LAS VEGAS -- Broadcast equipment supplier Thomson Video is using the NAB Show this week to showcase its “first implementation” of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec that the Motion Picture Experts Group approved in late January, Jean Macher, Thomson’s marketing director for the Americas, told us Monday at his company’s booth. “We don’t have it running live yet, but it’s coming very soon, probably in June,” Macher said.
LAS VEGAS -- Global interoperability and spectrum efficiency need to be the biggest cornerstones of any next-generation broadcast system if terrestrial broadcasters want to retake valuable competitive ground lost to wireless carriers, streaming services and other content-delivery rivals, various speakers said Sunday at the NAB Show’s Broadcast Engineering Conference. Though terrestrial Ultra HD and 3D TV are on the list of desired features of the next-gen system, they're nowhere as high on the priority scale as other attributes like mobility or interactivity, or so it appeared from the many speakers who gave presentations at the conference.
The Advanced Television Systems Committee wants proposals by Aug. 23 for the “physical layer” of its next-gen ATSC 3.0 broadcast TV standard, the ATSC said Tuesday. ATSC 3.0 figures prominently on the agenda of the Broadcast Engineering conference of the NAB Show opening April 6 in Las Vegas. ATSC 3.0’s physical layer includes its core modulation and coding technologies, ATSC said. A key goal of the ATSC 3.0 physical layer will be to provide TV service to fixed and mobile devices, ATSC said. “Spectrum efficiency and robust service will be key areas of evaluation,” it said. Increased data rates to support terrestrial Ultra HD delivery and other services “will be considered,” but not necessarily required, it said. “Robustness of service for devices operating within the ATSC 3.0 service area should exceed that of current ATSC systems and that of cell phone and other wireless devices.” ATSC will give “consideration” to technologies and proposals “that enable a smooth transition from existing systems” for broadcasters and consumers, it said. While initial responses to ATSC’s call for proposals are due Aug. 23, “detailed technical descriptions” of those proposals are due Sept. 27, ATSC said.
The Advanced Television Systems Committee approved the specifications for a mobile emergency alert system to be delivered using the ATSC A/153 Mobile Digital TV standard. The M-EAS enhancements to the standard will provide capabilities for delivering multimedia alerts “to mobile DTV-equipped cellphones, tablets, laptops, netbooks and in-car navigation systems,” ATSC said in a press release (http://bit.ly/YIqeD3). Using mobile DTV for emergency alerting “requires no additional spectrum and is an additional use of existing TV transmitters and towers,” it said. M-EAS is backwards compatible and will not affect the performance of mobile TV products already in consumer hands, it said. Partners in the M-EAS effort said that completion of the standardization will lead to the implementation of the system and commercialization of the equipment (CD Feb 26 p8).
Partners in the mobile emergency alert system effort are nearing the end of the technology standardization process and moving toward commercialization of the equipment and implementation of the system, said Harris Broadcast, Mobile500 Alliance and other partners. Commercial and noncommercial broadcasters have demonstrated the technology and are planning to take it up, they said. The effort began as a pilot project headed by PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting aimed at distributing emergency alerts to the public using video, text messages and other media (CD June 6 p11). Mobile EAS uses the mobile DTV equipment infrastructure.
The Advanced TV Systems Committee (ATSC) set up new implementation teams for bringing ATSC 2.0 and Mobile-EAS to market, it said. Cox Media’s David Siegler will chair the ATSC 2.0 team while Harris’s Jay Adrick will chair the Mobile-EAS team. The new implementation teams “underscores our progress and will help drive next-generation technologies toward marketplace introduction,” said Mark Richer, ATSC’s president.
ATSC 2.0 will emerge as a new candidate broadcast standard early this year with a goal of deploying it in CE products by year-end, Richard Chernock, chairman of the ATSC technology and standards group, told us. The candidate standard designation is a precursor to formal implementation of ATSC 2.0, he said.
ESPN has no visible roadmap for beaming live sports in native 4K, except possibly to use 4K technology for special viewing enhancements on its regular HD programming, executives at the network told Consumer Electronics Daily.
Small and medium multichannel video programming distributors requested streamlined financial hardship waivers of the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act rules for one year. The requests were filed in docket 11-93. Sweetwater Cable Television in Wyoming said it needs the waiver “to avoid the financial hardship that would otherwise be imposed if it were required to obtain sooner the necessary upgraded ad insertion equipment and purchase audio monitoring equipment” (http://xrl.us/bnqoes). Wire Tele-View Corp. in Pottsville, Pa., also requested a waiver (http://xrl.us/bnqodz), attributing its financial hardship to the “700 percent increase in non-regulated retransmission fees from local off-air networks” and the state of the economy in Schuylkill County, Pa. Agape Church in Little Rock, Ark., requested waivers for its three small broadcast stations. Due to legacy analog equipment, the stations “do not have current capabilities to send audio metadata to the ATSC encoders,” it said (http://xrl.us/bnqofg). The American Cable Association supports NCTA’s petition for reconsideration on implementation of the CALM Act, it said in comments in the same docket (http://xrl.us/bnqodi). In the petition filed this year, NCTA urged the FCC to limit the rules to commercial ads, clarify that a cable operator won’t be held liable when it has notified a network of its non-compliance and not to “prohibit cable operators from contacting program networks when performing spot checks” (http://xrl.us/bnoike). The commission finds no policy or legal reason to exempt commercial advertisements promoting TV programming, or promos, from the scope of its rules, ACA said. The commission should reverse its position “and grant NCTA’s request to exclude promos from being covered by the statute’s requirements,” it said. The recommended practice should only require MVPDs that implemented AC-3 technology “to pass through without alteration the dialnorm metadata in commercial advertisements inserted upstream by programmers.” MVPDs should be able to contact programmers while conducting spot checks, ACA said.
Progress in the rollout by two broadcaster technology coalitions of mobile DTV, now commercially available to about half of Americans, was cited by senior House Communications Subcommittee members of both parties. Speaking at a Capitol Hill mobile DTV and mobile emergency alert system (M-EAS) demo Thursday, they said those new technologies’ use of spectrum already allocated to broadcasters helps meet increasing consumer demand for streaming video. Lawmakers recognized consumption of mobile DTV -- TV stations sending live shows to portable devices and as of this summer one model of Samsung cellphone on MetroPCS (CD Aug 10 p10) -- doesn’t use wireless spectrum or incur data consumption charges to cellphone subscribers.