Sinclair Readies Retooled ATSC 3.0 Lab

Sinclair Broadcast Group in two weeks plans to open a significantly upgraded ATSC 3.0 lab in Baltimore to test and piece together the technology for a planned national network based on the next-generation TV standard.

“If we want that [national network] up and running and open for business in the next three years, we aren’t just talking about thousands of transmitters,” says Mark Aitken, VP Advanced Technology, at Sinclair. “We are talking about a whole lot of other gear that has to come together, be packaged and economized and optimized for rapid deployment.”

Sinclair has been at work for the past few months renovating its existing 1,500-square-foot ATSC 3.0 lab, which shared space with the broadcast group’s news operations lab.

With the news lab relocated elsewhere at Sinclair headquarters, the ONE Media Lab, as it is called, brings together 4K UHD production and playout gear, signal transport and transmission technology and home reception gear.

Once complete, the retooled ATSC 3.0 lab will make it possible for Sinclair to invite technology vendors and others into the facility so the broadcast group can evaluate technologies and begin integrating an entire next-generation TV broadcast system, Aitken says.

“ATSC has had two [ATSC 3.0] plugfests,” he adds. “Those are working at sort of the atomic level of the transmission standard. Now we are going to be working at the molecular level with all of the pieces and parts.”

Vendors can bring pre-production prototype technology, prototype products and equipment that is in production for Sinclair to test, he says. “They are all of the essential elements in the 3.0 chain.”

One area of particular interest is high dynamic range, or HDR. With a current lack of consensus on which high dynamic range approach to choose within the Advanced Television Systems Committee, evaluating different HDR technologies will be a high priority, Aitken says.

Technicolor and DS Broadcast will be providing “encoders and other essential elements” that take different approaches to HDR, he says.

Technicolor has a history of helping Sinclair with ATSC 3.0 and has built a testbed for all the technologies it has proposed for the standard, says Alan Stein, VP of technology development and standards at Technicolor. “We will integrate that testbed into Mark’s lab and do a series of experiments that are still in the definition phase.”

Sinclair will be able to generate its own 4K UHD content for the HDR evaluations and other tests it plans to conduct.

“Content [rights] has been a constant issue [when it comes to 4K material],” says Aitken. “So we made the decision [to build out 4K acquisition and editing]. It’s not an easy decision because it’s not inexpensive.”

Sinclair has deployed one of the first Avid 4K UHD editing stations to be released in an office within the lab and acquired Sony F55 and FS7 4K UHD cameras, 4K lenses and other associated equipment to support its activities.

“We had to acquire a UHD equipment chain, which doesn’t stop at the output of the editor,” says Aitken. “You have to take the editing output and through a very limited number of devices, you have to be able to playout this UHD content on something like a Sarnoff-Video Clarity system and then pass that along to an encoder.”

The lab also has a new 20 Gb/s distribution network to transport content because RAW UHD material “is running on a lot of the equipment” in the lab, he says.

For monitoring, Sinclair is relying on high-end Sony displays that are capable of outputting 2,000 Nits or more, he says.

Other core lab technology includes multiple audio-video encoders, DASH/MMT (Multimedia Transport) packagers, ROUTE/MMT (Real-Time Object Delivery over Unidirectional Transport) encoders, signaling and announcement, a scheduler/framer, an exciter, and modulator-to-receiver chain, Aitken says.

Currently, Aitken is awaiting the arrival of a sophisticated ATSC 3.0 transmit-receive chain from South Korea.

“One of the more important elements to invest in was a fully developed receiver that supported all attributes of the ATSC 3.0 standard,” he says.

Developed by ETRI, South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, and implemented as a product by Clever Logic, the transmit-receive chain will give the lab “full instrumentation” that will enable it to “look at all aspects of the standard,” Aitken says.

Another critical inquiry the lab will make is determining the optimum bit allocation strategies to support different business models.

“Everybody knows that the first thing we [broadcasters] are going to be doing is television,” says Aitken.

Television — whether 4K or 1080P— determines the “extreme limit” when it comes to budgeting bits for other ATSC 3.0 services, says Aitken. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an encoder, an encapsulator, a gateway or any one of the dozen primary pieces inside this ATSC 3.0 studio architecture.

“The question is: Can I support all of the things I want to do, starting with television and moving forward into the other IP-based business opportunities?”

While the major focus of the newly renovated lab is helping Sinclair “stack up” the dozen or so critical pieces of ATSC 3.0 technology needed to deploy its nationwide network, make sure they are interoperable and identify a unified way to control everything, the lab will be open to the industry at large, Aitken says.

“We are still a couple of weeks away from making it open to the public [vendors, research organizations and other broadcasters], but soon we will have a very clear runway in front of us,” says Aitken.

His advice for those wanting to make use of the lab and participate in Sinclair’s ongoing ATSC 3.0 tests is simple. “Pick up the phone or drop me an email. Most people know we are here.”

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