‘Futurecast,’ Proposed ‘Guts’ of ATSC 3.0, to Be Field-Tested Late Summer

The agreements with those broadcasters are in the early stages and were hatched only Monday, the executives said, declining to identify which markets or broadcasters will participate. Those broadcasters are “in various markets that will provide different types of challenges to be able to prove that the system performs well,” said Jay Adrick, technology adviser to GatesAir.

"We are actively involved in what’s happening on the physical layer” of ATSC 3.0, said Zenith Vice President Wayne Luplow, a key member of the team that contributed Zenith know-how to the current ATSC DTV broadcast system. “The physical layer is the guts, if you like, of any type of a new system, and it seems to have the longest lead time to wrestle through the technologies that are associated with it.” Competition appears stiff at the ATSC among proposals vying to be ATSC 3.0’s physical layer. ATSC representatives have said about a dozen proposals were submitted last fall and are now being evaluated, including seven complete proposals like Futurecast. The rest were classified as “technology pieces.”

The specialist group at ATSC is “thrashing through” the various physical layer proposals that were submitted in September, and “we're trying to accelerate that process and really provide a complete system for the physical layer, and that’s what we call Futurecast,” Luplow said. Futurecast is being demonstrated in the GatesAir booth on the NAB Show floor “for the first time in a public arena,” he said. The demos include three different programs running simultaneously on a 6-MHz channel, he said. One is a 4K “embellishment” beamed to a 55-inch LG Ultra HD TV, he said. The others depict Futurecast delivered to a tablet and a smartphone, he said.

"We work within the ATSC process, but we're also trying to accelerate it by having a complete physical layer,” Luplow said. The ATSC “has gone on a path of trying to take parts from one guy and parts from another vendor and parts from third proposer and mix them all together in some kind of an optimum way,” he said. “This may happen, we don’t know how that will happen. If it happens, it’s got to be built and tested. In our case, we've got all our pieces together. Our various blocks talk to each other, so you get the optimum performance within them.”

Combining various and competing pieces to form a single physical layer “turns the calendar back” because those pieces need to be implemented, “proven out” and tested anew, Luplow said. ATSC 3.0 standards-setting is “a long, necessary process” involving weekly meetings that are highly technical and characterized by debate, he said. “We're trying to, not go around it, but we're trying to really push that forward as best we can.”

Futurecast is the best physical layer proposal out there, but it’s also adaptable to being combined with other technologies because it contains “future extension frames,” said Rich Redmond, GatesAir chief product officer. “Why we think that’s really relevant is it allows you to merge together other types of technologies and enhancements,” he said. On the NAB Show floor, GatesAir is showing a demonstration of how Futurecast’s future extension frames are implemented in DVB-T2 using a combination of broadcast terrestrial TV and LTE, he said. “That’s very complementary and in the core basis of what Futurecast can do.” Zenith’s R&D Lab in Lincolnshire, Ill., thinks Futurecast is “the best of the best of the best,” its president, Jong-Gyu Kim, told us.

Asked what he thinks might happen to ATSC 3.0 after it’s completed as a final standard by year-end 2015, if the ATSC’s timeline holds true, “we have this enormous issue of standards, policy and what I would call transition,” Luplow told us. “These other pieces” besides standards-setting “are not coming together yet,” in terms of the spectrum auction, the repacking process that follows, and how much spectrum will be available when all is said and done, he said. Luplow personally has doubts the ATSC will meet its goal of completing work on ATSC 3.0 by the end of 2015 because he thinks the goal is “quite unrealistic,” he told us. “I don’t like to say that too much. I'm a member of the ATSC board of directors.” One reason ATSC standards-setting takes so long is that typically, in a physical layer meeting at the ATSC, there are 60 people “pushing for their intellectual property to be incorporated into the standard,” he said. “For a technology company like ours, that’s why we invest millions in this stuff. And why do you do it? Not because we're philanthropic, but we're looking for something in return.”

Much of ATSC 3.0’s fate will depend on “what happens in a testing world,” Luplow said. “I know the broadcast community, and damned near every broadcaster is going to say, ‘I'm not going to think about implementing this thing until I've tested it or until there have been a bunch of tests in the city in trials.” The existing DTV system went through “lots and lots of trials, and I think you'll see that broadcasters will insist on that” for ATSC 3.0, he said. “That’s why I'm trying to get out front up here with what we've got” in Futurecast, and so the trials are beginning in late summer, he said.

On the trial that LG announced last week with the broadcaster consortium Pearl to demonstrate interactive TV delivered to LG smart TV owners in Atlanta, Cleveland and Orlando, “we really see that there’s a lot of great potential in this, both for bringing in enhancements to the content itself … and also with advertising,” said Wendell Wenjen, director-smart TV advertising and interactive TV platforms at LG’s Silicon Valley Lab. One of the “really notable things” about the trial with Pearl is that it’s the first time the technology is being used with live news, Wenjen said. “We're real excited to see what kinds of things we learn about how people use this, the kinds of interactive enhancements that are most engaging.”

The trial will include additional photo and map overlays offered to viewers who want more information about news or weather reports and also will include the ability for consumers to interact with advertising by requesting more information such as store locations or receiving coupons, LG and Pearl said. LG updated the firmware in its 2012 and 2013 smart TVs to add the interactive capability needed for the trial, Wenjen said. The trial works on a “double-opt-in” basis, he said. The viewer first opts in to using the service through the TV, and then when the service detects the interactive content that’s featured on the news program, there’s an on-screen opt-in “for the duration of that program,” Wenjen said.

"What we do as Pearl is collectively we look at ventures,” said Peter Diaz, executive vice president at Gannett, one of eight broadcast companies involved in the Pearl consortium. “We look at ways that we can pivot in the broadcast industry into places that we may not be able to do individually.” Pearl’s other members are Cox Media Group, E.W. Scripps, Hearst TV, Media General, Meredith Local Media Group, Post-Newsweek Stations and Raycom Media. Collectively, Pearl’s eight members have about $4 billion annual in net ad revenue, Diaz said. Their 170 stations reach about 63 percent of the U.S. population, he said.

From the broadcast perspective, “we like the idea of interactive,” Diaz said. “We understand that we have to get more interactive with our customers both on the content and the business side. But until recently, we didn’t know how to do that because the cable companies and the set-top boxes were going to block us from doing that. So smart TV was a good way to get into it. We didn’t know much about it, but on a very fast track, we're trying to learn how smart TVs can work for us.”

Pearl-affiliated stations in Orlando and West Palm Beach, Fla., also have begun demonstrating mobile emergency alert system capabilities to devices equipped with mobile digital TV receiver chips in advance of the hurricane season that begins June 1, the consortium said. “A service like this, a life-saving service for the American public, whether there’s a tsunami, or a chemical spill, or nuclear accident, terrorist attack, tornado or hurricane, this system can save lives,” said John Lawson, CEO of Convergence Services. “We think that could be a key to actually getting mobile DTV tuners on cellphones,” said Lawson, a former president of the Association of Public TV Stations. “We're not looking for a mandate, we never have,” he said. “But if you look at how GPS got on the cellphone, it was a result of federal policy. Congress directed the FCC to enable callers to 911 -- for their location to be apparent to the dispatcher.”