Sinclair, Saankhya Developing Off-Load Platform

ONE Media 3.0, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sinclair Broadcast Group, has reached an agreement with Bengaluru, India-based Saankhya Labs, a leader in wireless and software defined radio solutions, to accelerate the development of a 5G broadcast off-lead platform.

The platform will enable 4G and 5G wireless operators to offload OTT and live content dynamically on to the  “one-to-many” broadcast Digital Terrestrial Transmission (DTT) networks that broadcasting are developing with ATSC 3.0.

This creates many “firsts” in DTT innovation:

• Cellularizing broadcast architecture to enable indoor reception of DTT with mobile and portable devices
• Dramatically improving DTT spectrum utilization, providing more bits/higher robustness through spectrum reuse
• Introducing artificial intelligence (AI)-based analytic engines to provision and directly offload traffic from congested 4G/5G networks
• Providing content delivery networks (CDN) with significant improvement in the streaming experience by moving OTT traffic to the broadcast platform
• Enabling hyper-localization of broadcast content (video/audio services, datacasting, advertising, emergency alerts)

Demonstrations of the 5G-related components of this new cooperative network have been exhibited at CES2019, Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2019 and NAB Show 2019.

The first phase of product and system development will establish real-world proof-of-concept deployments in India and the United States.

“Broadcasters have a critical seat at the 5G table. This work and product development will provide a ‘level set’ against expectations for broadcast services that are embraced by the 3GPP 5G standard.” said Mark Aitken, President, ONE Media 3.0.

“These first deployments will elevate understanding of the cooperative role NextGen (ATSC 3.0) broadcast can play to make 5G networks highly efficient Broadcast/Broadband convergent networks.

“The direct-to-mobile focus of this activity will leverage the one-to-many efficiencies of broadcast in a new topology that can provide high-reliability and large bandwidth solutions and make them available to the competitive marketplace.”

“Saankhya is excited to expand its partnership with ONE Media and Sinclair to build an end-to-end solution that transforms the delivery and consumption of both linear and non-linear video,” added Parag Naik, CEO of Saankhya Labs.

“Broadcast video networks are essentially ‘constant quality’ networks compared to the current ‘best effort’ unicast mobile networks, especially for video delivery.

“Our direct-to-mobile solution provides a new tool combining broadcast and OTT content over a new video distribution platform. We are convinced that OTT content players and mobile network operators will take full advantage of this unique video delivery solution.”