ATSC 3.0 Archives – Page 3 of 6 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Webinar: An Overview of the ATSC 3.0 Interactive Environment

Posted on 3rd February 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Allowing viewers to interact with television services is an obvious next step for the IP-delivered ATSC service. Taking cues from the European HbbTV standard, the aim here is to make available as many ways as practical for viewers to direct their viewing in order to open up new avenues for television channels and programme creators.

Mark Corl is chair of the TG3/S38: Specialist Group on Interactive Environment. Its aim is to support interactive applications and their companion devices. It has produced the A/344 standard which is based on W3C technologies with APIs which support the needs of broadcast television. It describes the Interactive Environment Content Display model allowing video to be mixed with app graphics as a composite display. Mark is also part of the ATSC group TG3-9 which looks at how the different layers of ATSC 3.0 can communicate with each other where necessary.

From the TG3 group, too, is the Companion Device Concepts A/338 standards document which details discovery of second devices such as smartphones and enabling them to communicate with the ATSC 3.0 receiver.

In this webinar from the IEEE BTS, Mark marries an understanding of these documents with the practical aspects of deploying interactive broadcaster applications to receivers including some of the motivations to do this, such as improving revenue through the introduction of Dynamic Ad Insertion and personalisation.

Mark Corl
Chair, TG3/S38 Specialist Group on Interactive Environment
Co-chair, TG3-9 AHG on Interlayer Communications in the ATSC 3.0 Ecosystem
Senior Vice President, Emergent Technology Development, Triveni Digital

Webinar: ATSC 3.0 Signaling, Delivery, and Security Protocols

Posted on 20th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

ATSC 3.0 is bringing IP delivery to terrestrial broadcast. Streaming data live over the air is no mean feat, but nevertheless can be achieved with standard protocols such as MPEG DASH. The difficulty is telling the other end what’s its receiving and making sure that security is maintained ensuring that no one can insert unintended media/data.

In the second of this webinar series from the IEEE BTS, Adam Goldberg digs deep into two standards which form part of ATSC 3.0 to explain how security, delivery and signalling are achieved. Like other recent standards, such as SMPTE’s 2022 and 2110, we see that we’re really dealing with a suite of documents. Starting from the root document A/300, there are currently twenty further documents describing the physical layer, as we learnt last week in the IEEE BTS webinar from Sony’s Luke Fay, management and protocol layer, application and presentation layer as well as the security layer. In this talk Adam, who is Chair of a group on ATSC 3.0 security and vice-chair one on Management and Protocols, explains what’s in the documents A/331 and A/360 which between them define signalling, delivery and security for ATSC 3.0.

Security in ATSC 3.0
One of the benefits of ATSC 3.0’s drive into IP and streaming is that it is able to base itself on widely developed and understood standards which are already in service in other industries. Security is no different, using the same base technology that secure websites use the world over to achieve security. Still colloquially known by its old name, SSL, the encrypted communication with websites has seen several generations since the world first saw ‘HTTPS’ in the address bar. TLS 1.2 and 1.3 are the encryption protocols used to secure and authenticate data within ATSC 3.0 along with X.509 cryptographic signatures.

Authentication vs Encryption
The importance of authentication alongside encryption is hard to overstate. Encryption allows the receiver to ensure that the data wasn’t changed during transport and gives assurance that no one else could have decoded a copy. It provides no assurance that the sender was actually the broadcaster. Certificates are the key to ensuring what’s called a ‘chain of trust’. The certificates, which are also cryptographically signed, match a stored list of ‘trusted parties’ which means that any data arriving can carry a certificate proving it did, indeed, come from the broadcaster or, in the case of apps, a trusted third party.

Signalling and Delivery
Telling the receiver what to expect and what it’s getting is a big topic and dealt with in many places with in the ATSC 3.0 suite. The Service List Table (SLT) provides the data needed for the receiver to get handle on what’s available very quickly which in turn points to the correct Service Layer Signaling (SLS) which, for a specific service, provides the detail needed to access the media components within including the languages available, captions, audio and emergency services.

ATSC 3.0 Receiver Protocol Stack

Media delivery is achieved with two technologies. ROUTE (Real-Time Object Delivery over Unidirectional Transport ) which is an evolution of FLUTE which the 3GPP specified to deliver MPEG DASH over LTE networks. and MMTP (Multimedia Multiplexing Transport Protocol) an MPEG standard which, like MPEG DASH is based on the container format ISO BMFF which we covered in a previous video here on The Broadcast Knowledge

Register now for this webinar to find out how this all connects together so that we can have safe, connected television displaying the right media at the right time from the right source!

Speaker

Adam Goldberg
Chair, ATSC 3.0 Specialist Group on ATSC 3.0 Security
Vice-chair, ATSC 3.0 Specialist Group on Management and Protocols
Director Technical Standards, Sony Electronics

Webinar: ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer and Data Link Layer Overview

Posted on 13th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

ATSC 3.0 brings IP delivery to over-the-air TV marking a major change in delivery to the home. For the first time video, audio and other data is all delivered as network streams allowing services available to TV viewers at home to modernise and merge with online streaming services better matching the viewing habits of today. ATSC 3.0 deployments are starting in the USA and it has already been rolled out in South Korea for the XXIII Olympic Winter Games in 2018.

Whilst the move to IP is transformational, ATSC 3.0 delivers a whole slew of improvements to the ATSC standard for RF, bandwidth, Codecs and more. In this, the first of three webinars from the IEEE BTS focussing in on ATSC 3.0, we look at the physical layer with Luke Fay, Chair of the ATSC 3.0 group and also a Senior Manager of Technical Standards at Sony.

Click to register: Wednesday, 15th January, 2020. 11am ET / 16:00 GMT

What is the Physical Layer?
The physical layer refers to the method data gets from one place to another. In this case, we’re talking about transmission by air, RF. Whilst this isn’t, in some ways, as physical as a copper cable, we have to remember that, at a basic level, communication is about making a high voltage in place A change the voltage in place B. The message physically moves from A to B and the medium it uses and the way it manipulates that medium are what we refer to as the physical layer.

In this webinar, Luke will talk about System Discovery and Signalling, defined by document A/321 and the Physical Layer Protocol defined by A/322. Both freely available from the ATSC website. The webinar will finish with a Q&A. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the topics which will be covered.

Choice of modulation

ATSC 3.0 has chosen the COFDM modulation scheme over the previous 8VSB, currently used for first-generation ATSC broadcasts, to deliver data over the air from the transmitter. COFDM, stands for Coded Orthogonal Frequency Devision Multiplexing and has become the go-to modulation method for digital transmissions including for DAB, DAB+ and the DVB terrestrial, satellite and cable standards.

One of the reasons for its wide adoption is that COFDM has guard bands; times when the transmitter is guaranteed not to send any data. This allows the receiver some time to receive any data which comes in late due to multi-path reflections or any other reason. This means that for COFDM, you get better performance if you run a network of nearby transmitters on the same frequency – known as a Single Frequency Network (SFN). A transmitters signal from further away will arrive later, and if in the guard interval, will be used to re-inforce the directly received signal. This means that, counter-intuitively from analogue days, running an SFN actually helps improve reception.

Multiple operating points to match the business case
Another important feature of ATSC 3.0 at the physical layer is the ability to be able to choose the robustness of the signal and have multiple transmissions simultaneously using different levels of robustness. These multiple transmissions are called pipes. As many of us will be familiar with, when transmitting a high bandwidth, the signal can be fragile and easily corrupted by interference. Putting resilience into the signal uses up bandwidth either due using some of the capacity to put error checking and error recovery data in or just by slowing down the rate the signal is sent which, of course, means not as many bits can be sent in the same time window.

Because bandwidth and resilience are a balancing act with each one fighting against the other, it’s important for stations to be able to choose what’s right for them and their business case. Having a high robustness signalm for penetration indoors can be very useful for targeting reception on mobile devices and ATSC 3.0 can actually achieve reception when the signal is below the noise, i.e. a negative signal to noise ratio. A higher bandwidth service delivering UHD at around 20Mbps can be achieved, however, by using 64 instead of 16 QAM.

Luke Fay
Chairman, ATSC Technology Group 3,
Senior Manager Technical Standards, Sony Home Entertainment & Sound Products – America

Video: ATSC 3.0 – What You Need to Know

Posted on 18th December 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

ATSC 3.0 is the next sea change in North American broadcasting, shared with South Korea, Mexico and other locations. Depending on your viewpoint, this could be as fundamental as the move to digital lockstep with the move to HD programming all those years ago. ATSC 3.0 takes terrestrial broadcasting in to the IP world enabling traditional broadcast to be mixed with internet-based video, entertainment and services as part of one, seamless, experience.

ATSC 3.0 is gaining traction in the US and some other countries as a way to deliver digital video within a single traditional VHF channel – and with the latest 3.0 version, this actually moves to broadcasting IP packets over the air.

Now ready for deployment, in the US ATSC 3.0 is now at a turning point. With a number of successful trials under its belt, it’s now time for the real deployments to start. In this panel discussion as part from TV Technology looks at the groups of stations working together to deploy the standard.

The ‘Transition Guide‘ document is one of the first topics as this video tackles. With minimum in technical detail, this document explains how ATSC 3.0 is intended to work in terms of spectrum, regulatory matters and its technical features and makeup. We then have a chance to see the ‘NextGenTV’ logo released in September for equipment which is confirmed compliant with ATSC 3.0.

ATSC 3.0 is a suite of standards and work is still ongoing. There are 27 standards completed or progress ranging from the basic system itself to captions to signalling. A lot of work is going in to replicating features of the current broadcast systems like full implementation of the early alert system (EAS) and similar elements.

It’s well known that Phoenix Arizona is a test bed for ATSC and next we hear an update on the group of 12 stations which are participating in the adoption of the standard, sharing experiences and results with the industry. We see that they are carrying out trial broadcasts at the moment and will be moving into further testing, including with SFNs (Single Frequency Networks) come 2020. We then see an example timeframe showing an estimated 8-12 months needed to launch a market.

The video approaches the end by looking at case studies with WKAR and ARK multicasting, answering questions such as when will next-gen audio be available, the benefit of SFNs and how it would work with 5G and a look at deploying immersive audio.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Pete Sockett Director of Engineering & Operations, WRAL-TV, Raleigh
	Mark Aitken Senior VP of Advanced Technology, Sinclair Broadcast Group President of ONE Media 3.0
	Dave Folsom Consultant, Pearl TV
	Lynn Claudy Chairman of the ATSC board Senior VP, Technology at NAB
	Tom Butts Content Director, TV Technology

Subscribe to get daily updates