Though there’s still “a lot of work to do” to finish the next-gen ATSC 3.0 DTV broadcast standard, ATSC President Mark Richer is “confident” that “our standardization work is on track,” he said in the July issue of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard, published Tuesday.
Pay-TV technology supplier Motive Television developed what it’s calling the world’s first ATSC-format DVR for mobile devices. The new mobile DVR provides the ability to time-shift over-the-air programs on tablets and mobile devices, it said in a Thursday announcement. It works with the existing TabletTV app and TPod antenna that Motive developed jointly with Granite Broadcasting, it said. The DVR “uses an intuitive functionality and interface, similar to the functions consumers have used in the home for the past 20+ years,” it said. Users can schedule the DVR to record programs up to seven days in advance and then watch them for their personal use later, it said. TabletTV previously had a one-touch recording feature that permits pausing, playing and recording a current program, but the new DVR will extend that capability to recording future programs for later viewing, it said. Motive plans this month to introduce the DVR in a beta version to existing TabletTV users and will distribute the DVR to the larger “general market” in September, it said. Motive also later plans to license the DVR software to CE makers and app developers, it said.
Sinclair Broadcast is considering participating in the TV incentive auction, said CEO David Amy on a panel of broadcast executives at the SNL Kagan TV and Radio Finance Summit Thursday. “There are some markets where it could make sense,” such as designated market areas where Sinclair has duopolies and could sell spectrum while maintaining the same presence through channel sharing, Amy said. Amy's profession of interest in the auction was just 10 days after losing a court challenge along with NAB against the auction in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. NAB General Counsel Rick Kaplan conceded Thursday that the decision's language means future court challenges against the FCC aren't likely to succeed. Litigation “is not a major threat” to the auction happening on time, Kaplan said. The auction and a transition to ATSC 3.0 aren't likely to synchronize, he said.
Sinclair is “bullish on whatever allows us to bring consumers together with advertisers in the television environment,” Mark Aitken, vice president-advanced technology, told us on whether Sinclair’s ATSC 3.0 memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Samsung and Pearl TV, announced Wednesday, means his company is committed to broadcasting in Ultra HD.
Broadcasters deny wanting an incentive auction delay for the adoption of ATSC 3.0, but the Expanding Opportunities For Broadcasters Coalition, Public Knowledge, wireless carriers and several wireless trade organizations issued a joint statement against that possibility last week. They “strongly support" the planned first-quarter 2016 start of the incentive auction and oppose delaying the auction “in an attempt to synchronize" the post-auction repacking and the transition to ATSC 3.0,” the statement said.
The LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition will lobby Congress to hold an auction of low-power TV spectrum separate from the incentive auction, said Director Mike Gravino. Under the coalition's proposal, the federal government would purchase the LPTV spectrum now but not auction it off until after the incentive auction is completed. The promise of future gains from the sale of the LPTV spectrum could be used to justify adding more money to the incentive auction’s relocation fund, or to put off the incentive auction to allow the repacking to coincide with the adoption of ATSC 3.0.,Gravino said. “It’s a Christmas tree bill” that could be used to fix “everything wrong” with the incentive auction, and provide a future source of valuable spectrum, Gravino said. Gravino told us he had been scheduled to brief NAB on the proposal, but he said the meeting was canceled by the broadcast association after we contacted NAB for confirmation. An NAB spokesman said his association has no meetings scheduled with Gravino. In the group's Monday newsletter, it took aim at CEA CEO Gary Shapiro for not knowing some of the intricacies of LPTV. At an ATSC meeting last week, Gravino wrote, he had spoken with Shapiro about the "tax credit plan to free up spectrum and pay LPTV." Shapiro, "as intense as everyone says he is," "simply did not know the basic facts about LPTV, nor the auction process itself," wrote Gravino. "He certainly did not know about the potential impacts on LPTV from the auction, nor how LPTV can screw up the auction process. But there is a reason he is considered the toughest guy in the room when it comes to lobbying and TV. He listened very carefully to the distilled data I presented, was literally shocked by it, and asked my permission to quote me when he was on the panel." At the panel, Shapiro challenged NAB CEO Gordon Smith to agree that broadcasters wouldn't further try to delay the auction (see 1505140040). CEA had no comment Tuesday.
Center for Copyright Information hires Jim Kohlenberger, JK Strategies, as executive director, succeeding Jill Lesser, named senior adviser, and adds Stephen Balkam, Family Online Safety Institute, to advisory board ... Sony Electronics Senior Staff Engineer Luke Fay wins 2015 Bernard Lechner award for outstanding contributions to ATSC ... Lobbyist registration: Cyber Security and Defense Super PAC, Socci and Associates, effective May 1.
CEA President Gary Shapiro used a “super panel” on the future of TV at the ATSC Broadcast TV Conference Thursday to challenge NAB President Gordon Smith to declare that NAB plans to seek no “further delays or modifications” in the FCC incentive auction schedule. Smith responded that there wouldn’t be any delays, repeating what he said at the NAB Show that broadcasters want the auction to go forward.
ATSC 3.0's framers have “multiple degrees of video freedom” in designing the next-generation DTV system, Alan Stein, Technicolor vice president-technology, who chairs the “S34-1" ad hoc group on ATSC 3.0 video, told the ATSC 3.0 Boot Camp conference Wednesday in Washington. The framers have reached consensus on using HEVC’s “Main-10" profile at 8- and 10-bits and frame rates up to 60 frames per second, he said. But after nearly a year of evaluating high dynamic range (HDR), wide color gamut and high frame rates for ATSC 3.0, S34-1 members are still discussing them, with no consensus, Stein said.
Roughly a week before ATSC 3.0's framers unleash a full progress report on the next-gen DTV standard at their “Boot Camp” conference on Wednesday in Washington, ATSC Thursday said the “first ingredient” of ATSC 3.0's physical layer has reached the status of “candidate standard” following a month of balloting. The so-called “bootstrap signal” portion of the physical layer is designated “A/321 Part 1" and will be “important to the future evolution of ATSC 3.0,” ATSC said in an announcement. Other “core elements” of the physical layer, including its modulation and error correction systems, will be balloted for candidate status this summer, ATSC said. Balloting on each of ATSC 3.0's components typically will be a four-week process, ATSC has said. The bootstrap signal for ATSC 3.0 transmission will remain a candidate standard for nine months while prototype equipment is built and tested “in advance of balloting for the entire system,” ATSC said. “The bootstrap is a low-level signal that tells a receiver to decode and process wireless services multiplexed in a broadcast channel,” said ATSC President Mark Richer. “It’s designed to be a very robust signal and detectable even at low signal levels.” The bootstrap signal provides “a universal entry point into a broadcast waveform,” ATSC said. It uses a “fixed configuration” known to all receivers “and carries information to enable processing and decoding the wireless service associated with a detected bootstrap signal,” as well as a “flag” that indicates when an emergency alert is in effect, it said.