Planning For ATSC 3.0 Deployment Must Begin Now, Says ‘Implementation Guide’
Now is the time for terrestrial TV broadcasters to start planning for the deployment of ATSC 3.0, said a new “transition and implementation guide” published Wednesday by Pearl TV, Sinclair and several broadcast equipment suppliers and consulting firms. Broadcasters have “moved with urgency and focus to finalize the ATSC 3.0 standard in an unprecedented time frame,” says the elaborate 81-page report, which also lists American Tower; Dielectric; GatesAir; Ericsson; Harmonic; Hitachi-Comark; Meintel, Sgrignoli & Wallace; and Triveni Digital as “contributors.”
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South Korea’s adoption of ATSC 3.0 will establish the technology as an "international standard," and comes in time for the ATSC 3.0 carriage of the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang in February 2018, the report says. “The urgency is not solely for the acute need to competitively transform the broadcasting business and related opportunities,” it says. “Completing the standard so that broadcasters can simultaneously plan for spectrum repacking and ATSC 3.0 implementation can save the industry millions of dollars, and help to ‘kick start’ the transition. With a new spectrum plan for the 600 MHz TV band anticipated in early 2017, planning for ATSC 3.0 adoption now is essential.”
The report trumpets itself as a practical primer to “real world implementation” of ATSC 3.0, including suggested ATSC 3.0 “service models” and instructions on how to manage the “trade-offs between services, robustness and bandwidth.” ATSC 3.0 “provides the broadcaster with many new opportunities to provide services, as well as to reach viewers in venues that have not been served by the current ATSC system,” says the report. “Developing a business model for a station will require selection of the services which the station wants to provide, selecting the best delivery (emission) method to reach the targeted viewers, and then matching those goals against the limitations of bandwidth.”
The transition to ATSC 3.0 from ATSC 1.0 will be “dramatically different than the previous transition from analog to digital TV,” the report says. “Single-market cooperation will be necessary, so that broadcasters can ensure that no viewer loses programming.” One solution is a temporary channel-sharing partnership among broadcasters in a market featuring a “lighthouse” station, the report says. Its purpose will be to “seed the market” with ATSC 3.0 signals for all stations in a given market, while other stations make unused capacity “collectively available to replicate” the lighthouse station’s ATSC 1.0 signal, plus their own ATSC 1.0 signals, it says.
Over time, “as audiences migrate their viewing to the ATSC 3.0 services, these stations will elect to convert all of their respective transmissions to ATSC 3.0, and no longer transmit an ATSC 1.0 signal,” the report says. “Eventually, all stations in the market will only transmit ATSC 3.0 signals, but this will only occur after viewers in that market have compatible ATSC 3.0 receivers.”
It’s “likely” that each contributing station in a given market would begin its ATSC 3.0 stream by operating “in an advanced video format” such as 1080p at 60 frames per second and “perhaps even” with high dynamic range, the report says. The limitation on the video format would be driven by the number of individual streams that the lighthouse station would carry and the “overall parameters of the emitted 3.0 signal,” it says.
For stations that remain on ATSC 1.0, but carry additional ATSC 1.0 streams from the lighthouse or other stations that have converted to ATSC 3.0, “they will likely need to engage in a distributed architecture to create a geographically dispersed statmux pool, where each station hosts their own encoders and contributes to a shared transport stream that is physically transmitted by the 1.0 host station,” the report says. “The available technology is able to support the transition when stations engage in these types of collaborative sharing arrangements. Transition success will ultimately come down to creating a viable temporary business arrangement among the partners.”
ATSC 3.0 “is rounding third base" and heading for home, so "it's time for managers, engineers, and planners at all levels to look ahead and get ready for the requirements," said Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle in a statement. ATSC 3.0 is the "glue" that will enable "broadcast protocol to exist in an Internet environment," she said. That will mean "better pictures and sound, personalized and geotargeted viewing, mobile viewing, more information about emergency alerts, and the seamless integration of broadcasting programming with other Internet Protocol services,” she said.