ATSC

America’s Public Television Stations (APTS) will hold its 2018 Public Media Summit February 26-28 in Washington. The theme of the 2018 Summit will be The Power of Public Media. The 2018 Summit […]

The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) has approved the Advanced Emergency Alerting (AEA) specification as part of the A/331 standard, which is based primarily on designs submitted by Monroe Electronics […]

The Advanced Television Systems Committee today presented Madeleine Noland, LG Electronics senior director of standards and technology, with its Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award during the 2016 ATSC Broadcast Television Conference in Washington.

Association chiefs from broadcasting, cable and consumer electronics will be featured in a “Tune In to the Future” panel on May 14 at the 2015 ATSC Broadcast TV Conference in Washington.

Companies are proposing a next-generation broadcast TV tech standard to reach a number of goals. But one result that’s not been in the spotlight is the mega-bucks that will flow to them in the form of royalties from whatever patented technology they can squeeze into the new standard.

Kevin Gage, late of NAB and now CTO of ONE Media, a joint venture of Sinclair Broadcast Group and Coherent Logix, is leading a technical drive to develop a new TV standard that will give stations the ability to broadcast TV signals to smartphones while simultaneously serving all those TV receivers linked to roof-top antennas. “That’s the nut that we’re trying to crack,” he says, adding “and we believe that we have cracked it.”

NAB chief Gordon Smith tells engineers at the ATSC’s annual conference that a new broadcast TV standard is needed so the industry can “move quickly to increase the number of distribution channels and platforms for our valuable local content, and we must respond to the needs of an ever-more mobile audience.” He also blasts the FCC for being “myopically focused on broadband and delivering our spectrum to wireless companies.”

The Advanced Television Systems Committee’s Today, Tomorrow & Beyond broadcast TV conference in Washington next Thursday will examine emerging video standards designed to add flexibility to television, Internet compatibility, 4K Ultra HD program content and more robust signal transmission to the current broadcast standard.

Asserting that it is “not just important, it is vital,” Univision Chairman Haim Saban urged the development of a new broadcast transmission standard “to allow us to deliver our signal to all platforms, all the time,” on Monday at the NAB Show. “If we don’t, we will be left back in the 20th century. It is not an option,” he added. During his remarks he drew laughs when he referred to the FCC as the “Friendly Cable Commission.”

While Sinclair is working on its own next-gen transmission standard because it doesn’t like where ATSC 3.0 is headed, there’s another option. The station groups should become fully involved in ATSC — that’s the best way to insure that the standard that finally emerges in 2016 will jibe with their business strategy and give them a fighting chance.

Spearheaded by Mark Aitken, Sinclair’s VP of advanced technology, the new “broadcast-centric”  transmission standard is being designed to address an issue Sinclair feels is being left out of ATSC’s efforts: the ability to reach viewers on their mobile devices. “ATSC 3.0 ought to be whatever broadcasters want it to be,” Aitken says. “This process should be about bringing broadcasters to the table for a solution, rather than having it dictated to them by TV set manufacturers.”

Former ATSC Chairman John Godfrey, VP communications policy and regulatory affairs at Samsung, was elected to come back and serve on the board again. He’s joined by Mark Eyer of Sony and John Taylor of LG Electronics USA, both of whom were elected to a second term.

ATSC 2.0, an enhancement of the current television standard, gained some steam Monday when the Advanced Television Systems Committee established a candidate standard for interactive TV, a key element of the new standard. The A/105 standard will let broadcasters take advantages of second screens and provide delivery of additional media via an Internet path.

The implentation guide, available for download from ATSC, provides a road map for broadcasters looking to launch a mobile EAS service in their market. M-EAS generates a banner alert on capable mobile devices. The system also aims to include rich media, like radar maps, charts and HTML pages.

Michael Dolan, an industry consultant for The Nielsen Co. and founder and president of the Television Broadcast Technology consulting group, assumes his new role Jan. 1. ATSC 2.0 is the stepping stone to ATSC 3.0, the next-generation standard, and will let broadcasters offer content in non-real-time, premium content using conditional access and improved service guides. Audience measurement is also expected to improve under the new standard.

Broadcasters attending this year’s event in New York City (Nov. 13-14) can easily fill their two-day schedule with sessions about how to deliver video to mobile devices, how to get ready for ATSC 3.0 and how to improve HD images in a 4K world.

The demonstration took place in Australia, but it showed how U.S. television stations could potentially broadcast in the future. Ericsson, in partnership with Qualcomm, submitted its LTE Broadcast Solution to the Advance Television Systems Committee as a proposal for ATSC 3.0, the next-generation U.S. broadcast standard. “LTE Broadcast provides the ability to send the same content simultaneously to a very large number of devices in a target area,” says Thomas Norén, VP, head of Project Area Radio at Ericsson.

The global interactive broadcasting standard will be the focus of U.S. broadcasters at next month’s IBC gathreing in Amsterdam. Says Kevin Gage, NAB’s chief technology officer: “Our job is to go look at what are potential future capabilities of television in the U.S. The outreach with HbbTV is all part of the learning process.”

Bill Lake, the FCC’s Media Bureau Chief, told the standards group that ATSC 3.0 — the next-generation and non-backwards compatible television standard — can’t be completed and deployed without holding up the spectrum auction and channel repack.

FCC Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake is the keynote speaker at this year’s ATSC Annual Meeting, held next week in Washington.

This week was a busy one for proponents of broadcast television’s future. On Tuesday, the ATSC issued a call for proposals for a new standard, ATSC 3.0, and the next day, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s tech guru, Mark Aitken, turned on an experimental broadcast at WNUV Baltimore of a transmission system that could be part of TV’s next-generation standard. ATSC President Mark Richer anticipates receiving a dozen or more proposals by September and plans to brief potential proponents at NAB.

ATSC President Mark Richer on approval of the Mobile Emergency Alert Service: “We have learned from past events that a natural or man-made disaster can have a devastating impact on communications networks, which quickly become overburdened.”