Public TV has the opportunity to provide trusted communication during emergencies, said Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, at a session Monday at the Association of Public Television Stations Summit. Public TV needs to work with FEMA to provide emergency coverage, said APTS CEO Patrick Butler at the session. Stations have to “market” their ability to provide coverage during emergencies, even when cable and The Weather Channel goes out, Fugate said.
The ATSC formed a new “implementation team” for advanced emergency alerting as a "key element" of the next-gen ATSC 3.0 DTV standard, the group said Thursday. “Advanced emergency alerting promises to create new significant value for viewers, consumer electronics manufacturers, broadcasters and the public safety community," ATSC President Mark Richer said. "The addition of advanced emergency alerting capability and the accompanying rich-media warning information represents a compelling ATSC 3.0 application.” The implementation team, chaired by Jay Adrick, a technology adviser to Gates Air, won't develop standards or recommended practices, but may make recommendations to ATSC and other standards development organizations "as appropriate," the group said.
With the end of the AWS-3 auction, the upcoming incentive auction will be costlier, panelists at a spectrum conference sponsored by PwC said Thursday. It’s unclear how that will affect broadcasters on the reverse side of the upcoming incentive auction, said Eric Wolf, vice president of technology strategy and management at the Public Broadcasting Service. “There will be a lot more demand for spectrum,” said John Hane, a Pillsbury communications lawyer. “Another view is the AWS-3 auction is fundamentally different from the 600 MHz auction. AWS was a fairly straightforward auction -- people knew what they were bidding on. The 600 auction is very complex, even on the forward side of the auction.” The industry has “essentially forced consumers to stitch together the services that they want,” Wolf said. It can disaggregate and break up service from infrastructure, Hane said. He said he’s optimistic that ATSC 3.0 will be adopted. The “3.0 will make it a lot easier,” said John Lawson, principal of Convergence Services. “It seems like it’s happening, but there’s no structure to make these devices interoperable. We’re still in this scenario with silos.” Wolf said, “Don’t think about it as how many dollars per hertz or bits you can extract. Think about it as how can you help the consumer?” The FCC should be thinking of the consumer, too, and beyond the dollars, he said. “By 2025, I see the FCC trying to auction the T-band,” said Mike Gravino, director of the LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition. “I see a constant struggle between the wireless industry and broadcast industry, even though we want to be the same, a struggle over this bandwidth.”
Intrado hires Kim Robert Scovill, ex-TCS, as vice president-government, external and legal affairs ... National Music Publishers’ Association hires Amelia Wang, ex-aide to Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., as vice president-industry relations and government affairs ... ZwillGen Subpoena Compliance promotes Abby Liebeskind to legal compliance attorney and hires two from Yahoo: Shannon Kontinos as manager, legal compliance services and Darcy Riedell as supervisor, legal compliance services ... Fletcher Heald hires David Janet, technology lawyer, as member, representing software, Web content, wireless and other companies ... Gray Television hires Jacqueline Policastro, ex-Lilly Broadcasting, as chief of Gray's new Washington bureau.
CEA’s “R4.0” Video Systems standards development committee formed a new working group (R4WG18) on receivers for the next-gen ATSC 3.0 broadcast DTV standard, ATSC said Monday in its monthly newsletter. R4WG18 is co-chaired by Martin Freeman of Samsung and Peter Shintani of Sony, and its charter “is to develop standards, recommended practices and technical reports on receiver guidelines, profiles and characteristics in support of the ATSC 3.0 emission standard,” ATSC said. “A fast-track liaison process has been established between ATSC and CEA for the two-way exchange of important information between the two standards development organizations,” ATSC said. The point men on the liaison will be Paul Thomsen, a technology adviser to CEA, and Rich Chernock of Triveni Digital, who chairs the ATSC’s "TG3" technology group that’s leading the ATSC 3.0 development effort.
Though ATSC said in its Dec. 8 call for proposals (CFP) that it has no plans “to develop the ATSC 3.0 audio system out of independent components from multiple sources" (see 1412090019), that won’t preclude the possibility that ATSC will pick multiple audio codecs for the next-gen broadcast system, ATSC President Mark Richer emailed us Thursday. "ATSC may select a single audio system or multiple audio systems for ATSC 3.0." He was reacting to a statement from DTS, one of three contestants to submit ATSC 3.0 audio proposals in response to the CFP, in which it supported ATSC picking multiple audio codecs rather than deciding on a single mandatory audio standard for ATSC 3.0. At DTS, “we believe ATSC 3.0 audio should be a multi-codec choice and not a single mandatory solution,” spokesman Jordan Miller emailed us Wednesday. Though Miller didn't say so, the statement seemed an attempt to forestall ATSC choosing Dolby or another technology as a single mandatory audio codec for ATSC 3.0 as ATSC did in picking Dolby AC-3 as the mandatory audio codec for the existing DTV broadcast system. Dolby and the "MPEG-H Audio Alliance" of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor were the other contestants to submit proposals in response to the CFP. “Choice, innovation and competition are important to ATSC and broadcasters, and a framework for multiple audio codecs will be key to allowing broadcasters to choose the solution that best matches their needs," Miller of DTS said. "This will ensure that ATSC can remain at the forefront of technology in the face of competing systems, and ensure consumer-electronics manufacturers are not beholden to a single, mandatory technology provider.” Miller confirmed that DTS:X, “our next generation object based audio platform, is the core component of our ATSC 3.0 submission.” For Miller, it was a somewhat more sweeping claim of the role of DTS:X in the DTS ATSC 3.0 submission than he made a day earlier when he told us only that a “portion” of DTS:X would be “leveraged” in the DTS ATSC 3.0 audio proposal (see 1501210023).
DTS acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that its DTS:X object-based audio codec figures prominently in the proposal the company submitted last week (see 1501130054) to vie for selection as the audio system for the next-gen ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard.
Three proponents had registered by Tuesday afternoon their intent to vie for selection as the audio system for the next-gen ATSC 3.0 broadcast specification, ATSC spokesman Dave Arland emailed us. The deadline for responses to ATSC’s Dec. 8 call for proposals (CFP) was 11:59 p.m. EST Tuesday. The three proponents are Dolby Labs, DTS and, as a group, Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor, Arland said. ATSC, through its S34-2 ad hoc group, plans a thorough but fast-track process for choosing a proponent audio system for ATSC 3.0, in keeping with ATSC’s self-imposed deadline of finishing the ATSC 3.0 standard by the end of this year, its CFP said (see 1412090019). Audio systems proposed "will be judged discretely and in their entirety, as comprehensive, end-to-end systems for emission of the ATSC signal," the CFP said. "ATSC does not intend to develop the ATSC 3.0 audio system out of independent components from multiple sources."
ATSC is looking ahead to 2015 "with eager anticipation, tempered with a healthy dose of cautious optimism," as the next-gen ATSC 3.0 broadcast system approaches the status of a "candidate standard" in the months ahead, ATSC President Mark Richer said in a President's Memo in ATSC's monthly newsletter, published Friday. "The process is the process, and there will need to be some give and take" as ATSC's "TG3" technology group works to make the candidate standard a reality, Richer said. The ATSC board "is urging TG3 participants to keep their eye on the prize and quickly resolve issues that arise or find ways to move forward on a path toward resolution" as the candidate standard is finalized, he said. "The eyes of the world are on the ATSC and our disciplined, inclusive, open approach to standards-setting. As such, it’s crucial that the new standard both moves ahead expeditiously and meets the varied needs of broadcasters, manufacturers and viewers in the United States and around the world."
PMCM pushed back against CBS and Meredith Corp., saying they haven’t attempted to show that PMCM’s WJLP-TV Middletown Township, New Jersey, caused any problems by use of Virtual Channel 3.10. Meredith Corp. and CBS issued a joint opposition to PMCM’s application for review of FCC Media Bureau orders on the proper virtual major channel for WJLP. That opposition “is essentially non-responsive” to PMCM’s application, PMCM said in its response posted Friday in docket 14-150. “Their failure even to attempt some, any, rebuttal may be seen as an effective concession of the correctness of PMCM’s arguments.” CBS and Meredith Corp. also fail to mention there are no fewer than 105 situations, already in place for years, “in which non-commonly-owned stations with overlapping service areas use identical two-part virtual channel numbers” in apparent violation of the A/65 ATSC standard, PMCM said.