Futurecast Now 'Complete, End-to-End' System for ATSC 3.0, Its Backers Say at NAB Show
LAS VEGAS -- LG, GatesAir and Zenith are using the NAB Show this week to showcase how their year-old Futurecast physical layer proposal for ATSC 3.0 has been expanded to encompass a “complete, end-to-end sort of a system,” said Wayne Luplow, vice president at LG’s Zenith research and development Lab in Lincolnshire, Illinois, Monday in a media briefing at the GatesAir booth. “We’ve gone beyond where we’ve been before,” Luplow said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
As a measure of its progress, Futurecast is using an “off-the-shelf” LG 65-inch Ultra HD TV fitted with field-programmable gate array chips to do the video decoding inside the TV, Luplow said. “It shows you that we’ve moved forward in terms of getting stuff into TVs. It’s not quite product, but it shows you it can be done.” LG Vice President John Taylor said the new features of Futurecast leverage the WebOS 2.0 smart TV protocol built into the company’s consumer TVs to enable demonstrations of such features as emergency alerting.
Futurecast “is all about a robust delivery system, whether it is delivering to the home or to mobile devices or portable devices in the field,” said Jay Adrick, GatesAir technology adviser. “So we have the ability through coding that can be tailored to an individual application. The advanced coding is very flexible. You can code for high-bandwidth delivery, such as Ultra HD. You can code for narrower-bandwidth delivery to mobile devices, where you’re trying to run with much lower signal-to-noise levels.”
Following night-time field tests last fall in Madison, Wisconsin, that helped mold the “optimized system” being shown at the NAB Show, Futurecast will be field-tested starting next month in Cleveland, Adrick said. “We have a unique arrangement” with Tribune Broadcasting, which owns an interim 600-kilowatt station on Channel 31, he said. Tribune in Cleveland “moved back to Channel 8 at the end of the dual-carriage period in 2009, but the facility remained intact,” he said. “It’s been mothballed.” So GatesAir applied for a six-month special temporary authorization at the FCC, which was granted about three weeks ago, he said. “It will allow us to do 24/7 testing without having to worry about just overnight availability.”
The newly expanded Futurecast includes emergency alerting that triggers activation of the Advanced Warning and Response Network, the industry’s next-gen alerting system announced earlier in 2015 that’s “something new under the sun,” said John Lawson, a senior adviser to AWARN. The current U.S. emergency alert system is “out of date, it’s fragile and it’s insecure,” said Lawson, former president of the Association of Public TV Stations. It dates “to the beginning of the Cold War,” he said. “It’s been extremely important for the country, but it’s showing its age. It’s still based on an AM radio daisy chain. It’s a blunt instrument.” More-recently introduced wireless emergency alerts are based on 90-character text messages that “don’t prompt people to take action” during a crisis, he said.
AWARN solves many of the problems of the current systems and “can reach all kinds of devices,” Lawson said. “With AWARN, we can reach devices indoors, mobile, in-car devices -- a whole range. It is capable of providing very robust, rich media content.” AWARN will feature alerting capability that’s “geographically targetable,” he said. “Consumers will have a lot of say over what levels of alerts they want to receive. So it’s really a big leap forward for the U.S. in terms of public alert and warning. We have attracted a lot of interest from public safety agencies at the federal and state level and expect to be working with them going forward. So we’re very excited that with ATSC 3.0, we’ve got all these robust capabilities.”