ATSC 3.0 Receiver Development Going ‘Really Well,’ Says Pearl Consultant

“Compliance” with the 20-book suite of 3.0 specs is “very important, and the equipment road maps are still being worked on,” said Van Peenen. “I don’t think anything is completely baked, but we do have a lot of participation from South Korean vendors, which have been in production for almost two years now.”

All of Pearl’s “partners are really moving fast to close those gaps,” said Van Peenen. “We just have to manage the different versions of all the stuff we have running to make sure that it doesn’t fall down.” ATSC 3.0 receivers “are coming along really well,” said Van Peenen. “We had the advantage of the South Korean launch that kind of shook out the receiver details and issues. But they’re still prototypical, at least the stuff we have here in the U.S.”

All the 3.0 receiver prototypes “kind of vary, in terms of feature support,” said Van Peenen. “That’s all coming into alignment, because the road maps are being worked on.” With all the prototype head-end equipment and prototype receivers, “we’ve got to make sure that everything kind of comes to the table the same time,” he said. After the current phase of prototype receivers will come preproduction samples, “and we’ll need to run those through their paces as well,” he said.

ATSC 3.0 audio scored “really, really high” in the consumer lab testing Pearl did in Phoenix, said Van Peenen. Dolby AC-4, the 3.0 audio codec designated for North America, has “a lot of great capabilities and it really resonated with consumers when we did these surveys and lab studies,” he said. “There’s a lot of work that has to be done there” to incorporate AC-4's many functions into 3.0 hardware, he said. “It’s going to be worth it, based on the benefits and consumer interest in the audio feature.”

The Pearl team was “a little bit surprised how high audio ranked” in the consumer testing, said Van Peenen. “We’re going to need to focus more on that now as we get into real implementation phases.” Consumers in the focus groups were especially blown away with AC-4's “enhanced dialogue” feature, plus its “immersive” audio capability, demonstrated using “prototypical” movie clips of AC-4-encoded object-based surround, Van Peenen told us.

The Phoenix model market is starting to use digital rights management “as a way to protect our free-to-air content,” said Van Peenen. “This is hard stuff. There’s a lot of details that have to be fine-tuned, and you have to have a complete infrastructure for that to work. I think we’ve got a pretty good handle on that now, so we’re very positive on the ability to protect our free-to-air signal using encryption.”

There’s still “work to do in signal-protection DRM,” said Van Peenen. He thinks that work should “wind up” by Q3 at the latest. There are “low-cost, well-proven solutions in the market today” for DRM, he said. “We want to leverage those.” Most smart-TV platforms also “support one DRM or another, and so we think that’s sort of the fastest path to get to a launch,” he said.

NAB Show Notebook

The U.S. is asking the ITU to adopt ATSC 3.0 as a digital broadcast TV standard internationally, said ATSC Monday. “We ... look forward to an expedited consideration so that other nations can confidently implement this remarkable new standard,” said Larry Olson, assistant chief of the FCC International Bureau Global Strategy and Negotiation Division. Outgoing ATSC President Mark Richer first floated the idea of promoting 3.0 as a global standard at the NAB Show six years ago (see 1304090033).

ATSC 3.0, regulatory-wise, is “not quite ready for prime time,” said Peter Starke, American Tower vice president-broadcast. The FCC approved 3.0's voluntary deployment in November 2017 (see 1711160060), but the fledgling 3.0 industry remains in a “holding pattern” until the commission finalizes a license application form (see 1902260046), he said. June is “what we’re hearing” about availability of the form, “so all broadcasters can go out there and look at moving or transitioning toward the 3.0 lighthouse model,” he said. Meantime, trials and test-market deployments need to operate under experimental FCC licenses or special temporary authority, he said. Asked about the June timing of the application form that Starke quoted, FCC Media Bureau Chief Michelle Carey told us Monday that the form will become available "hopefully before that."

Since NHK debuted an 4K/8K TV service via broadcast satellite Dec. 1, “we have been promoting it by scheduling various attractive programs,” said Yo Narita, an NHK technical engineer. The 4K programming airs 6 a.m. to midnight daily, he said. The 8K offering has “the finest video quality in the world” and runs part of the day daily, he said. NHK airs mainly dramas, documentaries and travel shows in 4K, and reserves the most "immersive" programs, like concerts and Olympic highlights, for 8K, he said. Various manufacturers sold 194,000 4K set-top boxes in Japan cumulatively through February, priced on average roughly 20,000 yen ($179), he said. They’re designed to be retrofitted with the 5 million 4K TVs sold in Japan in 2018 that can receive only HD programs, he said. TVs with integrated 4K receivers were released just before the broadcast service launched in December, and 359,000 were sold through February, he said. Several thousand TVs with embedded 8K receivers were sold through January, having also been introduced just before the service launch, he said.