ATSC's recently announced adoption of the A/103 standard for non-real-time television gives broadcasters a backwards-compatible way to push data out over the air to viewers who can view content — even content customized to their individual tastes — at their convenience.
While the new standard opens up a variety of obvious opportunities for broadcasters, such as giving them a way to play in the VoD space with their OTA transmissions, it also makes possible some less apparent but equally appealing benefits for viewers and broadcasters alike.
OTA of stereoscopic 3-D TV and 1080p HDTV are just two such benefits. That's because NRT doesn't care what data gets pushed out. It simply wants to push out information to OTA receivers that collect it and play it back when desired. It makes no difference whether that data is a traffic map or the extra data needed to create a 3-D or 1080 progressively scanned television images.
In this podcast interview, Rich Chernock, chief science officer of Triveni Digital and chairman of the ATSC working group that developed the NRT standard, talks about A/103 and the things it will make possible.