ATSC 3.0 Needed to Keep Broadcast TV ‘Relevant,’ NAB Show Told

Keeping terrestrial TV broadcasting relevant will require “making it more mobile, making it more on demand, personalizing it more and making it more interactive,” said Kutzner, who has chaired several ATSC 3.0 working groups. “We do need to deliver higher quality, and we certainly need to make it more efficient.” ATSC 3.0 will be targeted at both fixed and mobile receivers, and will need to encompass “state-of-the-art compression,” Kutzner said. It also will need to be “fully converged with broadband” and it will need to be upgradable to keep pace with fast technological developments, Kutzner said. “Looking ahead,” ATSC 3.0 is “likely to be a complete replacement” for ATSC and ATSC 2.0, “and so it does need to be worth the effort in terms of time and expended resources,” he said.

The Motion Picture Experts Group is developing a new high-efficiency video codec (HEVC) that’s expected to be published as a standard next January, Kutzner said. It’s expected to be part of a new “suite” of MPEG video and audio standards, including 3D audio, that will be ready in about three years, he said. HEVC has twice the data efficiency of the existing advanced video coding, known as AVC, he said. That’s crucial if 4K or 8K terrestrial TV transmissions will ever become a reality, he said. Kutzner won’t hazard a guess when ATSC 3.0 as a standard will be ready. “We are not going to develop a system that no one will buy and the FCC won’t accept,” he said. Still, “we recognize there’s a strong desire to use the current investment for as long as possible,” he said.

But ATSC 3.0 or no 3.0, Craig Todd, Dolby Labs chief technology officer, is one who doubts “anybody would ever use terrestrial bandwidth for UHDTV,” he told the Technology Summit for Cinema Conference in Q-and-A later on Sunday. “That bandwidth is just too valuable.” Todd is vice chairman of the ITU-R Working Party 6C that’s expected to adopt specs for next-gen, progressive-scan-only 4K and 8K UHDTV at its meetings in Geneva next week. “I don’t think anyone knows” for sure when UHDTV delivery to the home will begin, Todd said. “IP could happen first, if you could decode the signal on a computer and get it to a display. I mean, a niche service could pop up, delivering a limited amount of content over the top for download to decode on a computer or a specialized set-top box. For cable or satellite, you'll probably need HEVC chips at 10 bits, and that could be three years out, and maybe another year for equipment."

Todd said the HEVC spec due from MPEG next January will be limited to an 8-bit standard. He thinks it will take another year after that for MPEG to standardize HEVC as a 10-bit spec, he said. Responding to a question whether HEVC will occupy a role in the Blu-ray standard, Hugo Gaggioni, chief technology officer at Sony Professional Solutions of America, said there’s considerable “interest” in standardizing native 4K for “physical media.” Asked how long such a spec would take to finalize, Gaggioni said: “That’s hard to say.” The Blu-ray Disc Association has said recently there was little call within the group to upgrade the Blu-ray spec for native 4K or 8K. Todd said HEVC is one of several specs nearing final development that would be needed to support the commercialization of UHDTV. For example, HDMI 1.4, though it currently supports 4K, does so only at “low frame rates,” Todd said. HDMI Licensing is “currently looking at upping the bandwidth,” he said.