FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler again pressed for action on public safety communications, during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing Thursday. He promised many updates on the commission’s broadband and spectrum efforts, noting items to come up in the final months of the Obama administration. "Our work is far from done," Wheeler told senators.
Correction: What NAB CEO Gordon Smith said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler told him is that the agency would take up ATSC 3.0 once it finished some other ongoing proceedings (see 1609130043), (see 1609070065).
The FCC should “promptly” begin a rulemaking on approving ATSC 3.0, said NAB officials and America's Public Television Stations CEO Patrick Butler in meetings with aides to all regular FCC commissioners Thursday, according to an ex parte filing posted Tuesday in docket 16-142. “Broadcasters representing hundreds of stations support Commission approval of broadcasters’ voluntary use of the new standard.” In comments on a petition requesting approval for the new standard, NAB and numerous broadcast filers asked for the NPRM to be issued in October.
Cadence Design Systems claims it has the industry’s first SoC designs approved for use with Dolby AC-4 decoders, the chipmaker said in a Monday announcement. AC-4 decoders will be “critical” for next-generation TV and set-top applications, including those for ATSC 3.0, the company said. In a separate announcement Monday, Cadence also said it's offering immediate availability of an MPEG-H audio decoder for ATSC 3.0 and other global next-gen broadcast systems. MPEG-H Audio “is a future broadcast standard and is expected to be one of the key audio technologies adopted worldwide for new TVs,” Cadence said. Working in “close collaboration” with Fraunhofer, a developer of MPEG-H with Qualcomm and Technicolor, Cadence is first to market with an implementation for a “licensable” MPEG-H digital signal processor, it said. ATSC by year-end “likely” will recommend adoption of AC-4 as the ATSC 3.0 audio codec for North America and MPEG-H for South Korea, ATSC officials told us at the NAB Show (see 1604180080).
ATSC members, in balloting completed Wednesday, approved elevating ATSC 3.0's physical layer transmission system (document A/322) to the status of a final standard, ATSC said in a Thursday announcement. “While other ingredients of the ATSC 3.0 standard are still in the final stages of standardization, the approval of the over-the-air transmission system is a foundation for the future,” said ATSC President Mark Richer. ATSC 3.0's framers are “delivering” on the timetable published “early in the process” to finish work on the “complete” ATSC 3.0 standard by the first quarter of 2017, Richer said Thursday in the September issue of The Standard, ATSC’s monthly newsletter. But “as we saw with ATSC 1.0, broadcasting standards are never totally done,” he said. “Great standards continue to evolve with enhancements, modifications and adjustments. Standards development is an ongoing organic process that continues, and the ATSC board already is looking beyond ATSC 3.0.”
The FCC could take up a proceeding on approving ATSC 3.0 before the end of 2016, NAB CEO Gordon Smith said at NAB's Broadcast Innovations event Wednesday. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler told Smith the new standard would become a priority for the commission after "a few things" are taken off the FCC's agenda, Smith said. If a new standard is approved in 2016, broadcasters could be transmitting in the new standard by summer 2017, Smith said. ATSC 3.0 would allow broadcasters to offer better visuals and audio, such as UltraHD, said NBCUniversal Senior Vice President-Advanced Technology Glenn Reitmeier on a panel. Cable and satellite providers don't require regulatory approval to offer services like UltraHD, so it's important for broadcasters to have the new standard approved, Reitmeier said.
Broadcasters that adopt ATSC 3.0 will need to decide how best to serve both high-dynamic-range streams to HDR TVs and standard-dynamic-range streams “to legacy TVs over the ATSC 3.0 environment,” but after the FCC incentive auction won’t have “the ability to simulcast or use two-layer delivery systems to light up SDR and HDR screens simultaneously.” So said a new white paper, "HDR over ATSC 3.0: A Technology Impact Analysis for Broadcast Industry," co-authored by Alan Stein, Technicolor vice president-R&D, and Gérard Faria, chief technology officer at broadcast-equipment supplier TeamCast.
Three months before a presidential election that could signal the end of his time in the driver’s seat, has Chairman Tom Wheeler’s FCC done what he said it would when he took office? Based on interviews with FCC officials, pay-TV executives and communications attorneys of many stripes, the answer is, “Mostly.”
ATSC 3.0 will allow broadcasters to “datacast," which will create opportunities for public TV stations, said America's Public Television Stations in an ex parte filing posted Thursday in FCC docket 16-142. “Next Gen datacasting will allow Public Television to deliver encrypted and targetable IP data, including video and other large files, and thereby provide a wireless IP delivery network that is natively multicast and not subject to congestion or delay, like the television signals carrying it,” APTS said. “Public Television is eager to embrace the non-broadcast datacasting opportunities that Next Gen presents to enhance the public services we offer.” ATSC 3.0 would allow noncommercial stations to support FirstNet and first responders, send educational materials to schools, and perform a “C-SPAN-like” service for state legislative proceedings, the association said. The service also could present a nonbroadcast revenue opportunity for public stations by allowing them to provide datacast services to local businesses, it said.
“Timing of availability” of ATSC 3.0 receivers will depend primarily on how quickly the FCC moves to authorize use of 3.0's physical transmission layer, America’s Public TV Stations, CTA and NAB told the FCC in Aug. 2 meetings with members of the Media Bureau, Office of Engineering and Technology and International Bureau, NAB said in a joint ex parte filing Thursday in docket 16-142. The associations want the FCC to launch a rulemaking on the transition by Oct. 1, they told the commission in reply comments in late June (see 1606280068). Consumer equipment manufacturers are unlikely to begin building ATSC 3.0 receivers into their products until the FCC “allows the voluntary use of the standard and there is something for those receivers to receive,” the ex parte filing said. Attendees included Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake, CTA Senior Vice President-Research and Standards Brian Markwalter, APTS CEO Patrick Butler and NAB officials including General Counsel Rick Kaplan. ATSC 3.0 receiver costs "will fall over time as the standard becomes more widely used and consumer demand spurs broader manufacture of Next Generation TV receivers,” said NAB. CTIA’s concerns are “unfounded” about the potential for ATSC 3.0 to interfere with wireless operations in the 600 MHz band, the groups told the commission. “CTIA supports the broadcast industry’s efforts to evolve, as long as it does not delay or disrupt the use of new 600 MHz licenses purchased at auction,” Scott Bergmann, vice president-regulatory affairs, emailed us Monday through a spokeswoman. CTIA used the identical language in its June 27 reply comments to summarize its position on ATSC 3.0. Further testing of the interference potential between wireless LTE and ATSC 3.0 “is unlikely to provide useful results,” APTS, CTA and NAB told the FCC. “There is no technical reason to believe that ATSC 3.0 creates a higher risk of potential inter-service interference” than the existing ATSC 1.0 service, they said.