The FCC Media Bureau as expected issued a public notice Tuesday seeking comment on the multi-industry petition for authorization of the physical layer of ATSC 3.0 (see 1604200051). The petition asks the FCC to approve ATSC 3.0 as an “optional standard” for broadcasting and approve rule changes to allow simulcasting during the deployment of ATSC 3.0. Broadcasters told us at the NAB Show that the commission's seeking swift comment on the petition is a positive sign but not a guarantee of further FCC action. Comments are due May 26, replies June 27, said the Tuesday notice in Docket 16-142.

Pilot, formerly NAB Labs, will use the NAB Show to demo the industry's first prototype ATSC 3.0 receiver and “home gateway” that showcases the “breadth” of HTML-5-based “interactive environment” functionality enabled by the ATSC 3.0 standard, NAB said in a Friday announcement. The home gateway Pilot will demonstrate in Las Vegas this week combines an over-the-air TV tuner with Internet access, Wi-Fi connectivity and a “software environment that enables new types of user engagement,” it said. For the demo, among other content, Fox Sports will provide interactive “multi-view” programming clips, and Akamai will contribute “on-demand” content that’s “pre-loaded and stored for instant gateway access,” it said. Pilot itself will fashion a dedicated channel featuring the NHL’s Washington Capitals “that showcases zoned and targeted advertising as well as advanced emergency alerting capabilities,” it said. The NAB Show demonstration represents “early and important work that begins to show the promise” of ATSC 3.0, NAB Chief Technology Officer Sam Matheny said in a statement. “We’d like to get to a place where we can share our prototype and SDK with other developers and content providers to build out additional and even more compelling use cases,” he said of Pilot’s software development kit. “I hope you’ll see something like that happen as we proceed.”

Sinclair formed a subsidiary, One Media 3.0, to develop “business opportunities, products and services” for the ATSC 3.0 platform, the company said in a Thursday announcement. The subsidiary’s initial priorities will include building out a “national footprint” of local ATSC 3.0 single frequency networks (SFNs) to foster “virtualized coast-to-coast data services,” Sinclair said. “The optimization and development of shared facilities will foster quick, affordable adoption and implementation strategies by broadcasters,” it said. Sinclair launched the first-ever ATSC 3.0-based SFN last month in Baltimore and Washington under special temporary authority from the FCC, saying then that it expects the Baltimore-Washington SFN will be the first of “hundreds” it and other broadcasters will roll out in adopting ATSC 3.0 (see 1603220032).The subsidiary also will design, develop and deploy “a coordinated, intelligent network infrastructure” that will connect markets nationally, using ATSC 3.0's Internet protocol backbone, it said. A third priority will be buildout of “an integrated system” to collect and measure “viewer analytics and user habits on Next Gen enabled devices that will allow broadcasters to develop personalized content,” it said. Sinclair’s launching of One Media 3.0 “signals that we are ready to take the next steps to build the operating infrastructure and network necessary for the television broadcast industry to launch business models, compete on a level playing field, and bring new and exciting products to the consumer,” CEO David Smith said.

Broadcasting groups focused on transitioning to the ATSC 3.0 standard joined with consumer electronics companies to form a group focused on using the new standard for advanced emergency alerting. Called the AWARN Alliance after the proposed Advanced Warning and Response Network, the new entity will support “rapid deployment” of the AWARN system, which can deliver “rich media” such as graphics or video containing emergency information to consumer devices, the group said in a Tuesday announcement. The alliance includes ATSC advocates Pearl TV; Pilot, the former NAB Labs; LG Electronics and Sinclair. The AWARN Alliance will officially launch at the 2016 NAB Show, the group said. The group said it will be headed by John Lawson, formerly of America’s Public Television Stations and an architect of AWARN.

ATSC 3.0, based as it is on Internet protocol, “will enable new business models, giving broadcasters a competitive edge that they haven’t had since leading the HDTV revolution 15 years ago,” ATSC President Mark Richer said Monday in his President's Memo in the April issue of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. “But fully exploiting the benefits of next-generation television will require bold plans,” Richer said. “As they sharpen those bold strategies, it’s important for senior broadcasting executives to understand that the major elements of the ATSC 3.0 suite of standards are essentially completed.” At this month’s NAB Show, broadcasting executives who have been hearing about ATSC 3.0 from their chief engineers for a while now “will see first-hand the amazing possibilities enabled by next-gen broadcasting,” he said. In particular, the ATSC 3.0 Consumer Experience exhibit that ATSC is sponsoring with CTA and NAB will showcase “how to monetize next-gen broadcasting with targeted ad insertion, how to enhance their viewers’ experience with high-dynamic range programming (even with 2K broadcasting), how to reach more consumers during emergencies with advanced emergency alerting, and more,” he said. Meanwhile, the theme for the ATSC’s annual Broadcast TV Conference May 11 in Washington is “Countdown to Launch,” to reflect “where things stand on the ATSC 3.0 standard, the spectrum auction and repack plan,” Richer said. For 2016, he said, ATSC also has restructured its ATSC 3.0 Boot Camp conference May 10 and instead will host a daylong “implementation tutorial” titled "Ready-Set-Go! Planning Your ATSC 3.0 Rollout."

ATSC’s Technology Group 3 at meetings last week in Arlington, Virginia, voted to authorize the ballot that would elevate the second component of ATSC 3.0's physical layer, A/322, to the status of proposed standard, ATSC President Mark Richer emailed us Friday through a spokesman. A/322 is one of two ingredients of ATSC 3.0's physical layer that remain to be elevated to final standards now that the A/321 document on system discovery and signaling architecture for the physical layer has cleared ATSC membership balloting as a full standard (see 1603280043). The A/322 candidate standard document describes the RF transmission system of a “physical layer waveform,” said a description accompanying the actual document, now posted at the ATSC website. “This waveform enables flexible configurations of physical layer resources to target a variety of operating modes. The intent is to signal the applied technologies and allow for future technology adaptation.” TG3 also voted to authorize the ballot to elevate A/342 to the status of candidate standard for ATSC 3.0 audio, Richer said. Assuming the balloting approves A/342 in about five weeks’ time, that document will be posted as a candidate standard on the ATSC website, Richer said. With Dolby AC-4 and the MPEG-H consortium of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor vying to be named the ATSC 3.0 audio codec, Richer thinks “it’s likely there will be two systems documented as ATSC 3.0,” with the “recommendation that only one should be used in a given region,” such as in an individual country or continent, he has said.

ATSC 3.0 no longer is “just a pie-in-the-sky idea with engineers in the basement skunkworks piecing things together,” new ATSC Chairman Richard Friedel said Tuesday in the March issue of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. “Bottom line” is that ATSC 3.0 as a standard “is real and it’s coming upon us like a freight train!” said Friedel, Fox Networks executive vice president-engineering and operations. ATSC 3.0's “reality” will be in plain sight at next month’s NAB Show, “where ATSC members will demonstrate operational 3.0 hardware, running 3.0 applications on actual 3.0 over-the-air broadcasts,” Friedel said. “Broadcasters will begin placing orders for 3.0 professional equipment, and we’ll see actual consumer 3.0 receivers and ancillary equipment -- okay, they’re still prototypes but using real chips -- from major consumer electronics brands.” Friedel thinks ATSC 3.0's framers’ biggest challenge will be to “articulate” the technology’s capabilities “so broadcasters can develop their business plans and begin to make the necessary investments for the future,” he said. “With the spectrum auction underway and implementation of 3.0 expected to coincide perfectly with the spectrum repack, now is the time for broadcasters to work in earnest on business plans, implementation plans and transition plans,” he said. “Now is the time for all the stakeholders to recognize that ATSC 3.0 is real and ready to redefine the future of television.” As for ATSC 3.0 demo activities at the NAB Show, they’ll be centered around the ATSC 3.0 Broadcast Pavilion in the NAB Futures Park exhibit area on the upper level of the Las Vegas Convention Center’s South Hall, the ATSC newsletter said. The pavilion will highlight broadcast equipment and systems “from nearly 20 companies and research institutions that [are] designed to facilitate the introduction of ATSC 3.0 services,” it said.

The long-delayed choice of an audio codec for ATSC 3.0 is “progressing,” ATSC President Mark Richer told us Wednesday. “Audio, not uncharacteristically, is the complicated document” in ATSC 3.0, Richer said. “So we have plenty of people working on that, and it’s just complicated, so it’s taking a while longer than we would like.” But ATSC is “still on track to have audio done in a timely manner to allow the standard to be finished on time,” Richer said of elevating the entire suite of ATSC 3.0 specs to the status of final standard by the end of 2016. Richer thinks “there’s a fairly good chance” that ATSC 3.0 audio will “go out for a vote” as a candidate standard by the NAB Show, which opens April 16 in Las Vegas, he said. “I hope that will happen, but I think it will,” he said. ATSC released its call for proposals on ATSC 3.0 audio in December 2014 with a “project schedule” calling for ATSC’s S34 specialist group to recommend a winning codec by August 2015 (see 1412090019). The decision will boil down to a choice between the Dolby AC-4 codec and that of the MPEG-H consortium of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor.

LG Electronics teamed with Korean broadcasters MBC and SBS and other partners to beam the world’s first end-to-end 4K broadcast in Korea using the ATSC 3.0 standard, the companies said in a Tuesday announcement. Also working on the test broadcast were the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute of Korea, Korean conditional access firm DigiCAP, French broadcast equipment supplier TeamCast and American video software supplier Media Excel, they said. The first end-to-end broadcast of 4K Ultra HD “represents a significant development, because past demonstrations have simply used pre-recorded material loaded directly to a transmitter,” the announcement said. This test broadcast featured a live camera feed with real-time IP transmissions from the SBS network studio in Mokdong to the broadcaster’s Gwanak Mountain transmitter. The IP signals transmitted over the air on Channel 53 were then received using a simple antenna and decoded in Ultra HD by an LG ATSC 3.0 receiver, it said. The success of the trial “highlights the potential for Korea’s launch of terrestrial UHD TV commercial services using ATSC 3.0 in February 2017,” it said. "And the fact that Korean companies are playing such an important role in ATSC 3.0 provides a good opportunity for Korean equipment manufacturers to advance in the U.S. market.”

With the “new capabilities” of ATSC 3.0, terrestrial broadcasting “is poised to become an essential part of the next-generation content delivery network,” ATSC President Mark Richer said in the February issue of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. “By leveraging broadcasters’ highly efficient one-to-many architecture and Internet protocol transmission, ATSC 3.0 will enable new over-the-air services such as 4K and HDR, immersive audio and targeted advertising, mobile TV and advanced emergency alerting.” CES “previewed how ATSC 3.0 will usher in the future of broadcast" TV, he said. At the NAB Show in April, “we expect to see real-world demonstrations of even more ATSC 3.0 capabilities,” he said. “With the lion’s share of the standard completed and remaining items, like audio and interactivity, wrapping up in the months ahead, we’re on target to finalize the entire suite of ATSC 3.0 standards for next-gen broadcasting this year.”