Most of 23-Standard ATSC 3.0 Suite Finished or Near Completion, Conference Told
The “skyscraper” that symbolizes the “suite” of 23 standards comprising ATSC 3.0 “is getting fairly bottom-heavy, which is good, more stable,” Rich Chernock, Triveni Digital chief science officer, told an ATSC conference Wednesday. “Most of the standards are either finalized or in the proposed standard stage,” said Chernock, who chairs Technology Group 3 that’s tasked with supervising the framing of the next-gen standard.
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Of all the building blocks in the ATSC 3.0 suite, the system’s “bootstrap” is its starting point, said Chernock. The bootstrap, specified in document A/321, “is where receivers start in acquiring an ATSC 3.0 signal,” he said. “The big thing is that this bootstrap is going to stay there no matter how the standard evolves.” The bootstrap “is going to be constant, even as we get into 3.1, 3.2, 4.0,” he said.
ATSC 3.0's framers “have done an excellent job sticking” to the schedule of having the standard finished by the end of Q2, LG consultant Madeleine Noland, who chairs the S34 specialty group on ATSC 3.0 audio and video, told the conference Tuesday. “For such a big project with so many people involved, and so many decisions involved, so many different things could go sideways, and we have really stuck to the schedule.”
The “expectation” is that ATSC 3.0 will “grow and evolve,” Noland said. “We don’t want this to be a static standard. We want the broadcasters to have freedom to move forward with their businesses as they see fit. If things need to change, we should change them.”
Conference Notebook
CTA and NAB are partnering to fund and operate the WJW-hosted experimental Channel 31 station in Cleveland as “a neutral test facility” for ATSC 3.0, said Lynn Claudy, NAB senior vice president-technology. “Companies represented in this room and elsewhere can bring their stuff” to test their interoperability with other products, said Claudy. “So we see this as kind of a living laboratory where ATSC 3.0 issues can be discussed, hopefully problems can be resolved, and we can get closer to the real world of ATSC 3.0 services.” Using the WJW-TV facility for ATSC 3.0 field-testing has been in “the planning phase” since the fall (see 1611280030).
In Sinclair’s zeal to see ATSC 3.0 get off the ground and running as a “mobile-first” implementation, it’s willing to give receiver chipsets for free to smartphone manufacturers, said Mark Aitken, vice president-advanced technology. Sinclair already is in talks with one wireless carrier to bring ATSC 3.0 to smartphones, Aitken said. The company announced an agreement late March with India-based chipmaker Saankhya Labs to “fast-track” development of ATSC 3.0 receiver chipsets for smartphones within a year (see 1703280044).