The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) conducted its first face-to-face event since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, recenty at the Reagan International Commerce Center in Washington, DC. ATSC worked closely with the Reagan Center to ensure that health and safety protocols were in place in accordance with the latest information from federal and local authorities and the venue’s own requirements.
The hybrid in-person/livestreamed event featured the ATSC Annual Member Meeting and member reception, followed by a full day of conference programming open to the general public.
ATSC President Madeleine Noland kicked of the meetings, saying that the industry is moving “full steam ahead” with the ATSC 3.0 rollout. U.S. markets continue to launch NextGen TV services, with 38 cities now offering a combined 139 services. Over 70 models of NextGen-capable television sets are available, and CTA recently increased its forecast for 2021 NextGen TV sales by almost 300% from their January projection of 800,000 units to a new mid-year projection of 2.1 million units, and they anticipate that by 2023 over 25% of televisions sold will be NextGen TVs.
The NextGen Broadcast Conference covered these important developments and many other topics. In addition to the conference program, there were some 20 exhibitors showing off the latest tools and solutions for the broadcast ecosystem.
Conference Speakers Detailed Emerging and Future Applications of NextGenTV Services
- Susi Elkins, General Manager WKAR Public Media and Director of Broadcasting at Michigan State University stressed the needed for technology “on ramps” to make access to content seamless across devices. NextGenTV can fit into and enhance existing workflows and user experience.
- John Taylor, Senior VP, Public Affairs and Communications, LG Electronics said that 2022 should be a “turning point” to more (smaller) models, expecting the technology to be more broadly available. Beyond features like Voice-plus and HDR, flexible upgrading of features is another benefit of NextGenTV, he says, but that’s sometime in the future.
- Nick Cosley, Business Development, Sony TV, Sony Electronics, said that all new models, starting at 43” to 100” will be NextGenTV capable – bringing their street total to more than 40 models.
- Alfred Chan, VP of TV BU, Smart Home Business Group, MediaTek Semiconductor, described a complete NextGenTV SoC and middleware software solution, available today, with tier-2 companies now in compliance testing. He agrees that 2022-2023 should be a turning point for product penetration.
- FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr is very excited about NextGenTV, he said, calling it “a high-speed broadband download pipe … disruptive, like 5G and low-orbit satellite communications.” The return path [for interactivity] is not an issue, he says, as devices will “mix and match” all connection modes, both upstream and downstream. He also stressed that the evolution of ATSC did not need government intervention, which aided its speed of introduction. Media ownership rules, he added, allow datacasting as separate from delivering main content, again aiding rollout. Once it gets built out, he says, we will see “all kinds of new applications and services beyond just linear TV.”
- Lindsay Shelton-Gross, VP, Membership and Marketing, (ITS) Intelligent Transportation Society of America, said that GM has announced they will include 5G in all vehicles starting in 2023.
- Anne Schelle, Managing Director, Pearl TV, outlined the various testbeds running in Phoenix, Detroit, Washington, DC, and elsewhere. Datacasting offers an economically competitive alternative to that of the MNOs, she said, highlighting the automobile-fleet software upgrade use case.
Schelle later recounted how the group started by focusing on “basic television service.” This allowed a quick start-up of linear TV services, along with features like Voice Plus and loudness leveling across channels, so that they can now shift to the more innovative services supported by NextGen broadcasting. They are also a key participant in the rollout, by airing informational spots in the latest rollout markets.
To the “skeptics,” Schelle also mentioned that all the TV networks are actively involved in the NextGenTV rollout, including recent rollouts and membership in the A3SA content security partnership.
- Atheer Sabti, Global Video Solution Architect, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, explained how datacasting can be realized across services and even broadcasters, all with existing technology and solution providers.
- Sponsoring lunch was Synamedia, whose sales head Jack Vines mentioned in passing that their encoder solution is being deployed at the ATSC 3.0 Lighthouse (channel-share) facility in Los Angeles. [Apparently, the first such announcement about the LA market, which will be activated this month.]
Vines later talked about their Broadcast Gateway that not only encodes and multiplexes services, but also manages ingress of signals from multiple stations in a market, as well as retransmission distribution to cable operators.
- Dave Arland, Arland Communicaions, announced that ATSC will have a booth presence at the NAB Conference in October this year in Las Vegas.
- FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington is excited about the future of broadcast television, saying that NextGenTV targeting and personalization “bring television into the Internet age,” and should increase access to local content.
- Mark Aitken, Senior VP, Sinclair Broadcast Group, said that an interactive return channel is “fully embraced by the ATSC-3.0 standard.”
- Mark O’Brien, President and CEO, SpectraRep, said that ATSC-1 was the “foot in the door” that brought to light the problems now solvable by ATSC-3.0, such as public-safety communications and educational applications. Datacasting applications are already in place, he said, that can bring timely data to users, such as in emergency vehicles. Datacasting can leverage broadcast TV signals to securely deliver proprietary IP data, is natively one-to-many, scales infinitely, is targetable to individuals or groups, can be shared across agencies when desirable to do so, and can interoperate with other networks, with content taking the most efficient path.
- John Lawson, Executive Director AWARN Alliance, spoke with Lisa Fowlkes, Chief, FCC Public Safety & Homeland Security Bureau. Fowlkes gave an update on the actions and reports currently within the Commission’s activities on emergency alerting.
- Rob Folliard, Senior VP, Government Relations & Distribution, Gray Television, in cooperation with the Cronkite School of Journalism, built and rolled out a broadcaster application in Talahassee, FL that geo-locates users, to enable sending locally-targeted content. After initial testing, the application will be rolled out at Gray stations in other markets.
- Sean D. Plater, General Manager, WHUT-TV described the Howard University NextGenTV Lab. Among their activities is understanding the needs of learning management educators and how broadcast applications can be developed that better serve students. One of these applications is planned to go live in DC in 30-60 days, and further developments are planned.
- Dave Brass, Vice President NA Strategy & Market Development, ATEME, says his company is now developing technologies that go beyond their encoding platform that can integrate other capabilities into the traditional transmission architecture, like HDR as immersive audio. (AC)
