Capitol Broadcasting Still 'On the Fence’ Whether to Use 4K For ATSC 3.0's Debut
RALEIGH -- Capitol Broadcasting remains “on the fence” whether to use 4K or 1080p in the transition to ATSC 3.0, Pete Sockett, head of engineering and operations, told us Monday, repeating comments he made at May’s ATSC conference (see 1705160044). Sockett spoke at a demonstration that Capitol organized with partners, including NBCUniversal, NAB, LG, Samsung and the Korean government-funded Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), to showcase 3.0's capabilities. In addition to showing 3.0 as a carrier for Ultra HD video, the demo also previewed 3.0-capable advanced emergency alerting on an LG TV and showcased a prototype 3.0 home gateway for interactive content developed by NAB Pilot.
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It’s perhaps “premature” to decide whether to go 4K or 1080 for 3.0, said Sockett. “My gut tells me we will shoot, capture and edit in 4K” but broadcast in 1080p from the studio, with additional “bells and whistles” such as wide color and high dynamic range, he said. “There’s potentially the studio in 4K, I just don’t know yet. The jury’s still out for me on that. If you can notice it, we’ll do it. If you can’t notice it, why bother?”
Capitol invited dozens of industry dignitaries, including ATSC President Mark Richer, to an event venue at North Carolina State University for the 3.0 demo. Capitol’s WRAL-TV Raleigh used a transmitter atop its 1,740-foot tower in Auburn about 20 miles southeast of Raleigh to transmit a 3.0 signal to a modified Samsung receiver fitted with a flat, wall-mounted antenna. “It’s a 40-kilowatt transmitter that’s covering all of Raleigh,” said Sockett. “This signal is 40 kilowatts. The WRAL main signal is a million.”
The video shown was of an Olympics skating event beamed from Pyeongchang, South Korea, through an NBC server to WRAL’s Auburn tower via satellite, said Sockett. The content in 4K with HDR10 high dynamic range and Dolby AC-4 audio was shown on a one-day delay because the International Olympic Committee wouldn’t permit WRAL to run the demos live, said Sockett.
WRAL sent 3.0 over the air as “two different signals in the same channel,” said Sockett. The 4K signal, beamed in H.265 compression at 18 Mbps, “is high-throughput, high-capacity,” he said. “It needs a little more signal strength than the other.” The other signal, at 4 Mbps, showed how it’s possible to broadcast normal WRAL content using 3.0 in HD quality to a standard Windows 10 tablet through a prototype plug-in antenna “dongle” designed by ETRI that’s slightly larger than a USB stick. Since all of 3.0 is based on internet protocol, it’s easily possible to stream the same HD-quality video to various devices in a home gateway network over Wi-Fi, said Sockett.
The demo was meant to show how 3.0's “new modulation scheme” makes the signal “easier to receive” than is possible with ATSC 1.0, said Sockett. “It’s really going to make a difference when we try getting into not just regular antennas, but into smaller antennas and into homes and into basements, and getting this signal to all these devices.” Basic over-the-air 3.0 “does not need the internet, and it does not need wireless,” said Sockett. “It is a single broadcast transmit antenna that’s covering all the market.”
Capitol and its partners designed the demo to make the new suite of 3.0 standards “tangible, to show you what’s possible,” said NAB Chief Technology Officer Sam Matheny. “The last of the 3.0 standards were approved last month,” said Matheny (see 1801090056). “Here we are this month, and it’s very real with multiple products, from televisions to dongles to gateways, and also the analysis equipment, the tools that the engineers are going to use to help create and evaluate what is being transmitted.”
Recalling what he said was the pioneering work WRAL did for the transition to digital from analog TV, the migration to 3.0 “is sort of deja vu all over again,” said Capitol CEO James Goodmon. Just as Capitol did with the transition to HD, “we’re off to the races again” with 3.0, he said. “Remember I said back when we went to HD, I said we’re entering the golden age of broadcasting,” said Goodmon. “They wrote all these articles in the broadcasting magazines about how stupid I am,” suggesting that Goodmon was naive to the threats that pay TV posed to over-the-air broadcast TV, he said. “So I’m saying it again.”
With 3.0, “you can’t beat our signal quality,” said Goodmon. “You can’t believe the coverage we’ve got. We can reach more people more of the time in a more efficient way than, you name it, we can do it. So I have a lot of confidence in the future of broadcast.”
The demo of 3.0's Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN) capability on an LG TV simulated how the system would perform during a hypothetical hazardous materials leak in the Washington area. Using AWARN, broadcasters can send "all of this extra information that will support anybody in an emergency scenario," including evacuation instructions and stay-in-place directives, said Sockett. "None of this needs the internet. As broadcast television, we have a 1,700-foot tower covering the market with six days of diesel fuel buried in the ground to keep us on the air. If there's a problem, you don't need the cellphones, you don't need the internet."
There's "a lot of social science to alerting that is really baked right into" AWARN, said Sockett. AWARN "can actually wake up a device and tell it to turn on and let you know there's something important," he said. "We can also make it so it's not a nuisance. We're not going to wake you up every time there's a thunderstorm. There's going to be settings and hierarchies." The goal is to get the 3.0 signal "into every device," including smartphones, said Sockett. From the standpoint of AWARN alerting, doing so will make 3.0 a "game changer," he said.