Jason Power Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Next-generation audio refers to a range of new technologies which allow for immersive audio like 3D sound, for increased accessibility, for better personalisation and anything which delivers a step-change in the lister experience. NGA technologies can stand on their own but are often part of next-generation broadcast technologies like ATSC 3.0 or UHD/8K transmissions.

This talk from the Sports Video Group and Dolby presents one case study from a few that have happened in 2020 which delivered NGA over the air to homes. First, though, Dolby’s Jason Power brings us up to date on how NGA has been deployed to date and looks at what it is.

Whilst ‘3D sound’ is an easy to understand feature, ‘increased personalisation’ is less so. Jason introduces ideas for personalisation such as choosing which team you’re interested in and getting a different crowd mix dependant on that. The possibilities are vast and we’re only just starting to experiment with what’s possible and determine what people actually want or to change where your mics are, on the pitch or in the stands.

What can I do if I want to hear next-generation audio? Jason explains that four out of five TVs are now shipping with NGA audio and all of the five top manufacturers have support for at least one NGA technology. Such technologies are Dolby’s AC-4 and sADM. AC-4 allows delivery of Dolby Atmos which is an object-based audio format which allows the receiver much more freedom to render the sound correctly based on the current speaker set up. Should you change how many speakers you have, the decoder can render the sound differently to ensure the ‘stereo’ image remains correct.

To find out more about the technologies behind NGA, take a look at this talk from the Telos Alliance.

Next, Matthieu Parmentier talks about the Roland Garros event in 2020 which was delivered using sADM plus Dolby AC-4. sADM is an open specification for metadata interchange, the aim of which is to help interoperability between vendors. The S-ADM metadata is embedded in the SDI and then transported uncompressed as SMPTE 302M.

ATEME’s Mickaël Raulet completes the picture by explaining their approach which included setting up a full end-to-end system for testing and diagnosis. The event itself, we see, had three transmission paths. An SDR satellite backup and two feeds into the DVB-T2 transmitter at the Eiffel Tower.

The session ends with an extensive Q&A session where they discuss the challenges they faced and how they overcame them as well as how their businesses are changing.

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Speakers

	Jason Power Senior Director of Commercial Partnerships & Standards, Dolby
	Mickaël Raulet Vice President of Innovation, ATEME
	Matthieu Parmentier Head of Data & Artificial Intelligence France Television
	Moderator:Roger Charlesworth Charlesworth Media

Where is UHD? Whilst the move to HD for US primetime slots happened very quickly, HD had actually taken many years to gain a hold on the market. Now, though SD services are still numerous, top tier channels all target HD and in terms of production, SD doesn’t really exist. Is UHD successfully building the momentum needed to dominate the market in the way that HD does or are there blockers? Is there the will but not the bandwidth? Can we show that UHD makes financial sense for a business? This video from the DVB Project and UltraHD Forum answers these questions.

Ian Nock takes the mic first and explains the UltraHD Forum’s role in the industry ahead of introducing Dolby’s Jason Power. Ian explains that the UltraHD Forum isn open organisation focused on all aspects of Ultra High Definition including HDR, Wide Colour Gamut (WCG), Next Generation Audio (NGA) and High Frame Rate (HFR). Jason Power is the chair of the DVB Commercial Module AVC. See starts by underlining the UHD-1 Phase 1 and Phase 2 specifications. Phase 1 defines the higher resolution and colour gamut, but phase 2 delivers higher frame rate, better audio and HDR. DVB works to produce standards that define how these can be used and the majority of UHD services available are DVB compliant.

On the topic of available services, Ben Schwarz takes the stand next to introduce the UltraHD Forum’s ‘Service Tracker‘ which tracks the UHD services available to the public around the world. Ben underlines there’s been a tripling of services available between 2018 to 2020. It allows you to order by country, look at resolution (from 2K to 8L) and more. Ben gives a demo and explains the future plans.

Paul Bray focusses on the global television set business. He starts looking at how the US and Europe have caught up with China in terms of shipments but the trend of buying a TV set – on average – an inch larger than the year before, shows little sign of abating. A positive for the industry, in light of Covid-19, is that the market is not predicted to shrink. Rather, the growth that was expected will be stunted. The US replaces TVs more often than other countries, so the share of TVs there which are UHD is higher than anywhere else. Europe still has a large proportion of people who are happy with 32″ TVs due to the size and HD is perfectly ok for them. Paul shows a great graph which shows the UHD Penetration of each market against the number of UHD services available. We see that Europe is notably in the lead and that China barely has any UHD services at all. Though it should be noted that Omdia are counting linear services only.

Graph showing UHD Penetration per geographical market Vs. Number of Linear UHD services in that Market

The next part of the video is a 40-minute Q&A which includes Virginie Drugeon who explains her work in defining the dynamic metadata that is sent to the receiver so that it can correctly adapt the picture, particularly for HDR, to the display itself. The Q&A covers the impacts of Covid-19, recording formats for delivery to broadcasters, bitrates on satellite, the UltraHD Forum’s foundational guidelines, new codecs within DVB, high frame rate content and many other topics.

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Speakers

	Jason Power Chair of the DVB Commercial Module AVC Working Group Commercial Partnerships and Standards, Dolby Laboratories
	Ben Schwarz Chair of Ultra HD Forum Communication Working Group
	Paul Gray Research Director, Omdia
	Virginie Drugeon Senior Engineer, Digital Standardisation, Panasonic
	Moderator:Ian Nock Chair of the Interoperability Working Group of the Ultra HD Forum Principal Consultant & Founder, Fairmile West

Jason Power

Video: Next-generation audio in the European market – The state of play

Video: UHD – commercial success or work in progress?

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