Standards Work Continues on Mobile DTV
ATSC committees are continuing work on mobile DTV technology that broadcasters will be showcasing in Washington this spring, executives said at an ATSC seminar Wednesday. Though ATSC adopted the standard for mobile DTV broadcasts in October, certain pieces of the technology were left out of that process in order to speed it, said Sterling Davis, vice president of technology for Cox Media Group.
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“Broadcasters need a completed standard for business success,” Davis said. Specifications for the studio- transmitter link, content protection and interstitial content between channel changing are still in the works, he said, as is the standard’s recommended practice document.
Work is also underway at ATSC on a system that would allocate all of a station’s capacity to mobile DTV, said Brett Jenkins, vice president of technology for Ion Media Networks. For now, the standard caps mobile DTV bandwidth at about 14.6 Mbps, leaving about 4.6 Mbps for broadcasters’ traditional TV service, he told the forum on the new service. Within that 14.6 Mbps, stations could broadcast up to 14 mobile DTV streams, he said.
Stations in Washington have been broadcasting mobile streams as they prepare for a consumer showcase later this year. Initial technical results showed about a 30-mile radius coverage area from local transmitter sites, said Wayne Bretl, an engineer with LG Electronics. The results “verify the usefulness of the existing ‘big stick’ transmitter facility model, even in Washington, D.C., which is known to be a challenging area,” he said. He as referring to the traditional broadcast model of having one high-powered transmitter cover a market.
Consumers in Washington will get their first mobile DTV receivers beginning April 1, said Anne Schelle, executive director of the Open Mobile Video Coalition. The trials will run through summer and include local broadcast programming as well as national cable programming, she said.