A dozen of the largest TV station groups said they will form a joint venture to offer a national mobile content service using the ATSC Mobile DTV standard. Belo, Cox, E.W. Scripps, Fox, Gannett, Hearst, Ion, Media General, Meredith, NBC, Post-Newsweek and Raycom are in the group. All except Ion, Fox and NBC said they had formed the Pearl Mobile DTV company to act on their behalf in the venture. All the stations in the joint venture will contribute spectrum, content, marketing resources and cash, the participants said. “The venture is designed to complement the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) National Broadband Initiative by giving consumers mobile access to video content while reducing congestion of the nation’s wireless broadband infrastructure,” they said. The venture is the first step toward forming cross-industry and company partnerships that will get additional mobile programming to viewers, said Jack Abernethy, Fox TV Stations’ CEO. The participants said they will announce a management team to add programming, spectrum and distribution partners.
A consumer showcase of mobile DTV in Washington will begin May 3, the Open Mobile Video Coalition said Monday. Stations in the market have been broadcasting for weeks, and relatives and friends of employees of group members have been testing devices, but OMVC will begin recruiting consumers next week, said Executive Director Anne Schelle. The showcase will feature a mix of broadcast and cable programming, said Brandon Burgess, Ion Media’s CEO and the coalition’s chairman. “We're going to get some sober feedback about what works and what doesn’t work."
LAS VEGAS -- Most people who viewed 3D telecasts or highlight reels of Masters golf came away so impressed that they think the jump to 3D from HD will “be a bigger transition than it was from SD to HD,” said Dan Holden, chief scientist at the Comcast Media Center in Centennial, Colo. At the NAB Show’s Broadcast Engineering Conference on Saturday, he said Comcast plans to deliver 3D content in an “over-under” format at half the resolution per eye of full HD, which won’t require adding bandwidth. He thinks most other cable companies will do the same, he said.
Envivio said it introduced a mobile DTV encoder and transcoder system. The 4Caster C42 for mobile broadcasting supports the ATSC mobile DTV standard and the DVB-H, DVB-SH, CMMB and HTTP streaming formats, the company said. “Two critical and tightly-related factors will establish the success of mobile TV broadcasting: The efficiency with which we can fit mobile TV within the available bandwidth and the quality of the experience we can deliver,” said Envivio CEO Julien Signes.
Three dozen-plus engineers attended the second ATSC Mobile DTV interoperability event at CEA to test new portable TV equipment, CEA said. That was a bigger crowd than attended the first such event in December, it said.
Distributed Transmission System technology has become highly politicized since the CTIA and CEA suggested that it could be used to reclaim some of the spectrum used in the TV band, industry executives and engineers said. The technology, also known as a single frequency network, lets stations use multiple synchronized transmitters to supplement the one on their main tower. It was approved by the FCC in the lead-up to the analog cutoff. Broadcast executives have panned the technology and the criticism is growing. Now a group of engineers is setting out to prove that the DTS won’t work. The CTIA-CEA proposal “did not fully understand the application, and that is what has gotten some of the broadcasters’ backs raised over this whole thing,” said Jay Adrick, vice president of broadcast technology for Harris, which sells some equipment for DTS.
“Broadcast consolidation and technical flexibility will mitigate [the] risk of future mobile broadband spectrum shortages,” said a LIN TV presentation to the FCC. TV stations should be allowed to program simultaneously using multiple standards such as ATSC, LTE and Wi-MAX to “reach [a] wide variety of devices,” it said (http://xrl.us/bgxgo5). “Broadcast technical rules should mimic the ‘liberal use’ policy applicable to wireless services” and allow any technical standard or service architecture that meet interference protection and public interest rules, LIN said. CEO Vincent Sadusky met last week with Commissioner Robert McDowell, Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake, Office of Strategic Planning Chief Paul de Sa and Blair Levin, head of the commission’s broadband initiative, said ex parte filings Tuesday.
ATSC, CEA, the Open Mobile Video Coalition and the NAB said they'll sponsor a Mobile DTV Marketplace at the NAB Show in April. The event will showcase Mobile DTV consumer products.
ATSC committees are continuing work on mobile DTV technology that broadcasters will be showcasing in Washington this spring, executives said at an ATSC seminar Wednesday. Though ATSC adopted the standard for mobile DTV broadcasts in October, certain pieces of the technology were left out of that process in order to speed it, said Sterling Davis, vice president of technology for Cox Media Group.
A single-frequency network proposal that CEA and CTIA say will save spectrum was panned by the five TV industry officials who responded to our survey about whether switching to a low-power model using more and smaller antennas is practical. They said the SFN distributed transmission system (DTS) sought by the cellular and consumer electronics industries to free up radio waves for wireless broadband (CD Dec 24 p1) is largely untested. DTS has primarily been used by individual broadcasters to fill in coverage areas after they've lost part of their signal contour from the DTV transition. Broadcasters also haven’t embraced a newer idea of using multi-frequency networks (CD Jan 27 p3).