ATSC Has ’the Whip Out’ to Speed Development of Mobile DTV Standard
Broadcasters are meeting Thursday and Friday to complete an “aggressive” work plan for developing a standard for mobile DTV, said Mark Aitken of Sinclair, chairman of the specialists group to develop a mobile DTV standard for the Advanced TV Systems Committee. “We've got the whip out, and a lot of highly motivated people,” Aitken said, referring to the perceived need for broadcasters to get into mobile TV before the cellular industry can dominate it.
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The specialists group is expected to divide up the standardization work and work on several parts simultaneously to speed the process, Aitken said. At the same time, the Open Mobile Video Coalition will be working on the business side of mobile DTV, he said: “The big question is how we monetize this. And the business side may affect the technical side.”
The “long pole in the tent” on the technical side is standardizing the physical layer of the technology -- essentially the part that delivers the video from the TV tower to the mobile receiver. So work on the physical layer will be “priority number one,” Aitken said. “It’s not that the management or presentation layers are less important,” he said, just that they may be simpler. Work on those layers will be done at the same time, he said.
Meeting the goal of a final standard by February 2009, the date for the analog TV cutoff, won’t be easy, everyone acknowledges. Completing the HDTV standard took nearly a decade, and the work on E-VSB, a much less important technology, took four years. ATSC has probably never worked on a standard as complex as this as fast as it plans to now, Aitken acknowledged. “But what alternative do we have? If we took four years on this, by then we would probably be over-run by savages.”
It will be a “challenge” to meet the ambitious schedule, agreed ATSC Executive Director Mark Richer. He promised a “very methodical approach” to setting the standard but said that “as long as the broadcasters keep the pressure on, I think there is a good chance” the schedule can be met. The “good news,” he said, is that most of the technology doesn’t need to be invented. “This is not crazy,” Richer said. “It is doable.”
Attacking mobile DTV from multiple angles simultaneously can offer advantages, Aitken said. For example, if those working on the business model draw some lessons before the standard is set, those lessons can influence standard choices. And documenting the standard while it’s being developed could help uncover any problems. “You learn a lot of things in the process of documenting,” he said.