Two more ingredients of ATSC 3.0's physical layer remain to be elevated to final standards now that the A/321 document on system discovery and signaling architecture for the physical layer has cleared ATSC membership balloting as a full standard, ATSC President Mark Richer told us Monday. Though Sinclair scooped ATSC in releasing the news in a Monday morning announcement that A/321 had been approved, “we’re all good,” Richer told us.
The first-ever ATSC 3.0-based single frequency network began broadcasting Monday in Baltimore and Washington under special temporary authority from the FCC, Sinclair said in a Tuesday announcement. Launching the SFN “validates, in a real world environment, the operation and performance of new and innovative concepts relative to an ATSC 3.0 SFN deployment” that will include a “full range” of services, including “fixed, portable and mobile capabilities,” said Sinclair. It worked with its One Media subsidiary and with broadcast equipment supplier TeamCast on the deployment.
Online abstracts are due April 22 for papers to be presented at the Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers annual technical conference and exhibition Oct. 24-28 in Hollywood, California, SMPTE said Friday in a call for proposals. Proposed papers “must be informational and must address technical theory, research, innovation, application, or practice specific to any of the evolving technologies associated with the media technology industry,” SMPTE said. Suggested topics include Ultra HD, “color and dynamic range management,” new distribution methods such as ATSC 3.0 and content security, it said.
ATSC 3.0 no longer is “just a pie-in-the-sky idea with engineers in the basement skunkworks piecing things together,” new ATSC Chairman Richard Friedel said Tuesday in the March issue of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. “Bottom line” is that ATSC 3.0 as a standard “is real and it’s coming upon us like a freight train!” said Friedel, Fox Networks executive vice president-engineering and operations. ATSC 3.0's “reality” will be in plain sight at next month’s NAB Show, “where ATSC members will demonstrate operational 3.0 hardware, running 3.0 applications on actual 3.0 over-the-air broadcasts,” Friedel said. “Broadcasters will begin placing orders for 3.0 professional equipment, and we’ll see actual consumer 3.0 receivers and ancillary equipment -- okay, they’re still prototypes but using real chips -- from major consumer electronics brands.” Friedel thinks ATSC 3.0's framers’ biggest challenge will be to “articulate” the technology’s capabilities “so broadcasters can develop their business plans and begin to make the necessary investments for the future,” he said. “With the spectrum auction underway and implementation of 3.0 expected to coincide perfectly with the spectrum repack, now is the time for broadcasters to work in earnest on business plans, implementation plans and transition plans,” he said. “Now is the time for all the stakeholders to recognize that ATSC 3.0 is real and ready to redefine the future of television.” As for ATSC 3.0 demo activities at the NAB Show, they’ll be centered around the ATSC 3.0 Broadcast Pavilion in the NAB Futures Park exhibit area on the upper level of the Las Vegas Convention Center’s South Hall, the ATSC newsletter said. The pavilion will highlight broadcast equipment and systems “from nearly 20 companies and research institutions that [are] designed to facilitate the introduction of ATSC 3.0 services,” it said.
The long-delayed choice of an audio codec for ATSC 3.0 is “progressing,” ATSC President Mark Richer told us Wednesday. “Audio, not uncharacteristically, is the complicated document” in ATSC 3.0, Richer said. “So we have plenty of people working on that, and it’s just complicated, so it’s taking a while longer than we would like.” But ATSC is “still on track to have audio done in a timely manner to allow the standard to be finished on time,” Richer said of elevating the entire suite of ATSC 3.0 specs to the status of final standard by the end of 2016. Richer thinks “there’s a fairly good chance” that ATSC 3.0 audio will “go out for a vote” as a candidate standard by the NAB Show, which opens April 16 in Las Vegas, he said. “I hope that will happen, but I think it will,” he said. ATSC released its call for proposals on ATSC 3.0 audio in December 2014 with a “project schedule” calling for ATSC’s S34 specialist group to recommend a winning codec by August 2015 (see 1412090019). The decision will boil down to a choice between the Dolby AC-4 codec and that of the MPEG-H consortium of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor.
Developments on ATSC 3.0 are “advancing very quickly now,” Sinclair CEO David Smith said in Q&A on his company’s Wednesday earnings call. “I would expect that we’ll be on the Hill sometime in the next few months” and at the FCC, “probably getting ready to make an application on behalf of the industry to advance to the next television standard in this country,” said Smith of Sinclair's planned congressional and commission outreach on ATSC 3.0.
LG Electronics teamed with Korean broadcasters MBC and SBS and other partners to beam the world’s first end-to-end 4K broadcast in Korea using the ATSC 3.0 standard, the companies said in a Tuesday announcement. Also working on the test broadcast were the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute of Korea, Korean conditional access firm DigiCAP, French broadcast equipment supplier TeamCast and American video software supplier Media Excel, they said. The first end-to-end broadcast of 4K Ultra HD “represents a significant development, because past demonstrations have simply used pre-recorded material loaded directly to a transmitter,” the announcement said. This test broadcast featured a live camera feed with real-time IP transmissions from the SBS network studio in Mokdong to the broadcaster’s Gwanak Mountain transmitter. The IP signals transmitted over the air on Channel 53 were then received using a simple antenna and decoded in Ultra HD by an LG ATSC 3.0 receiver, it said. The success of the trial “highlights the potential for Korea’s launch of terrestrial UHD TV commercial services using ATSC 3.0 in February 2017,” it said. "And the fact that Korean companies are playing such an important role in ATSC 3.0 provides a good opportunity for Korean equipment manufacturers to advance in the U.S. market.”
The member stations of America's Public Television Stations -- changing its name from the Association of Public Television Stations -- voted at an APTS meeting Monday to "commit in principle" to allocating some of their spectrum to first responders as part of FirstNet. The vote to change the organization's name took place at the same summit, along with remarks by NAB CEO Gordon Smith and a panel discussion on the incentive auction by FCC staff. Unlike the name change vote, the vote on committing spectrum to FirstNet received considerable pushback from member station representatives at the event, and in response, the language of that commitment was changed to clarify that it isn't binding. "It was a really good discussion that clarified what we're committing to," said APTS CEO Patrick Butler in an interview.
The U.S. is still attempting to develop more-modern early warning systems for natural disasters -- such as earthquakes -- that use new technologies to reach mobile devices and connected devices within the IoT, experts said Tuesday during a White House summit on earthquake resilience. Panelists were optimistic about the pace of innovation on early warning, and said it's important to rethink the warning process to reach more individuals through mobile technologies, as opposed to traditional radio and TV early alerts.
With the “new capabilities” of ATSC 3.0, terrestrial broadcasting “is poised to become an essential part of the next-generation content delivery network,” ATSC President Mark Richer said in the February issue of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. “By leveraging broadcasters’ highly efficient one-to-many architecture and Internet protocol transmission, ATSC 3.0 will enable new over-the-air services such as 4K and HDR, immersive audio and targeted advertising, mobile TV and advanced emergency alerting.” CES “previewed how ATSC 3.0 will usher in the future of broadcast" TV, he said. At the NAB Show in April, “we expect to see real-world demonstrations of even more ATSC 3.0 capabilities,” he said. “With the lion’s share of the standard completed and remaining items, like audio and interactivity, wrapping up in the months ahead, we’re on target to finalize the entire suite of ATSC 3.0 standards for next-gen broadcasting this year.”