When it comes to deployment of the next-gen ATSC 3.0 broadcast system, "I think there’s going to be a good business proposition and a good financial proposition for 4K," Dave Siegler, vice president-technical operations at Cox, told us at NAB's Content and Communications World conference in New York Wednesday. Emphasizing that he was speaking in the context of Cox’s broadcast as well as its cable interests, Siegler said: "So much of it comes into implementation."
There has been "progress" and "a lot of discussion" on high dynamic range and wide color gamut within the ATSC’s S34-1 ad hoc group assigned to write specs for the video component of the next-gen ATSC 3.0 broadcast system, said ATSC President Mark Richer in an interview. "I don’t believe there are any final decisions" on HDR and wide color gamut, Richer said. "But these are areas that the whole industry has been looking at." The "production community" has been looking at HDR and wide color gamut, as have standards groups like the ITU and the Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers as well as CE manufacturers, he said. "There’s also other work around the world," such as at the European Broadcasting Union, "where they’re taking a look at the ramifications," he said. "The one thing I can say -- and this is not specific to ATSC -- but the industry is coming to the realization that it isn’t just about more pixels, it’s about the quality of those pixels and how we can make them better. So there’s real interest in those things, and exactly where we’re going to end up in ATSC 3.0, I really can’t say yet. But we certainly will address the issue, and we’re communicating with the other standards organizations to make sure what we’re doing complements what they’re doing."
As framers of the ATSC 3.0 next-gen broadcast system march toward their self-imposed deadline of completing work on a "candidate standard" by the end of 2015, the group's board formed an "ad hoc group" to begin studying the various "scenarios" under which ATSC 3.0 might be introduced commercially to the viewing public later in the decade, possibly as soon as 2017. The ad hoc group, under the chairmanship of Sam Matheny, NAB chief technology officer, is "exploratory in nature, trying to take a look at what the possibilities are, and what some of the ramifications of the different possibilities are," said ATSC President Mark Richer in an interview.
Meredith Corp. asked the FCC to direct PMCM TV to stop using Virtual Channel 3.10 for broadcast operations of WJLP-TV Middletown Township, New Jersey. WJLP’s unilateral arrogation of that channel openly defies the Media Bureau’s order assigning Virtual Channel 33 to WJLP, Meredith Corp. said in a letter posted in docket 14-150. Meredith’s complaint that its virtual channel is being modified or commandeered “is plainly erroneous,” PMCM said in reply comments. Its virtual channel remains exactly as it has always been, it said. It loses nothing by PMCM’s use of Virtual Channel 3.10, nor does Meredith have any claim to all minor channels associated with major Channel 3 “since the ATSC A/65 protocols explicitly envision coincident use of major channels by independent licensees,” it said. WJLP hasn’t received a single complaint from viewers about confusion, “and we must assume that CBS and Meredith have been similarly free from complaints or we would surely have heard about it,” it said.
Quincy Broadcast Group’s WKOW Madison, Wisconsin, planned to go off the air in the wee hours of Wednesday morning to accommodate the second round of "real-world broadcast field testing" of "Futurecast," the technology developed by LG, its Zenith research and development labs and GatesAir. Futurecast is proposed as the physical layer for the next-gen Advanced Television Systems Committee 3.0 broadcast system.
Ion, Meredith Corp. and Turner Broadcasting oppose broadcaster PMCM’s plan to occupy the same program and system information protocol (PSIP) channel as Meredith‘s WFSB Hartford, Connecticut, while using a virtual channel number that PMCM’s opponents say should be associated with WFSB (see 1409160043). WFSB uses RF Channel 33, while PMCM’s WJLP Middletown, New Jersey, uses RF 3. The stations’ signals overlap, and WJLP is broadcasting on virtual channel 3.10, while WFSB has long used channel 3.1 and its associated subchannels, Meredith said in comments on its request for a declaratory ruling in FCC docket 14-150 (http://bit.ly/ZLWbCz). Though PMCM has the New Jersey Broadcasters Association's support (http://bit.ly/1FsKa5B) and said in its own comments that it has found hundreds of situations in which overlapping stations occupy the same PSIP, Meredith said the request is without precedent. PMCM hasn’t shown any examples where the FCC “subdivided a major channel number to assign separate chunks of the channel to separately owned stations for concurrent use in the same area," Meredith said.
"Futurecast,” the technology that LG, Zenith Labs and GatesAir submitted to the Advanced TV Systems Committee as their proposal for the “guts” of the next-gen ATSC 3.0 broadcast system (CD April 9 p15), will be showcased in a demonstration in the wee hours of Oct. 22 in Madison, Wisconsin, at Quincy Broadcasting’s WKOW, Futurecast’s backers said Friday. WKOW will transmit Futurecast-modulated advanced TV signals to specially designed receivers, but Futurecast transmissions can’t be received by current DTV products, and the station will be able to transmit Futurecast only from 1 to 4 a.m. that day, they said. As one of the proposed ATSC 3.0 physical layer technologies, Futurecast’s “flexible parameters allow broadcasters to mix diverse services within a single RF channel with maximum efficiency,” the backers said. Next-gen broadcasting services enabled by Futurecast “range from deep indoor handheld reception to high-speed mobile reception to Ultra HDTV for the ultimate home entertainment experience, all within a single 6 MHz TV channel,” they said.
A TV station that won a rare FCC OK to move cross-country after a court ordered it to (CD Dec 17/12 p4) now wants to be what agency and industry officials said in interviews Monday would be a technological first for broadcasting. PMCM’s KVNV Middletown, New Jersey, wants to operate on the same main program and system information protocol (PSIP) channel as Meredith Corp.’s longtime WFSB Hartford, while each would have different virtual PSIP subchannels. Meredith opposed KVNV, which used to be licensed to Ely, Nevada, having the same PSIP as WFSB when the New Jersey station begins broadcasting from the new location. So, PMCM came up with an alternative idea that has never been presented before in the memories of TV station lawyers we spoke to or FCC officials.
The “Grand Alliance” of “fierce competitors” that worked together to develop what became the North American DTV standard was “a great adventure in cooperation and collaboration,” said Zenith Vice President Wayne Luplow according to the written text of a keynote he gave Tuesday at the IEEE’s International Conference on Consumer Electronics in Berlin. “When you work in an arena where there’s no definitive decision-making process, you conclude that cooperation is the only way you're going to get there,” Luplow said. “It’s a continual give-and-take -- like a marriage -- otherwise, you don’t get anywhere!” When the FCC ratified the Grand Alliance system on Christmas Eve 1996, it was “a profound decision that still ripples throughout our industry,” he said. “On reflection about the Grand Alliance experience, I think there are important lessons to be learned. Listen to what your in-house and out-of-house colleagues are doing. Look for win-win solutions. You can compete forever and end up with nothing that consumers and industry will embrace. It doesn’t have to be a battle to the death, as it was with the Beta and VHS recording wars in which, arguably, the better technology, with the better picture quality, lost. But the consumer-accepted system won out -- the system that could record two hours on one tape.” The next-gen ATSC 3.0 system “will bring new flexibility and new opportunities for over-the-air TV stations,” Luplow said. “Mobility will continue to grow in importance,” and Internet connectivity “is already a standard feature in most big-screen TV sets, merging the immediacy of live TV with the deep catalog of streamed content and the information-rich Internet,” he said. “But I also believe that we must have patience. This stuff takes time. After all, many of our technology transitions have ended up in the dust-bin of history. Transitional waters are sometimes littered with technologies that get thrown overboard. Remember: 8 Track tape? AM Stereo radio? The cassette and the laserdisc?"
It’s an entity that sports “Diamond,” “Platinum” and “Gold” elite membership tiers, but it’s not the Delta SkyMiles Medallion program. According to the group’s bylaws, it’s the Open Interconnect Consortium. Charter members Atmel, Broadcom, Dell, Intel, Samsung and Wind River formed it last month to promote interoperability among the billions of connected devices expected to come online by 2020 (CD July 9 p17).