"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).
A new S35 specialist group was formed at the ATSC to model and evaluate the “ecosystem” in which ATSC 3.0 systems will be deployed, ATSC said Wednesday. S35 will probe “the various layers of content and data that will flow into and through ATSC 3.0 encoders and will be delivered to consumers through broadcast and other media,” said Merrill Weiss, the longtime DTV consultant and engineer who will chair the group. It plans a series of “Top-Down 3.0” meetings to create “block diagrams for the respective layers and examining their interactions with one another,” Weiss said. Sony Electronics in San Diego will host the first meetings Sept. 29-Oct. 1, he said. S35’s “output” will be of “keen interest” to the other ATSC specialist groups that are developing ATSC 3.0’s “actual technology,” he said. “Those groups need to understand the environment in which ATSC 3.0 will be applied.” S35 “will consider the flow of content from acquisition through post production, distribution, emission, and redistribution,” ATSC said. It will examine all types of content and functionality “impacting on a fully operational ATSC 3.0 broadcast system,” it said.
At least two of the big three broadcasters in South Korea, one of the few major markets outside North America to use the ATSC DTV broadcasting standard, “expressed their willingness to consider deploying ATSC 3.0 commercially” if the next-generation system is ready in time for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. That’s according to ATSC board member John Godfrey, Samsung Electronics America vice president-communications policy and regulatory affairs, who was part of an ATSC delegation that recently toured the facilities of the Seoul Broadcasting System and the Munhwa Broadcasting Corp. Representatives of SBS and MBC “told us that they are pushing ahead with Ultra HD terrestrial broadcast experiments using DVB-T2, but that’s only because it’s what’s available today,” ATSC’s monthly newsletter quoted Godfrey as saying in reference to Europe’s terrestrial DTV transmission system. SBS and MBC representatives “didn’t say they would definitely deploy ATSC 3.0, only that they would consider it,” Godfrey emphasized to us in an email. SBS and MBC representatives didn’t immediately comment. The ATSC delegation, Godfrey said, did not tour the facilities of the Korean Broadcasting System, which in presentations last fall described DVB-T2 as the best transmission system available today for 4K (CD Oct 2 p10). KBS has said it plans live 4K coverage of the 2014 Asian Games in Incheon, which open Sept. 19 for a 16-day run. In four years, KBS, like SBS and MBC, plan live 4K coverage of the Pyeongchang winter games, KBS has said. KBS and its terrestrial broadcast partners are targeting year-end 2015 for the official launch of commercial 4K broadcasts because “we have a sense of urgency about this,” it has said. Year-end 2015 also happens to be the time frame the ATSC has quoted for completing ATSC 3.0 as a “candidate standard” that then goes out for balloting among the ATSC membership. But ATSC has been vague in predicting the commercial or regulatory course that ATSC 3.0 will take after that. It has said it hopes ATSC 3.0 ultimately will be the basis of a single unified global DTV standard.
NAB hires Sam Matheny, ex-Capitol Broadcasting, as executive vice president-chief technology officer, after previous holder of that job, Kevin Gage, was hired by One Media, the Coherent Logix and Sinclair project to bring next-generation broadcast platform to market faster than ATSC 3.0 (CD June 24 p17) … FCC hires Bartees Cox, ex-Public Knowledge, as public affairs specialist, effective July 28 … AT&T Vice President-Federal Relations Peter Jacoby hired by UnitedHealth Group to run government affairs … New America Foundation hires Peter Singer, consultant and author with cybersecurity and other experience, as strategist and senior fellow, joining NAF’s Future of War project, effective in September … Front Porch Digital promotes Phil Jackson to chief strategy officer … Richard Hochhauser to retire from Rentrak board at company’s annual meeting Aug. 13; Patricia Gottesman, ex-Cablevision, nominated to replace him.
The NAB will go to court to prevent the coverage areas of its members from being reduced by the FCC’s TVStudy software “if and when that is necessary,” association President Gordon Smith told us Wednesday in an interview to be aired over the weekend on C-SPAN’s The Communicators. Along with the incentive auction, Smith discussed broadcasters’ win in the Aereo case (see separate report above), politics at the FCC and the commission’s ownership policies.
Returning to Kelley Drye is Mark Anderson, ex-office of Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., as senior adviser, Government Relations and Public Policy practice group, where he will work on issues including cybersecurity; also hired for that practice group is Scott McGee, ex-office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., as adviser … One Media, the Coherent Logix and Sinclair project to bring a next-generation broadcast platform to market faster than ATSC 3.0, hires Kevin Gage, ex-NAB, as executive vice president-chief technology officer.
The FCC issued an order Wednesday implementing procedural updates to the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act’s method for calculating the loudness of commercials (http://bit.ly/1mbhxgv). The changes, as expected (CD May 30 p16), are based on updates to the Advanced Television Systems Committee’s recommended practices, which updated the algorithm used to calculate loudness to account for broadcasts that had long periods of relative quiet to compensate for brief increases in volume, the order said. “It is our hope that these changes will result in a modest decrease in the perceived loudness of certain commercials,” the FCC said. Stations and pay TV providers will have to adhere to the new standards starting June 4, 2015, but are allowed to begin doing so early, the order said.