GatesAir Demos Reveal Future Possibilities

Imagine a future for one moment where U.S. broadcasters can transmit TV programs over the air to the home television and at the same time transmit mobile content and services to LTE wireless devices like smartphones and media tablets.

Or, consider a future in which the wireless industry actually leases broadcast spectrum on an as-needed basis to deliver unicast-network-crushing video of mass viewing audience events like the Super Bowl to their LTE customers efficiently by exploiting the one-to-many advantage of broadcasting.

These and other similar scenarios may seem nothing more than pipedreams in an era of digital TV based on the ATSC A/53 standard. But GatesAir, the former Harris Broadcast RF division, is challenging U.S. broadcasters at the 2014 NAB Show to stretch their imaginations and envision what is possible, if the right steps are taken today in the development of the ATSC 3.0 next-generation digital television standard.

At its NAB booth (LVCC N609), GatesAir is presenting a technology demonstration showing how a single channel can be used to transmit DVB-T2 and LTE content by leveraging time division multiplexing and a technical aspect of DVB-T2 that instructs TVs to ignore the LTE signal and the LTE device to ignore the television signal.

What makes that signaling possible is something called “Future Extension Frames,” or FEF. While ATSC 3.0 is still in its formative phase, including an FEF signaling component could open up the future of TV broadcasting to delivering programming to the home and mobile content to LTE devices. It also makes possible on a technical level a way to lease wireless companies broadcast infrastructure as needed to reach their LTE customers, presumably saving them the time and capital expense of deploying their own LTE Broadcast alternative.

Speaking April 6 at a party jointly thrown by Imagine Communications and GatesAir — the spinoffs of the Harris Broadcast sale and restructuring — Rich Redmond, GatesAir chief product officer, explained that although the demo is being done with DVB-T2, the same thing can be done with any OFDM-based standard incorporating FEF signaling.

One thing this technology won’t do, however, is give broadcasters interested in making flexible use of their spectrum a way to steer clear of the regulatory requirement that they continue to deliver at least one channel of free over-the-air ATSC (A/53) programming to viewers. In other words, this approach doesn’t support transmission of single-carrier 8VSB on the same channel as a multi-carrier OFDM modulation in a fashion similar to the DVB-T2/LTE technology demonstration.

Separately, GatesAir is demonstrating the Futurecast Universal Terrestrial Broadcasting System, a collaboration of GatesAir, Zenith and LG. Submitted as a proposed ATSC 3.0 physical layer contender, Futurecast increases data throughput by at least 30 percent and improves multipath performance, said Redmond.

At the GatesAir booth, the Futurecast demo revolves around transmission of one 4K Ultra-HD channel, a high definition channel to a media tablet and mobile video to a handheld device in a single 6 MHz channel.