Allegro DVT launched the industry’s first “test suites” for decoder manufacturers to gauge compliance with the HEVC Scalability Extension (SHVC) standard, it said in a Monday announcement. The test suites are composed of multiple test sets to check spatial, bit-depth and color gamut scalability, plus "various combinations of these scalability features,” it said. The company expects SHVC “to play a major role especially in the context of the upcoming ATSC 3.0 standard,” which will introduce new features, such as Ultra HD, high dynamic range and support for mobile devices, it said. SHVC’s “layered” coding can be used to achieve backward compatibility “and less bandwidth congestion in the backbone network while ensuring efficient support for portable and mobile devices,” it said.

CES was the start of "an important new phase” for ATSC 3.0, as manufacturers and broadcasters began demonstrating products and services based on the “core” ATSC 3.0 candidate standards adopted last year, said ATSC President Mark Richer in a Friday statement. Those demonstrations will be repeated and enhanced at April's NAB Show, ATSC has said (see 1601040057). “The lion’s share of the standard has been completed and remaining items, like audio and interactivity, will be done in the months ahead.” ATSC is “on target to finalize the entire suite of ATSC 3.0 standards” this year, he said. CES featured the first live demonstrations of Ultra HD over-the-air broadcasts with high dynamic range using the ATSC 3.0's physical transmission layer adopted as a candidate standard in late September (see 1509290029).

LG is demonstrating reception on the CES floor of live, over-the-air 4K Ultra HD broadcasts in high dynamic range using the new ATSC 3.0 candidate standard, the company said Wednesday. The “landmark broadcast” over channel 18 is emanating from the transmitter of KHMP Las Vegas on Nevada’s Black Mountain, LG said. KHMP is owned and operated by DNV Spectrum Holdings, LG said.

ATSC issued requests for proposals for an ATSC 3.0 “consumer showcase” and ATSC 3.0 “workflow demonstrations” for the NAB Show in April, ATSC said Monday in the January issue of its monthly newsletter, The Standard. The consumer showcase will be in the lobby area in the upper level of the Las Vegas Convention Center's South Hall. Managed jointly by ATSC, CTA and NAB, the showcase will emphasize products and technologies that highlight “the consumer side of ATSC 3.0,” including 4K reception, immersive audio and advanced emergency alerting, it said. The workflow demonstrations, to be in a special area of the NAB Futures Park pavilion at the east end of the Upper South Hall, will “highlight new equipment that will be required at the broadcast station to offer the consumer access to the advanced features enabled by ATSC 3.0,” it said. ATSC also is “exploring the feasibility of providing a live ATSC 3.0 link” from the workflow demonstrations to the consumer showcase, it said.

Reserving vacant channels for unlicensed use would be “devastating” to low-power TV and translator stations and make aspects of ATSC 3.0 impractical, said the Advanced Television Broadcasting Alliance Executive Director Louis Libin and Sinclair Broadcast Senior Vice President-Strategy and Policy Rebecca Hanson in a meeting with FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly Tuesday, according to an ex parte filing in docket 12-268. “Elevating unlicensed (which does not even have an allocation in the broadcast band) to supra-primary status would be arbitrary and capricious absent a full record,” said the filing: “The proposal would severely limit full power stations’ ability to enhance and expand service.”

ATSC President Mark Richer sees 10 more ATSC 3.0 ingredients moving to candidate standard status this month, he said in the December issue of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard, published Monday. The new candidate standards will include those of “major elements” of ATSC 3.0, among them video encoding, Internet protocol transport, electronic service guides, second-screen services and closed captioning, Richer said. He expects ATSC will “finalize the few remaining” candidate standards for audio, security and interactive capabilities in early 2016, he said. The candidate standard phase of ATSC 3.0 “is not a time to take a breath,” Richer said. It’s “a critical time for broadcasters to implement test services and for professional and consumer equipment manufacturers to fine-tune their prototypes and demonstrate the capabilities of ATSC 3.0,” he said. “And it’s the time for all stakeholders to work together on any necessary clarifications to the standards documents to assure interoperability.”

Sinclair treated a delegation of 11 South Korean broadcast industry experts in Las Vegas Thursday to the “first end-to-end transmission” of Ultra HD signals with high dynamic range using the proposed ATSC 3.0 transmission standard, the broadcaster said in a Thursday announcement. The broadcast of content encoded with the H.265's codec’s scalability extension adopted a year ago originated from Sinclair’s facility on Black Mountain near Las Vegas using a prototype Teamcast modulator and was received 15 miles away by prototype receiver technology developed by Technicolor and Sinclair’s subsidiary One Media, Sinclair said. South Korea is weighing whether to use ATSC 3.0 to transmit Ultra HD video of the February 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Sinclair said. While U.S. broadcasters will have the option to use ATSC 3.0 to transmit Ultra HD and other services within their existing 6-MHz channels, South Korea has assigned new channels to broadcasters specifically to transmit in Ultra HD, it said. The ATSC 3.0 demonstration for the South Korean delegation was “just a preview” of what Sinclair, Samsung and Pearl TV plan to show at CES (see 1511050048), Sinclair said.

There needs to be “a business entity” that drives the commercial adoption of ATSC 3.0, and “those pieces are being lined up,” Mark Aitken, Sinclair vice president-advanced technology, told us. “If you ask me, what’s going to drive this thing forward, it’s going to be the equivalent of something like the Wi-Fi Alliance,” Aitken said of the group formed by big tech companies in 1999 as the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (see 0209170020) and later renamed the Wi-Fi Alliance to promote and certify Wi-Fi products and services. “Think of this Wi-Fi Alliance being called something like the IP Broadcast Alliance,” Aitken said. “There was a standard in the analog days built around being able to convey pictures and sound over the air,” he said. “TV was the one thing.” But in ATSC 3.0, “we’ve got this broadcast platform, and it’s all IP-based,” Aitken said. “It’s a tremendous economic engine, but TV is only one of the services that it has to offer.” Aitken sees ATSC 3.0 as an opportunity to use existing TV services as an economic springboard “to get into new services that are possible because we have a wireless IP platform,” he said. “For me, that is the story. The story is IP broadcast.”

High dynamic range “will ultimately be part of the ATSC 3.0 video specification, allowing broadcasters to compete effectively with other distributors of HDR content,” such as over-the-top (OTT) video providers and marketers of Ultra HD Blu-ray players and discs, said Alan Stein, Technicolor vice president-research and development, in an interview in the November issue of The Standard, ATSC’s monthly online newsletter. The S34-1 ad hoc group on video technology that Stein chairs reached consensus on the use of the H.265 video codec and its Main-10 profile, Stein said. “HDR solutions will need to be 10-bit and compatible with this specification." Stein agrees “there’s huge interest in broadcast HDR,” he said. But over-the-air HDR faces “some particular challenges” that are “quite different” from streaming HDR over the top or delivering HDR through physical media like Ultra HD Blu-ray, he said. Broadcast TV’s live production environment, regional opt-outs and interstitial advertising all “contribute to an environment that is quite different from offline-produced content,” he said. “That said, there is a real fear of fragmented HDR solutions entering the marketplace, which could confuse consumers and hurt adoption. It’s important that ATSC specify technologies that are adapted to our unique environment and can be deployed at scale across various devices when ATSC 3.0 launches.” So elusive was consensus within S34-1 on HDR that it’s possible the candidate standard draft for ATSC 3.0 video wouldn't have HDR included, Stein told the ATSC 3.0 Boot Camp conference in May (see 1505130058). ATSC President Mark Richer thinks his group is “still on track to have most ATSC 3.0 elements approved or balloted for Candidate Standards by year end,” Richer said in his “President’s Memo” column in The Standard. Coming soon to ATSC 3.0 “are middle and upper layer standards for video and audio coding, closed captioning, and more,” Richer said. “Although ballots for some areas like interactivity and transport are expected in early 2016, the majority of the overall ATSC 3.0 Candidate Standard will be in place for manufacturers to build equipment to support field testing as the standard moves to Proposed Standard status next year.”

Having just elevated ATSC 3.0's physical layer to a candidate standard (see 1509290029), ATSC is “on target to move essentially the entire suite of ATSC 3.0 standards” to candidate-standard status by year-end, ATSC President Mark Richer said in a "President's Memo" in the October issue of The Standard, ATSC’s monthly newsletter, published Thursday. In emphasizing “the need for speed” on ATSC 3.0, “we’re not just going fast for the sake of going fast,” Richer said. Broadcasters, CE makers and others in the U.S., South Korea and other countries “are clamoring for the completion of ATSC 3.0,” he said. Elevating the ATSC 3.0 suite to candidate-standard status will give stakeholders “confidence for short- and mid-term business planning and investments, while providing a critical platform for evaluating the technology under real-world conditions,” in preparation for moving the suite to proposed-standard status in 2016, Richer said. The candidate standard phase “provides an opportunity for the industry to implement some or all of the documented aspects of the standard,” he said. “That will help to assure that standard works as advertised, that professional and consumer electronics products will be interoperable and that there’s a good understanding of implementation issues.” Sinclair’s affiliated ONE Media is launching experimental broadcasts in Baltimore and Washington that will include the first single frequency network implementations using base elements of the new transmission candidate standard, the newsletter said in a separate column. “The full-power, multi-site test platform” in both markets “will deploy a full range of next-generation services that include fixed, portable and mobile capabilities,” it said. “The test broadcasts are being designed to provide real-time assessments of quality of service” using the new IP-based physical layer, it said. The testing is being done under the memorandum of understanding signed mid-June by Samsung, Sinclair and Pearl TV (see 1506170046), it said.