CEA President Gary Shapiro used a “super panel” on the future of TV at the ATSC Broadcast TV Conference Thursday to challenge NAB President Gordon Smith to declare that NAB plans to seek no “further delays or modifications” in the FCC incentive auction schedule. Smith responded that there wouldn’t be any delays, repeating what he said at the NAB Show that broadcasters want the auction to go forward.
ATSC 3.0's framers have “multiple degrees of video freedom” in designing the next-generation DTV system, Alan Stein, Technicolor vice president-technology, who chairs the “S34-1" ad hoc group on ATSC 3.0 video, told the ATSC 3.0 Boot Camp conference Wednesday in Washington. The framers have reached consensus on using HEVC’s “Main-10" profile at 8- and 10-bits and frame rates up to 60 frames per second, he said. But after nearly a year of evaluating high dynamic range (HDR), wide color gamut and high frame rates for ATSC 3.0, S34-1 members are still discussing them, with no consensus, Stein said.
Roughly a week before ATSC 3.0's framers unleash a full progress report on the next-gen DTV standard at their “Boot Camp” conference on Wednesday in Washington, ATSC Thursday said the “first ingredient” of ATSC 3.0's physical layer has reached the status of “candidate standard” following a month of balloting. The so-called “bootstrap signal” portion of the physical layer is designated “A/321 Part 1" and will be “important to the future evolution of ATSC 3.0,” ATSC said in an announcement. Other “core elements” of the physical layer, including its modulation and error correction systems, will be balloted for candidate status this summer, ATSC said. Balloting on each of ATSC 3.0's components typically will be a four-week process, ATSC has said. The bootstrap signal for ATSC 3.0 transmission will remain a candidate standard for nine months while prototype equipment is built and tested “in advance of balloting for the entire system,” ATSC said. “The bootstrap is a low-level signal that tells a receiver to decode and process wireless services multiplexed in a broadcast channel,” said ATSC President Mark Richer. “It’s designed to be a very robust signal and detectable even at low signal levels.” The bootstrap signal provides “a universal entry point into a broadcast waveform,” ATSC said. It uses a “fixed configuration” known to all receivers “and carries information to enable processing and decoding the wireless service associated with a detected bootstrap signal,” as well as a “flag” that indicates when an emergency alert is in effect, it said.
Balloting on the first component of ATSC 3.0's physical layer is set to close May 6, ATSC said Friday in The Standard, its monthly online newsletter. The first ballot from ATSC’s Technology Group 3 is to elevate the “working draft” of a “system discovering and signaling” document to a “candidate standard,” the newsletter said. This “important part” of the physical layer is called the “bootstrap” or “preamble,” and it provides “robust signaling and synchronization,” it said. Balloting on the document began April 8, ATSC 3.0's framers said at the NAB Show (see 1504130030), If approved, the document would be the first part of ATSC 3.0 that’s elevated to candidate standard status “and represents a major milestone of the process,” it said. “Additional documents describing the physical layer and other layers of the system are expected in the coming months.” Balloting on each of ATSC 3.0's components typically will be a four-week process, it said. As ATSC 3.0's component parts are adopted as standards, they will be numbered after the ATSC specialist groups where they originated, it said. Since the S32 specialist group is responsible for the physical layer, the first document from S32 will be numbered “A/321,” it said.
LAS VEGAS -- Apple has been the biggest challenge in broadcasters’ efforts to win more activations of FM chips in smartphones (see 1504120004) because “they hang their heart on being innovation leaders,” Paul Brenner, chief technology officer at Emmis Communications, the prime mover of the NextRadio FM smartphone app, told us Tuesday at the NAB Show.
LAS VEGAS -- NHK plans a Super Hi-Vision 8K broadcast test using “an actual satellite” during its annual Open House event May 28-31 in Tokyo, said Masayuki Sugawara, executive research engineer in NHK's Science and Technology Research Labs, at the NAB Show's Broadcast Engineering Conference Sunday.
LAS VEGAS -- LG, GatesAir and Zenith are using the NAB Show this week to showcase how their year-old Futurecast physical layer proposal for ATSC 3.0 has been expanded to encompass a “complete, end-to-end sort of a system,” said Wayne Luplow, vice president at LG’s Zenith research and development Lab in Lincolnshire, Illinois, Monday in a media briefing at the GatesAir booth. “We’ve gone beyond where we’ve been before,” Luplow said.
LAS VEGAS -- Apple is the biggest challenge in broadcasters’ efforts to win more activations of FM chips in smartphones, said Skip Pizzi, NAB senior director-new media technologies, Sunday at the NAB Show.
LAS VEGAS -- Questions abounded Monday about the DTS decision to abruptly withdraw its DTS:X object-based surround technology from the competition to pick the audio codec for the next-gen ATSC 3.0 broadcast system, despite assurances in a DTS statement that it wishes the ATSC 3.0 process well and will remain involved in its audio standards-setting activities.
LAS VEGAS -- Broadcasters need to move to the next-generation ATSC 3.0 in order to succeed after the incentive auction, NAB President Gordon Smith said in his keynote at NAB Show Monday. Since a successful incentive auction will leave 80 percent of current full-power stations and only 60 percent of the current broadcast spectrum, TV broadcasters have to learn to “do more with less,” Smith said. A move to ATSC 3.0 would allow them to do so, he told us after the speech. “There’s no question broadcasting will survive after the auction," but moving to ATSC 3.0 "will allow it to thrive,” Smith told us.