Communications Daily is a Warren News publication.

Evoca Using ATSC 3.0 Flash Channels

The ATSC 3.0 Evoca TV service in Boise has been “exercising flash channels a fair amount in our system” since debuting in September (see 2011010001), CEO Todd Achilles told the virtual Streaming Media 2021 Connect conference Thursday. “We set up…

Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article

Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!

a flash 4K channel for a sporting event, and we’re actually standing up a flash channel today for the Mars rover landing.” It landed around 4 p.m. EST. The channel capability is in the 3.0 suite to “spin up an extra channel” over-the-air “on demand and dynamically, and spin it down again,” said ATSC President Madeleine Noland: “A flash channel is a channel that pops up for a particular purpose and comes back down again.” Such protocols are in ATSC’s A/351 recommended practice document for 3.0 signaling, delivery and synchronization techniques, said Noland through a spokesperson. An app per the A/344 standards on 3.0 interactive content is used, she said. Achilles thinks 3.0 is superior to 5G for content delivery into the home. “There’s lots of conversations” about how 5G will become “the new technology to deliver video into the home,” he said. “When you look at the numbers on that, it’s still a really expensive way to deliver bits to a stationary end user.”