ATSC Chief Says He Has ‘Hunch’ That ATSC 3.0 Will Launch in 3-5 Years

Richer emphasized that he wasn’t privy to the commercial plans of individual CE makers or broadcasters on ATSC 3.0. However, by early 2017, “we should be finalizing the first version of the standard,” Richer said. “So we have a lot of work to do, but that’s the time frame. Now, I don’t know the private plans of manufacturers planning products or the plans of broadcasters planning services. But I would expect that we’ll see over the next year a lot of testing, and then some field trials, and then in three to five years, probably the time frame to look at real services starting. That’s just my hunch. I can’t, obviously, forecast the industry.”

By inviting the broadcast industry entourage to Cleveland to showcase Futurecast, “our purpose here was to kind of provide an overview or glimpse of what the field performance of ATSC 3.0 will be able to do for the industry,” said Wayne Luplow, vice president at LG’s Zenith research and development lab in Lincolnshire, Illinois. “We want to give you a firsthand view of what ATSC 3.0 is really going to look like and how it’s going to perform in the real world.” The "initial" results in Cleveland have been “very encouraging,” the Futurecast partners said in a statement. The Cleveland field trials have shown how ATSC 3.0 will viably deliver 4K content over the air plus “two robust mobile TV streams” in a single 6-MHz channel, “while optimizing indoor reception and offering unparalleled spectrum efficiency,” the statement said.

ATSC 3.0's physical layer is a “work in process,” Luplow said. “If one wants to build something today, you can’t build to it because there is not a complete candidate standard” for the physical layer, he said. “What you’re seeing is a Futurecast version” of an ATSC 3.0-like physical layer, Luplow said. “We expect the performance is going to be very comparable to what the ultimate ATSC 3.0 standard is or what it will be,” Luplow said. “Many, I think, of the elements in the physical layer we have put in here are scheduled to be included in the ATSC 3.0 physical layer candidate standard.” Luplow is comfortable making that statement because of the 16 “blocks” that will comprise ATSC 3.0's physical layer, LG has at least some involvement in at least 10 of those blocks, he said.

‘Guinea Pigs’

The field-testing in Cleveland is through an arrangement with Tribune Broadcasting, which owns an interim 600-kilowatt station on Channel 31, Jay Adrick, a GatesAir technology adviser, told us at the NAB Show. Tribune’s WJW Cleveland moved back to Channel 8 at the end of the dual-carriage DTV transition period in 2009, but the Channel 31 facility remained intact, though it had been mothballed, Adrick said then.

GatesAir this spring landed a six-month FCC special temporary authorization to use the mothballed facility to do 24/7 testing over the call letters WI9X3Y, transmitting content to custom-assembled field-programmable gate array (FPGA) LG receivers from a three-tube inductive-output-tube transmitter and tower in Parma, Ohio, about 10 miles southwest of downtown Cleveland, the Futurecast partners said Thursday. Other technology proponents are also expected to use the Tribune facilities to field test other components of the ATSC 3.0 standard “as it indeed develops,” Luplow said. “We’re all supportive of that. We’re kind of the guinea pigs of getting this thing up on the air, but I think we’re doing fine.”

Following its 2009 closure, “there was quite a bit of restoration work that had to be done to the transmitter,” Adrick said Thursday. Getting the facility “back up and operational” required the “cobbling together of parts to take care of various failures,” Adrick said. “But the transmitter is back up and working quite well.”

Since May, Luplow said, the Cleveland field tests have encompassed measurements of some 75,000 “data points” using the simultaneous transmission of three “streams” of content encoded with HEVC compression that in “ATSC parlance” are called “data pipes.” The three so-called “DP” streams are comprised of: (1) “DP-Zero,” for the transmission of 4K content to fixed receivers at a 15.7 Mbps data rate and a threshold of visibility (TOV) of 13.9 dB; (2) “DP-1," for the transmission of 720p HD content to mobile receivers at a 1.25 Mbps data rate and a TOV of 3.4 dB; (3) “DP-2," Futurecast’s most robust mode, for the transmission of 480p standard-definition content to handheld devices at a 0.59 Mbps data rate and a TOV of -1.2 dB.

That the TOV in DP-2 is a minus value means the noise in that mode is stronger than the signal, Luplow said. The three data pipes are “time-sliced” so that each data pipe "sequentially" takes up the station’s entire 6-MHz channel “for a small fraction of a second,” said Tim Laud, a senior member of the research and development technical staff at Zenith.

The entourage was taken on a bus ride through Cleveland's streets and on its expressways to show the imperviousness of the Futurecast signals to high speeds and tall buildings, using a looping golf video produced by LG and transmitted to the bus in the DP-1 mode. When the bus cruised the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway in the North Coast District in heavy rain at 60 miles an hour, we saw no visible deterioration in the picture. The same held true when we got stuck in stop-and-go traffic amid the tall buildings downtown.

The LG receiver used for the bus demos was mounted in an overhead luggage bin and fed from an antenna that was stuck to an inside window just below the bin. The receiver was built on a 19-inch rack using a half-dozen “large” FPGAs, said Laud. “One of the benefits of doing it that way is that we can re-program it and change the system anytime we want to, anytime we do an improvement, and eventually into whatever the final standard is,” Laud told us. “It’s a software-defined receiver of sorts.”

Basement Demo Shows Robustness

Later, the group assembled in the unfinished basement of a downtown office tower occupied by Osborn Engineering, a Futurecast collaborator, to see how the Futurecast signal can penetrate deep indoors using common indoor over-the-air antennas. When it comes to "picking up" the ATSC 3.0 signal, "you want to be able to pick it up anywhere, so we went to the basement," Laud said. An Osborn executive, Mark Wutz, told the group that "you should have seen the building management when we said we wanted to take 60 people to the basement. The security people said, 'Well our radios don't work too well down there.'"

Two displays were set up for the basement demo, both using vertical antennas. One was a standard ATSC TV that displayed nothing but snow. “You can play with that one as much as you like and you won’t find anything,” Laud said. A spectrum analyzer hooked up to the TV “shows you that pretty much the whole band is noise,” he said.

By comparison, a monitor hooked to a Futurecast receiver displayed SD content flawlessly for a few seconds in DP-2, which Laud described as “the most robust mode we have on the air right now.” It was meant as proof that Futurecast works “at very low signal-to-noise,” Laud said. However, the signal soon went dark, never to return, when the receiver failed after one among the entourage deliberately jostled the vertical antenna connected to the display. Laud joked that the failure, after several tries at rebooting the receiver, was proof that the demo was real, not faked.

On the tour’s last stop, in a third-floor conference room at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum on the Lake Erie waterfront, the intent was to showcase three simultaneous pictures transmitted live in 4K, HD and SD, Luplow said. Though the 4K image was displayed flawlessly on a large screen LG Ultra HD TV, and the SD image on a handheld tablet-like device, the middle display remained dark because of the receiver that had failed in the Osborn basement. “As we said at Osborn, there’s apparently a problem with one of the receivers,” Luplow said.

For the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame demo, the antenna feeding the DP-Zero signal to the 4K TV was mounted via coaxial cable to a location outside the conference room so that the crowd of people inside the room “wouldn’t be killing the signal,” Laud said. The antenna for the “more robust” DP-2 mode streamed to the tablet was mounted to a window frame inside the conference room. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame building “is not designed very well for the purpose of a 15-dB signal with multipath,” said Luplow. “Look at the glass and the shape of the building. It’s a multipath horror.”

Futurecast’s backers are often asked why they’re field-testing a system that won’t represent the final ATSC 3.0 standard, Laud said. He explained that Futurecast is the LG, Zenith and GatesAir proposal for ATSC 3.0 and is “designed to be a complete system.” In Cleveland, “we’re doing a comparison against ATSC 1.0 in all our field tests,” he said, referring to the existing DTV system. “So what we’re developing is data on this transmitter and others that shows how well the new system can work with its higher bit rate, with its higher flexibility. This then can be used as a reference against the completed ATSC 3.0 standard, so that they can be sure everything that they implement is up to snuff.”

With the ATSC 3.0 effort, just like with any standards development, “there’s always the possibility that with too many cooks, you can spoil the broth,” Laud said. Field testing Futurecast is one method to “guarantee that the broth is good at the end of the day,” he said.

Zenith parent LG “undoubtedly” will make “some kind of converter boxes somewhere along the way” to bridge the transition to ATSC 3.0 from the existing ATSC service, just as it did for the analog-to-digital transition, Laud said. “The exact timeline for that is not on anybody’s books yet.” That is "one possible transition scenario, is to make converter boxes," he said. "Another one would be to build dual receivers into every product, and when enough product is out there, then you can do the transition. But that takes a lot of receiver manufacturer cooperation.” Laud also thinks smartphones “would be a great place to put our receiver,” he said. “Talk to your local cellphone provider,” he joked. “If you can convince them to pick that up, we’d be happy to take care of it.”

The "transition" to ATSC 3.0 and the commercial and regulatory uncertainty surrounding it looms as a big impediment, Laud told us. "The hardware is not going to be a big problem. The receiver -- obviously it's a big hunk right now, but by the time we can get that to market, that's not going to be as big an issue. HEVC encoders will be equivalent to today's decoders. But the big drawback is the transition."

AWARN's 'Emergency Information Bit'

The emergency “wake-up” functionality on ATSC 3.0 receivers that will be part of the ATSC 3.0-enabled Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN) next-gen emergency alert system (see 1502230043) will be activated through an “emergency information bit” embedded “in the very base layer” of the ATSC 3.0 modulation and transmission system, said Peter Sockett, director-engineering and operations at Capitol Broadcasting’s WRAL-TV Raleigh, North Carolina. He spoke to the group during a stop at the downtown offices of Raycom Media’s WOIO, the CBS Channel 19 affiliate in Cleveland. The AWARN demonstration mounted at WOIO, which is licensed in Shaker Heights, Ohio, was the same as the demo held at the NAB Show in April (see 1504130028), Luplow said.

If a station decides that an emergency is “large enough” to activate the wake-up feature on ATSC 3.0 TVs, the “tag” embedded in the “boot strap” of ATSC 3.0's physical layer will say “turn on this receiver and start talking to the viewer,” Sockett said. That “boot strap” technology as part of ATSC 3.0's physical layer was the first ATSC 3.0 “ingredient” to be elevated to candidate standard when it cleared ATSC balloting this spring (see 1505070022).

To our question whether ATSC, in conjunction with CEA, has discussed whether the receiver wake-up feature will be a factory default in ATSC 3.0 TVs or an option that consumers will activate themselves, Richer, ATSC’s president, said: “That’s probably more of a CEA issue, ultimately. We’re just at the beginning of this, and trying to figure out how we’re going to do the signaling. The reason it’s important to be in the boot strap part of the system is so that it can be as robust as possible. This is all good stuff, but it’s complicated to work out from a business standpoint or regulatory standpoint. That’s not where we’re focused. We’re focused on making the right decisions within an engineering position, and then the industry will work that out.”

One of ATSC 3.0's “requirements” will be the ability to “geographically filter” emergency receiver wake-ups, said Rich Chernock, chief science officer at Triveni Digital, who chairs Technology Group 3, the umbrella group within ATSC that’s supervising all of ATSC 3.0's framing activities. If, for example, a tornado warning crops up for the eastern portion of a station’s coverage area, “you may not want all the TVs on the west side to wake up and so on,” Chernock told the group. “How far to take this, I don’t know. Most of what ATSC is doing is creating the framework to allow these things to be done.” As for “what exactly will be done on the receiving side,” that’s not up to ATSC, Chernock said. “That’s up to the CE manufacturers and so on.”

CEA has “a standards working group that is developing recommended practices for ATSC 3.0 receivers,” Brian Markwalter, CEA senior vice president-research and standards, emailed us Thursday. “This group would be the place to discuss the types of issues Mark Richer and Rich Chernock mention related to emergency information. To my knowledge the group has not addressed the ‘emergency information bit’ discussed in Cleveland.”