complement Modeo or Qualcomm national mobile programming, he said: “For them to deploy national and local content, they're going to have to build an additional transmission network.” That could be far too expensive given spectrum, build-out and program licensing costs, he said: “A better option would be actual tuners than can receive both MPH and MediaFLO.”

Broadcasting to vehicles is among the prospects most exciting for broadcasters. People spend so much time driving and GPS technology allows a back-channel enabling stations to deliver targeted ads, said Del Parks, Sinclair vp-technology & operations. “Cars have the back channel,” he said: “That gives us something we've never really had.”