[opendtv] Mobile TV

From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 01 Jan 2016 07:47:09 -0500

I still remember the OpenDTV Forum in Las Vegas, I think it was in 2000, when
Sinclair demonstrated mobile TV using COFDM (a service constellation of DVB-T).
Someone as walking around the room holding a bulky tablet that was receiving
the OTA broadcast.

Yesterday I was running around town getting a load of mulch, and could not be
home to watch the Peach Bowl on ESPN. So I decided to watch it via my iPhone -
plugged into a charger and the truck stereo system. The attached video shows
the setup, and location of the phone in the console, away from the windows.
This brought back memories of a Congressional hearing where Sinclair again
demonstrated walk about COFDM, while the ATSC placed an antenna in the window
of the hearing room.

Reception was rock solid, no glitches with tower hand-offs or other issues. And
when I got the load of mulch home, it handed off the stream to my home WiFi
network, so I was able to listen to the game while spreading the mulch. I had
to restart the stream once after leaving home again, but it came right back.
Total data usage was about 1 GB.

Makes one wonder why the ATSC is bothering with a new standard. Perhaps it's
time to make ATSC 1.0 Interoperable, scalable and extensible. Just keep the
marginal VSB transmission system and MPEG-2 TS and open up the rest to allow
broadcasters to update the components that are outdated and to make things play
nice across the Web and TV. A good starting point would be to move to h.264,
get rid of interlace and 59.94, and create a HTML5 program and metadata layer
that ties broadcasts and the web together.

Regards
Craig

[opendtv] Mobile TV

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