The Advanced Television Systems Committee’s work on the next-generation broadcast standard — ATSC 3.0 — is progressing well and should yield a proposal or “candidate” by early next year and a final standard by late next year, according to the technology experts leading the ATSC 3.0 working groups during an update on their activities at the NAB Show in Las Vegas on Sunday.
“It’s a big challenge,” said Madeleine Noland, of LG Electronics who is heading the applications working group. “I stand up there in front of my group and I say, ‘One year — are we really going to have a candidate standard in one year?’ And so far the people are looking at me and saying yes.”
As described by Noland and the other working group heads, ATSC 3.0 represents a giant leap forward in the kinds of services that broadcasters will be able to provide and in how they can generate money from them.
The standard will allow broadcasters to present 4K ultra HD and possibly 3D programming to big sets with fixed antennas in the home and HD programming to mobile devices in the hand or in the car with some degree of interactivity.
Such services are made possible by the combination of a “fatter pipe” and “skinnier content, said Rich Chernock of Triveni Digital, who chairs the top ATSC 3.0 committee.
In other words, the system will pass more bits per second, while the complementary compression system reduces the bits that need to be passed.
The pictures will benefit not only from the higher pixel count, but also from higher frame rates, higher dynamic range and wider color gamut, Noland said.
At least in its initial iteration, the systems will not be able to do it all. According to Noland, “8K [ultra HD] is likely out of the scope.”
To monetize the services, broadcasters could require viewers to pay or at least register through a conditional access function, which also means the stations will be better able to measure viewership.
The standard also enables some special features that will “personalize” the viewing experience. For instance, Noland said, viewers may be able to control individual soundtracks so that during a football game they could turn down the crowd noise to hear the announcers better.
Or, Noland said, viewers may be able to choose between multiple camera angles during a hockey game. Instead of the puck, they could follow their favorite player.
Not all the features will be integral to the standard. Software developers will be invited to create apps with features and services just as they now do for smartphones and tablets.
“The ideal would be to provide a very rich toolkit for the app developers,” Noland said.
The goal is to produce a standard that is robust, efficient and flexible, Chernock said. “Broadcasters all don’t want to do the same thing.”
The ATSC process is running in parallel with the FCC’s effort to reallocate up to 120 MHz of TV spectrum through an incentive auction.
The incentive auction involves three steps — buying as much spectrum as it can from broadcasters, repacking the TV band and selling the recovered spectrum to wireless carriers.
It has to potential of completely disrupting the TV band and at the same time broadcasters may want to implement ATSC 3.0.
But the NAB’s Skip Pizzi, head of the systems requirement working group, said ATSC is undaunted. It’s going “to make the best technical standard that we can come up with and deal with whatever spectrum issues come up at the end of the process.”
I have been an over-the-air digital TV viewer since 2002, residing in places that forbid outdoor antennas. Through years of experimentation, I found that set-top antennas are inadequate for receiving digital signals indoors. Successful reception has come from using the biggest antenna that I could fit indoors in a spare room. The antenna sits on a tripod near a large window that faces the direction of most of the broadcast towers in my state. Even then, the distant ABC affiliate in the state cannot be received consistently. It is the only channel in the state that stayed on the VHF band. I’m on my third generation ATSC tuner since 2002, the present one with a no-fee DVR, and have noticed the improvements that have come with each generation. I would like to see ATSC 3.0-generated video not break up into a mosaic as the current ATSC standard sometimes does when a flock of geese or a jet flies by, or when a truck drives by. I look forward to Ultra HD, and the new standard’s ability to deliver to my tuner what amounts to video-on-demand, programs that I want to see at my convenience. I have no interest in mobile delivery because when I’m out in the world, I’m working, driving, or shopping, and not playing with gadgets. If low-power stations survive repacking, the FCC needs to grant them higher power because the current maximum ERP of 15 kilowatts on UHF is not enough to deliver the digital signal over hilly terrain, even over relatively short distances.
lots of luck.