SMPTE Hears of 8K Skepticism, ATSC 3.0 Captioning Concerns
Industry is “seeing the dilemma between push and pull,” cinematographer Pierre Routhier said when we asked him at SMPTE's conference in Hollywood (see 1710240073) to reconcile his findings that 8K has no place in the living room, even as NHK…
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rushes to start 8K broadcasting services in 2018 and TV makers talk increasingly of introducing 8K product in the U.S. next year. “We are pushing forward with increased spatial resolution, but I’ve not seen the pull from the clients.” The Korean Broadcasting System, meanwhile, successfully implemented a “basic” closed-captioning system for the ATSC 3.0-based Ultra HD broadcasting services that debuted to the South Korean public in May, said Yunhyoung Kim, KBS research engineer. Implementation had its “difficulties,” most having to do with building the crucial “timing” mechanisms into the closed-captioning feeds, he said. ATSC’s A/343 document defines required technology for closed caption and subtitle tracks, but contains “no explicit expressions” of how to use the timing mechanisms in a practical implementation, so KBS improvised, he said. That prompted an audience questioner who said he was involved in 3.0's framing to approach the mic and declare: “Unfortunately, the structure of the ATSC 3.0 document set is not implementer-friendly.” Framers “argued repeatedly in a number of meetings about that,” said the questioner, who didn’t give his name, and our attempts to talk to him were unsuccessful. “All of the shell statements are present that you absolutely need, but they’re spread over about 20 documents,” he said. ATSC’s supervisors told 3.0's framers they would draft a “recommended practice to tell people how it all fits together,” said the questioner: “They haven’t done that.” To Kim, who stood onstage listening to the remarks with no visible expression, the questioner said: “Unfortunately, you’re the first guy that had to do it. I feel sorry for you, but congratulations on getting a working implementation.” ATSC President Mark Richer in a Wednesday statement told us, “Certainly ATSC will develop a Recommended Practice for closed-captioning with ATSC 3.0, just as we have done with the current digital TV standard." More than 20 different standards "will comprise the full ATSC 3.0 system, and we have drafts of several Recommended Practices that are now in development,” said Richer. An order on ATSC 3.0 is expected to be voted on by FCC members Nov. 16.