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ATSC II

Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Craig Birkmaier

The new ATSC standard for mobile/handheld devices may have far-reaching implications.

In recent years, the consumer electronics industry has been striving to make HDTV a bigger part of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Corporate one-upmanship has driven consumer electronics companies to develop ever-larger HDTV screens. At the 2008 CES show, Panasonic's 150in plasma display dwarfed competitors, not to mention the people who came to see it.

Next January, when CES returns to Las Vegas, the big news could be the introduction of mobile and handheld devices with tiny screens. The devices could receive over-the-air broadcasts using the new mobile/handheld DTV standard that is nearing completion by the ATSC (ATSC-M/H).

Those who rode the mobile DTV demo buses at NAB got a preview of what these devices may look like and how well the new ATSC-M/H standard works in demanding environments, such as the high-rise canyons along the Las Vegas strip. In short, all of the demos worked well, and one could see that the CE industry is ready to expand its offerings beyond the mobile handsets designed to work with competitive mobile TV offerings from the cell phone industry.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these demos is that the new ATSC-M/H standard, which will be known as ATSC A/153, goes far beyond an upgraded physical layer specification for the modulation required to deliver robust bit streams to mobile devices. These demos were built atop the ISO H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 video compression standard, and they offered a variety of data services that can be delivered to M/H devices, including those built into vehicles with in-dash displays and car theater systems.

A/153 could more appropriately be called ATSC II. While being backward compatible with the existing 8-VSB/MPEG-2-based standard, virtually every aspect of the standard is being updated in an eight-part document that may approach 900 pages. And many of these updated capabilities could find their way into new TVs and new services from broadcasters that can be targeted at any M/H-compatible device.

One area in particular may be the sleeper in this new standard — the ability to deliver non-real-time (NRT) services to local cache for asynchronous viewing. While this is technically possible today using the A/90 Data Broadcast Standard, the ability to reach M/H devices reliably is likely to cause broadcasters to rethink their legacy business model, which in turn could have an effect on services for the big screen TV as well.

A new platform for TV broadcasting

All of this could not come at a better time for local broadcasters, who are facing a range of challenges as the end of the NTSC era approaches. Those challenges include:

• declining ratings for traditional TV fare, both at the network and local levels;

• declining local spot sales in an increasingly competitive media marketplace;

• network demands for reverse compensation; and

• the prospect that major content producers may use the Internet to deliver their content directly to consumers, bypassing broadcasters.

While the first ATSC standard offered many possibilities for new broadcast services, a decade later, the reality is that the only major changes have been the gradual shift to HDTV programming with multichannel audio, and the ability to simulcast additional services.

Now that HDTV receivers can be found in a sizeable percentage of U.S. homes, and the cost to produce HD programming is comparable to that of legacy SDTV production, the multichannel services are turning to HDTV tiers to keep existing subscribers and attract new ones. Both DIRECTV and DISH Networks will offer more than 100 HD channels by the end of the year, and cable systems are scrambling to keep up.

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