Companies Open to Allying in ATSC Mobile/Handheld Standard Process

“I'm not sure whether we'll have a ‘Grand Alliance II,’ but I certainly think there is room for the various respondents to cooperate,” said Brett Jenkins, general manager of U.S. video transmission products at Thomson/Grass Valley, one of nine companies submitting work to ATSC. “That’s going to be absolutely necessary to meet the deadlines that the industry has put forward.” Broadcasters are excited about offering mobile DTV service within their spectrum allotments, a prospect that would allow them to introduce subscription-based services and gain some high-tech cachet. That excitement was fueled at the National Association of Broadcaster’s annual convention when LG with Harris and Samsung with Rohde & Schwarz demonstrated in-band mobile broadcast systems. Both partnerships’ plans are being considered by the ATSC.

Their interest has drawn to the table wireless players like Nokia and Qualcomm, which already are testing or offering incompatible mobile TV services in the U.S. using different technology. Qualcomm, which submitted two proposals to ATSC, is open to partnering with other companies, said Kamil Grajski, vice president of engineering. “If there are a couple of companies who may have taken an earlier start together, that’s not necessarily precluding us from joining that subgroup,” he said.

Qualcomm wants the upper layers of its mobile video system included in ATSC’s standard, Grajski said. Broadcast signals are divided into layers; the lower layer, often referred to as the physical layer, defines the RF signal’s modulation scheme. Upper layers can carry program guide material, conditional access and other features. Qualcomm’s first proposal covers only its MediaFLO technology’s upper layers. Its second proposal describes the full MediaFLO system, even though it’s not backwards compatible with legacy ATSC receivers.

Incorporating MediFLO’s upper layers into whatever RF scheme ATSC standardizes will simplify integration of ATSC mobile services into Qualcomm’s own mobile video service, said Grajski. “Potentially a handset can have both FLO- and ATSC-based capabilities, yet the user interface and some of the network infrastructure could be exactly the same,” he said. Nokia declined to discuss its involvement at ATSC but presumably has similar aims for its DVB-H system. Along with Crown Castle, it is running trials of the service in some U.S. cities.

The work pace at ATSC depends on those services’ success, Thomson’s Jenkins said. “What MediaFLO USA is doing right now with Verizon’s VCast service is a bellwether for the American consumers’ appetite for mobile video,” he said. “If that becomes wildly successful, ATSC’s work will accelerate.”

Companies are discussing each proposal’s details on an e-mail reflector set up by the committee, Grajski said. Discussions about partnering could occur there or bleed over outside ATSC to be hammered out by lawyers and executives, Jenkins said. “It’s going to be combination of those things,” he said.

ATSC’s call for proposals elicited submissions from audio codec makers looking to have technology included. Among them is AACPlus codec maker Coding Technologies, which says it can help broadcasters save bandwidth by compressing audio signal without sacrificing sound quality. Its codecs can offer bit rate savings ranging into the hundreds of kbps. This may seem minuscule in the context of a 10 Mbps HD stream, but could be critical in mobile uses for which broadcasters will set aside far less bandwidth, said Andreas Ehret, vice president of product management and development.

If the ATSC work boils down to a bake-off between Nokia’s and Qualcomm’s upper layers, Coding Technologies is “agnostic” the victor, Ehret said. Both companies already license AACPlus.