Coherent Logix and Sinclair's One Media got FCC special temporary authority to operate an experimental facility that will use the base elements of the new ATSC 3.0 standard, One Media said in a news release Thursday. The facility will implement a single frequency network (SFN) using the new standard on channel 43 in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore markets, it said: “The test is designed to provide real-time assessments of quality of service using the new Internet Protocol-based standard currently being reviewed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee.” The experiment is designed to prove new capabilities of broadcasting TV under ATSC 3.0, such as being able to program the same channel in adjacent markets, One Media said. “The SFN will permit broadcasters to 'zone' programming and advertising to discrete parts of a station's market using the same channel,” it said. "We now have a place to innovate, and together with our Memorandum of Understanding partners, Samsung and Pearl TV, we can bring powerful business ideas into practical demonstrations of opportunities to monetize all of our core assets,” said Sinclair Vice President-Advanced Technology Mark Aitken. The experiment's location on the “congested” East Coast helps test the new standard's capabilities under real-world conditions, One Media said. “Our demonstration should provide regulators the evidence they need to expedite these dramatic and competitive service improvements," said One Media Executive Vice President-Strategic and Legal Affairs Jerald Fritz.

​Balloting began this week on the “main elements” that will compose ATSC 3.0's physical transmission system, ATSC President Mark Richer said Wednesday in ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. If approved, those elements will be elevated to the status of a candidate standard, he said. That's significant because it will provide “a strong foundation for the industry to begin considering the launch of next-generation television broadcasting,” and will help “kickstart manufacturers to begin developing prototype ATSC 3.0 equipment,” he said. Within a month, ATSC will have a complete physical layer that manufacturers can start building to, ATSC insiders told us. The expectation is that perhaps as early as CES in January, the industry will have prototype physical devices for ATSC 3.0's transmission system available to the market, they said. ATSC will make an announcement when the ballot is voted and it’s expected that the vote on the system will pass because the companies that were involved in harmonizing ideas around a physical transmission system agreed the industry now has something that’s ready to be built, they said. CEA’s R4WG18 working group created a “gap analysis” of current and proposed ATSC 3.0 video formats for over-the-air broadcast and broadband streaming video “use cases,” said Brian Markwalter, CEA senior vice president-research and standards, in the same issue of the newsletter. From that gap analysis, R4WG18 recently reached consensus “on a lower limit for video formats that should be supported by ATSC 3.0 receivers, primarily fixed, larger screen devices, for the OTA use case,” he said, referring to over-the-air broadcasts. “With some yet-to-be-determined details, an initial list of broadband video formats has also been proposed.” The first section of the recommended practice will focus on recommended video formats for “baseline” and “advanced” fixed TVs, he said. “The final document is expected to address the audio, runtime and other aspects of both baseline and advanced ATSC 3.0 receivers.” R4WG18 hopes to complete the video formats list and give CEA’s R4 video systems committee a “progress report” at face-to-face meetings this month, he said.

Though people generally have called ATSC 3.0 the next-generation broadcast TV standard, it actually will be a suite of about 20 standards, said Rich Chernock, chairman of ATSC Technology Group 3, the committee that's supervising ATSC 3.0 standards development, in a blog post. “When considering what the architecture for the ATSC 3.0 documents will be, think of standards like toolboxes,” said Chernock, chief science officer at Triveni Digital. “When you’re faced with a plumbing task, your ability to reach into a box containing plumber’s tools only is quite helpful, as opposed to a box containing a jumble of electrical, woodworking and plumbing tools.” ATSC 3.0 specs will cover “an entire next-generation broadcasting system, from the RF transmission through presentation to the viewer or listener and all the necessary items in between,” Chernock said. “All told, the documentation for ATSC 3.0 will easily be in excess of 1,000 pages. As you might imagine, a single monolithic document of this size would be very difficult to create, to manage and especially to read. This is one of the reasons it makes sense to have a suite of standards, covering different aspects of the overall ATSC 3.0 system.”

Friday’s deadline passed for ATSC’s S34-2 ad hoc group to deliver a recommended ATSC 3.0 audio codec to its parent S34 subcommittee, but with no announcement on a winning system. A statement from ATSC President Mark Richer suggested an announcement on the winning codec might be a distance off. “ATSC will announce elements of ATSC 3.0 as they are approved for Candidate Standard status by ATSC’s Technology Group 3,” Richer emailed us Friday, in reference to the technology group chaired by Triveni Digital Chief Science Officer Rich Chernock that's overseeing all ATSC 3.0 standardization work. “In the case of audio,” Richer said, “the work of a subcommittee continues and there is nothing yet to announce.” Dolby AC-4 and the MPEG-H audio alliance of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor are the two proponents vying to be chosen as the ATSC 3.0 audio system (see 1508110027).

Sinclair’s memorandum of understanding with Samsung and Pearl TV to support the speedy commercial implementation of ATSC 3.0 (see 1506170046) signals “to the broadcast industry and to the world at large and the federal government that the broadcast industry is about ready to move” to the next-generation broadcast platform, Sinclair CEO David Smith said on a Wednesday earnings call. Samsung, “as the largest manufacturer in the world, is clearly now fully engaged in the process of preparing prototype products” for ATSC 3.0 “that will be likely on demonstration” at the January CES and April’s NAB Show, “in all probability,” said Smith, whose company has been a strong advocate of commercializing ATSC 3.0 sooner rather than later. Through the MOU, “I think when you look at what we're all going to be doing together, we're going to be demonstrating over the next three to five months some incredible capability to the technology,” he said. ATSC 3.0 is “really now on what I would say is a very fast track to being adopted by the industry,” Smith said. “And once that's done, then we'll go to the FCC and we'll say, it's time to go and we'll go through that process. And then we'll start to prepare for a transition.”

TP Vision, which makes and markets Philips-brand TVs in most regions of the world outside North America, Tuesday became the third TV maker to announce a collaboration with Dolby Labs to promote the adoption of the AC-4 audio codec. Dolby announced similar collaborations last month with Sony and Vizio. Dolby expects consumer TVs with AC-4 audio built in to become available in 2017, it said. AC-4 is vying against the MPEG-H consortium of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor to be chosen as the audio codec for the next-gen ATSC 3.0, and a decision on that selection is expected within the next two weeks (see 1507240030). AC-4 was published last year as an international spec at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (see 1501210023), and is available in a toolkit for use with European-based DVB broadcast systems, Dolby said.

Some of the most “pressing work” facing the many specialist and ad hoc groups working to frame ATSC 3.0 “relates to reaching consensus on a few remaining open items” for ATSC 3.0's physical layer transmission system, ATSC President Mark Richer said in the August issue, published Monday, of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. ATSC’s many subgroups “will be very busy in August putting the finishing touches on documenting core building blocks” of the physical layer transmission system as it heads toward ATSC 3.0 “candidate standard” status, Richer said. Work “in parallel” on ATSC 3.0's “upper layers,” including decisions about the ATSC 3.0 audio system, also continues unabated,” Richer said. Under ATSC’s call for audio proposals issued in December, the S34-2 ad hoc group that’s studying ATSC 3.0 audio proposals faces an Aug. 14 deadline for delivering a recommended audio standard to its parent S34 specialist group on "applications and presentation," and Richer told us recently that work is “generally on track” toward completion (see 1507240030). “While there’s a flurry of ATSC activity focused on our aggressive short-term goals of moving various ATSC 3.0 elements” to candidate standard status this year, “we also have our eye on the horizon,” Richer said. One “exciting opportunity for many ATSC members” that the ATSC board has identified “is the desire for prototype broadcast and reception hardware” based on the ATSC 3.0 candidate standard, Richer said. “A critical mass of equipment from various manufacturers will be needed for laboratory and field testing as ATSC 3.0 moves toward Proposed Standard status in 2016. And we encourage our members to begin developing such prototypes as the suite of standards collectively known as ATSC 3.0 solidifies in the months ahead.”

Proposals connected with the incentive auction's vacant channel proceeding that would freeze the service contours of broadcasters could impair TV broadcasters' ability to take full advantage of ATSC 3.0, said a group of broadcasters in meetings last week with Commissioner Mike O'Rielly and aides to Chairman Tom Wheeler and Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, according to an ex parte filing from pro-ATSC 3.0 group Pearl TV. Pearl's members are Cox Media, Graham Media, Hearst TV, Media General, Meredith, Raycom Media, Schurz Communications and Tegna. ATSC 3.0 development is in its final stages, is being promoted by Samsung along with Pearl and will be launched in South Korea in time for the 2016 Summer Olympics, the filing said. Under the new ATSC standard, it will be easier for broadcasters to channel share, but doing so would involve possible changes to service contours, the filing said. Proposals to prevent that would leave broadcasters with “no ability to adapt to the very different engineering and technical landscape that will exist post-repacking,” the ex parte filing said. The FCC should allow six years after the repacking to allow for broadcaster adjustments, it said. “That period will give broadcasters an opportunity to respond to the repacking process. It also will give broadcasters interested in channel sharing the confidence that they can enter the auction and be able to serve their existing audience,” Pearl said in the filing.

Though ATSC President Mark Richer “can't name a specific date for the work of a subcommittee, the process to select audio technology for use in ATSC 3.0 is making great progress and is generally on track," he emailed us Friday. Under ATSC’s call for audio proposals issued in December, the S34-2 ad hoc group that’s studying ATSC 3.0 audio proposals faces an Aug. 14 deadline for delivering a recommended audio standard to its parent S34 specialist group on "applications and presentation" chaired by Madeleine Noland, an LG Electronics consultant. Dolby Labs CEO Kevin Yeaman on a Wednesday earnings call generally sidestepped questions about Dolby’s fate in the ATSC 3.0 audio selection process, though he said "we’ve been highly engaged in that process.” Dolby’s AC-4 technology is one of the proposals that the S34-2 ad hoc group is considering for adoption, along with a second proposal from the MPEG-H audio alliance of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor. A third proponent, DTS, dropped out of the running days before the NAB Show opened in mid-April (see 1504130030). “We have a fantastic solution that both increases efficiency and also opens up possibilities for new and enhanced audio experiences,” Yeaman said of Dolby AC-4. “We feel good about where we are at this stage in the game,” though “we’re still ways off from any broad implementation,” he said. Pressed in Q&A on when ATSC might pick an audio winner for ATSC 3.0, Yeaman said: “I don’t think we have a firm date from them.”

Roughly a week before ATSC 3.0's framers unleash a full progress report on the next-gen DTV standard at their “Boot Camp” conference on Wednesday in Washington, ATSC Thursday said the “first ingredient” of ATSC 3.0's physical layer has reached the status of “candidate standard” following a month of balloting. The so-called “bootstrap signal” portion of the physical layer is designated “A/321 Part 1" and will be “important to the future evolution of ATSC 3.0,” ATSC said in an announcement. Other “core elements” of the physical layer, including its modulation and error correction systems, will be balloted for candidate status this summer, ATSC said. Balloting on each of ATSC 3.0's components typically will be a four-week process, ATSC has said. The bootstrap signal for ATSC 3.0 transmission will remain a candidate standard for nine months while prototype equipment is built and tested “in advance of balloting for the entire system,” ATSC said. “The bootstrap is a low-level signal that tells a receiver to decode and process wireless services multiplexed in a broadcast channel,” said ATSC President Mark Richer. “It’s designed to be a very robust signal and detectable even at low signal levels.” The bootstrap signal provides “a universal entry point into a broadcast waveform,” ATSC said. It uses a “fixed configuration” known to all receivers “and carries information to enable processing and decoding the wireless service associated with a detected bootstrap signal,” as well as a “flag” that indicates when an emergency alert is in effect, it said.