Coherent Logix and Sinclair's One Media got FCC special temporary authority to operate an experimental facility that will use the base elements of the new ATSC 3.0 standard, One Media said in a news release Thursday. The facility will implement a single frequency network (SFN) using the new standard on channel 43 in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore markets, it said: “The test is designed to provide real-time assessments of quality of service using the new Internet Protocol-based standard currently being reviewed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee.” The experiment is designed to prove new capabilities of broadcasting TV under ATSC 3.0, such as being able to program the same channel in adjacent markets, One Media said. “The SFN will permit broadcasters to 'zone' programming and advertising to discrete parts of a station's market using the same channel,” it said. "We now have a place to innovate, and together with our Memorandum of Understanding partners, Samsung and Pearl TV, we can bring powerful business ideas into practical demonstrations of opportunities to monetize all of our core assets,” said Sinclair Vice President-Advanced Technology Mark Aitken. The experiment's location on the “congested” East Coast helps test the new standard's capabilities under real-world conditions, One Media said. “Our demonstration should provide regulators the evidence they need to expedite these dramatic and competitive service improvements," said One Media Executive Vice President-Strategic and Legal Affairs Jerald Fritz.
Balloting began this week on the “main elements” that will compose ATSC 3.0's physical transmission system, ATSC President Mark Richer said Wednesday in ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. If approved, those elements will be elevated to the status of a candidate standard, he said. That's significant because it will provide “a strong foundation for the industry to begin considering the launch of next-generation television broadcasting,” and will help “kickstart manufacturers to begin developing prototype ATSC 3.0 equipment,” he said. Within a month, ATSC will have a complete physical layer that manufacturers can start building to, ATSC insiders told us. The expectation is that perhaps as early as CES in January, the industry will have prototype physical devices for ATSC 3.0's transmission system available to the market, they said. ATSC will make an announcement when the ballot is voted and it’s expected that the vote on the system will pass because the companies that were involved in harmonizing ideas around a physical transmission system agreed the industry now has something that’s ready to be built, they said. CEA’s R4WG18 working group created a “gap analysis” of current and proposed ATSC 3.0 video formats for over-the-air broadcast and broadband streaming video “use cases,” said Brian Markwalter, CEA senior vice president-research and standards, in the same issue of the newsletter. From that gap analysis, R4WG18 recently reached consensus “on a lower limit for video formats that should be supported by ATSC 3.0 receivers, primarily fixed, larger screen devices, for the OTA use case,” he said, referring to over-the-air broadcasts. “With some yet-to-be-determined details, an initial list of broadband video formats has also been proposed.” The first section of the recommended practice will focus on recommended video formats for “baseline” and “advanced” fixed TVs, he said. “The final document is expected to address the audio, runtime and other aspects of both baseline and advanced ATSC 3.0 receivers.” R4WG18 hopes to complete the video formats list and give CEA’s R4 video systems committee a “progress report” at face-to-face meetings this month, he said.
That MPEG-H is an “open standard” is one reason Sinclair endorses MPEG-H as the single audio codec for ATSC 3.0, Mark Aitken, vice president-advanced technology, told us. “We need to make a decision in the context of a standard that will evolve, should evolve and has been designed to evolve,” he said of MPEG-H. The MPEG-H Audio Alliance of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor is vying against Dolby AC-4 for selection as ATSC 3.0's mandatory audio codec, though ATSC hasn’t ruled out choosing multiple codecs (see 1501220023).
Though people generally have called ATSC 3.0 the next-generation broadcast TV standard, it actually will be a suite of about 20 standards, said Rich Chernock, chairman of ATSC Technology Group 3, the committee that's supervising ATSC 3.0 standards development, in a blog post. “When considering what the architecture for the ATSC 3.0 documents will be, think of standards like toolboxes,” said Chernock, chief science officer at Triveni Digital. “When you’re faced with a plumbing task, your ability to reach into a box containing plumber’s tools only is quite helpful, as opposed to a box containing a jumble of electrical, woodworking and plumbing tools.” ATSC 3.0 specs will cover “an entire next-generation broadcasting system, from the RF transmission through presentation to the viewer or listener and all the necessary items in between,” Chernock said. “All told, the documentation for ATSC 3.0 will easily be in excess of 1,000 pages. As you might imagine, a single monolithic document of this size would be very difficult to create, to manage and especially to read. This is one of the reasons it makes sense to have a suite of standards, covering different aspects of the overall ATSC 3.0 system.”
Friday’s deadline passed for ATSC’s S34-2 ad hoc group to deliver a recommended ATSC 3.0 audio codec to its parent S34 subcommittee, but with no announcement on a winning system. A statement from ATSC President Mark Richer suggested an announcement on the winning codec might be a distance off. “ATSC will announce elements of ATSC 3.0 as they are approved for Candidate Standard status by ATSC’s Technology Group 3,” Richer emailed us Friday, in reference to the technology group chaired by Triveni Digital Chief Science Officer Rich Chernock that's overseeing all ATSC 3.0 standardization work. “In the case of audio,” Richer said, “the work of a subcommittee continues and there is nothing yet to announce.” Dolby AC-4 and the MPEG-H audio alliance of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor are the two proponents vying to be chosen as the ATSC 3.0 audio system (see 1508110027).
The broadcast TV industry doesn’t have to guess whether it’s moving toward consolidation. With last week's release of the FCC incentive auction procedures public notice, TV licensees even have a firm timeline for how it's going to happen. While it’s not clear where participation will fall on the continuum between the FCC’s largest Greenhill auction book projections and the most gloomy broadcaster predictions, most industry observers said some stations will be going dark and selling their spectrum and some portion of existing low-power TV (LPTV) and translators could be displaced. Some said that may hurt diversity -- and consumers' choice of programming available for free for those owning a TV and over-air antenna.
A House Republican warned low-power TV (LPTV) broadcasters and translators that other “powerful” forces are seeking their spectrum and will exert intense lobbying power in Washington to acquire it. House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., listened to multiple stakeholders outlining anxieties about the FCC’s broadcast TV incentive auction, in a discussion lasting more than an hour in his home district.
Whether ATSC 3.0's framers pick a single mandatory audio codec for the next-generation broadcast standard or multiple voluntary audio codecs is one of the mysteries that will be solved when the imminent choice of an ATSC 3.0 audio system is made public, possibly within days. ATSC has ruled out combining the ingredients of competing audio systems into a unified ATSC 3.0 codec, but has left the door open on choosing multiple codecs.
Sinclair’s memorandum of understanding with Samsung and Pearl TV to support the speedy commercial implementation of ATSC 3.0 (see 1506170046) signals “to the broadcast industry and to the world at large and the federal government that the broadcast industry is about ready to move” to the next-generation broadcast platform, Sinclair CEO David Smith said on a Wednesday earnings call. Samsung, “as the largest manufacturer in the world, is clearly now fully engaged in the process of preparing prototype products” for ATSC 3.0 “that will be likely on demonstration” at the January CES and April’s NAB Show, “in all probability,” said Smith, whose company has been a strong advocate of commercializing ATSC 3.0 sooner rather than later. Through the MOU, “I think when you look at what we're all going to be doing together, we're going to be demonstrating over the next three to five months some incredible capability to the technology,” he said. ATSC 3.0 is “really now on what I would say is a very fast track to being adopted by the industry,” Smith said. “And once that's done, then we'll go to the FCC and we'll say, it's time to go and we'll go through that process. And then we'll start to prepare for a transition.”
TP Vision, which makes and markets Philips-brand TVs in most regions of the world outside North America, Tuesday became the third TV maker to announce a collaboration with Dolby Labs to promote the adoption of the AC-4 audio codec. Dolby announced similar collaborations last month with Sony and Vizio. Dolby expects consumer TVs with AC-4 audio built in to become available in 2017, it said. AC-4 is vying against the MPEG-H consortium of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor to be chosen as the audio codec for the next-gen ATSC 3.0, and a decision on that selection is expected within the next two weeks (see 1507240030). AC-4 was published last year as an international spec at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (see 1501210023), and is available in a toolkit for use with European-based DVB broadcast systems, Dolby said.