TV Makers ‘in Lockstep’ With Broadcasters to Bow ATSC 3.0 in 2020, Says Pearl’s Schelle
Pearl TV and its partners in the ATSC 3.0 Phoenix model-market project will use this week’s NAB Show New York to showcase publicly for the first time the common “application framework” they developed and hope to promote as an open industry standard for 3.0's nationwide deployment, Pearl Managing Director Anne Schelle told us Monday. The framework “gives the CEs comfort that when they sell a television set in Chicago, the consumer experience on their set will be the same in Charlotte,” said Schelle of consumer electronics makers.
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The application framework is a “software stack” that also gives broadcasters the ability to adapt over-the-air consumer offerings over time and “unlock” new features and services, said Pearl. The framework "runs in a standard A/344 runtime environment" and uses several web technologies, including HTML5 and JavaScript, said Pearl. A/344 is ATSC's document for the 3.0 standard on interactive content. NAB Show New York opens Wednesday for two days at the Javits Convention Center.
TV stations within the framework "support a shared broadcaster application to deliver a consistent OTA consumer experience," said Pearl. "Broadcasters share a common software framework to consistently support any 3.0-ready receiver." Each TV "has the runtime and supports the broadcaster framework and business models," said Pearl. "Broadcaster-controlled cloud services manage the application and content."
Having a consistent 3.0 consumer user experience is “hugely important” to the set makers, said Schelle. “We’ve been focused on the basic television service as a starting point” for the 3.0 deployment in 2020, she said. That will be “just the first round of feature availability,” she said. “We’ll continue to develop feature functionality with the CEs during 2020, but we’ll be able to launch with a set of capabilities and features and services that they’re interested in." The feature set will be a "motivator" for consumers "to go out and purchase a new television set,” she said.
Pearl will demonstrate the common framework on prototype devices from LG, Samsung and Sony at the ATSC booth on the show’s main floor, said Schelle. LG TVs use the webOS operating system, while Tizen is Samsung's OS and Android is Sony's, she said. “The framework needs to work with all three,” she said. “We’ll be demonstrating the Phoenix application framework that was incubated with the three TV manufacturers that we are opening up to the industry to be able to use.”
Think of the application framework as “our operating system for NEXTGEN TV,” said Schelle. The application is received over the air and “it’s riding on top” of the individual set-makers’ operating systems, she said. “When you tune to a 3.0 TV channel, then you’ve launched this application.” The rationale for putting on the demos this week is “to show the industry the importance of an open common framework like this that’s light enough so it gets accepted by the CEs,” she said. “You can’t do something that’s burdensome to the CEs.”
Broadcasters are taking the posture of “let’s crawl before we walk before we run” in launching 3.0 services in 2020, said Schelle. “You’re going to see some of the core elements that are meaningful to consumers to start to move TV sets out.” As time goes on, 3.0 “gets better and better as you add more features on,” she said. “These features that we add on, from the TV side, are simply software updates.”
The three TV makers involved in the demos were “early” to 3.0 and “they’ve got advantages” in the work they did in South Korea or during the standardization process, said Schelle. On additional TV brand support, “you’ve got the Chinese manufacturers right behind them, and other manufacturers that are well known in the marketplace that tend to be fast followers,” she said. She has no doubts additional TV brands beyond LG, Samsung and Sony will jump in with 3.0 support “post-2020.”
Broadcasters are “gearing up” for 2020 and TV makers are “in lockstep with us,” said Schelle. “It’s a very collaborative environment to launch in 2020, from understanding the consumer, to the receiver manufacturer, to the receiver itself, to the service, to all the infrastructure that needs to support those services.”
Engineers in Phoenix under the direction of Chief Technology Officer Dave Folsom produced a 105-page “host station manual" as a “how-to guide" for broadcasters seeking to make the leap into 3.0, said Schelle. “TV manufacturers have a conformance program” through CTA for assuring peak 3.0 receiver performance, she said. “On the broadcast side, this is our way of making recommendations,” she said, helping the industry “establish a baseline for 3.0 services.” Pearl is “gifting” the manual to the industry through downloads from its own website and that of the Phoenix project, she said.
Adding a second transmission site will make Phoenix the “first two-stick market” for 3.0, said Schelle. The two sites will power a single-frequency network that’s “an opportunity for us to continue to test automotive” use cases for 3.0, she said. The second transmission site and the SFN “both are built,” but “we need to get final authorization from the FCC to turn it on,” she said.