The comparatively low cost of mobile DTV will give terrestrial broadcasters a “significant advantage” over streaming TV services like Aereo, stakeholders said Thursday at the Advanced TV Systems Committee annual meeting. Representatives from mobile DTV providers Dyle and Mobile 500 Alliance said mobile TV technology’s comparatively low cost and reliable coverage was one of several advantages that would keep broadcasters competitive with wireless carriers.
The chief of the FCC’s Media Bureau, William Lake, threw cold water on broadcasters’ recent calls for the commission to delay the incentive spectrum auction and the repacking proceeding that follows to coincide with the deployment of the next-generation ATSC 3.0 standard. “I do urge ATSC and the industry to work as fast as you can and want to on ATSC 3.0,” Lake said Thursday in Q-and-A at the annual meeting of the Advanced TV Systems Committee. “It’s just that I think it’s unrealistic to expect that the incentive auction will slow down to wait."
LAS VEGAS -- Broadcast equipment supplier Thomson Video is using the NAB Show this week to showcase its “first implementation” of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec that the Motion Picture Experts Group approved in late January, Jean Macher, Thomson’s marketing director for the Americas, told us Monday at his company’s booth. “We don’t have it running live yet, but it’s coming very soon, probably in June,” Macher said.
LAS VEGAS -- Global interoperability and spectrum efficiency need to be the biggest cornerstones of any next-generation broadcast system if terrestrial broadcasters want to retake valuable competitive ground lost to wireless carriers, streaming services and other content-delivery rivals, various speakers said Sunday at the NAB Show’s Broadcast Engineering Conference. Though terrestrial Ultra HD and 3D TV are on the list of desired features of the next-gen system, they're nowhere as high on the priority scale as other attributes like mobility or interactivity, or so it appeared from the many speakers who gave presentations at the conference.
The Advanced Television Systems Committee wants proposals by Aug. 23 for the “physical layer” of its next-gen ATSC 3.0 broadcast TV standard, the ATSC said Tuesday. ATSC 3.0 figures prominently on the agenda of the Broadcast Engineering conference of the NAB Show opening April 6 in Las Vegas. ATSC 3.0’s physical layer includes its core modulation and coding technologies, ATSC said. A key goal of the ATSC 3.0 physical layer will be to provide TV service to fixed and mobile devices, ATSC said. “Spectrum efficiency and robust service will be key areas of evaluation,” it said. Increased data rates to support terrestrial Ultra HD delivery and other services “will be considered,” but not necessarily required, it said. “Robustness of service for devices operating within the ATSC 3.0 service area should exceed that of current ATSC systems and that of cell phone and other wireless devices.” ATSC will give “consideration” to technologies and proposals “that enable a smooth transition from existing systems” for broadcasters and consumers, it said. While initial responses to ATSC’s call for proposals are due Aug. 23, “detailed technical descriptions” of those proposals are due Sept. 27, ATSC said.
The Advanced Television Systems Committee approved the specifications for a mobile emergency alert system to be delivered using the ATSC A/153 Mobile Digital TV standard. The M-EAS enhancements to the standard will provide capabilities for delivering multimedia alerts “to mobile DTV-equipped cellphones, tablets, laptops, netbooks and in-car navigation systems,” ATSC said in a press release (http://bit.ly/YIqeD3). Using mobile DTV for emergency alerting “requires no additional spectrum and is an additional use of existing TV transmitters and towers,” it said. M-EAS is backwards compatible and will not affect the performance of mobile TV products already in consumer hands, it said. Partners in the M-EAS effort said that completion of the standardization will lead to the implementation of the system and commercialization of the equipment (CD Feb 26 p8).
Partners in the mobile emergency alert system effort are nearing the end of the technology standardization process and moving toward commercialization of the equipment and implementation of the system, said Harris Broadcast, Mobile500 Alliance and other partners. Commercial and noncommercial broadcasters have demonstrated the technology and are planning to take it up, they said. The effort began as a pilot project headed by PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting aimed at distributing emergency alerts to the public using video, text messages and other media (CD June 6 p11). Mobile EAS uses the mobile DTV equipment infrastructure.
The Advanced TV Systems Committee (ATSC) set up new implementation teams for bringing ATSC 2.0 and Mobile-EAS to market, it said. Cox Media’s David Siegler will chair the ATSC 2.0 team while Harris’s Jay Adrick will chair the Mobile-EAS team. The new implementation teams “underscores our progress and will help drive next-generation technologies toward marketplace introduction,” said Mark Richer, ATSC’s president.
ATSC 2.0 will emerge as a new candidate broadcast standard early this year with a goal of deploying it in CE products by year-end, Richard Chernock, chairman of the ATSC technology and standards group, told us. The candidate standard designation is a precursor to formal implementation of ATSC 2.0, he said.
ESPN has no visible roadmap for beaming live sports in native 4K, except possibly to use 4K technology for special viewing enhancements on its regular HD programming, executives at the network told Consumer Electronics Daily.