A couple of notes.
1) Comcast is finally upgrading to H.264 here in Silicon Valley. They
sent me a notice to swap out my trusty Motorola DCH-3200 STB that I've
had since 2007.
2) If I read this ATSC 3.0 video specification correctly, H.265 is the
/only/ codec allowed. No MPEG-2 or H.264. However, 1000/1001 frame rates
are allowed.
http://atsc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/S34-168r3-Video.pdf
Ron
On 01/04/2016 07:04 AM, Craig Birkmaier wrote:
On Jan 3, 2016, at 8:50 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>I think that was my point Bert. We now have a very competent mobile broadcast
wrote:
You almost got it, Craig. Point really being, nothing needs to change at all.
The solutions are evolving all by themselves. You managed to watch the game on
the go, and at home over WiFi, so what makes you think any new standards are
needed?
standard - LTE.
But that has NOTHING to do with broadcast television. The game I watched was
behind a pay wall (ESPN) and you could say I also paid for the LTE bits.
So the question is: what is to become of broadcast television, and do we really
need ATSC 3.0?
I talked with a Millennial cord cutter this weekend who is very happy with OTT
and an antenna. So at least in terms of reception, ATSC 1.0 is getting the job
done for those who care. The real question is whether broadcasters will be
willing to invest in another transmission system?
ATSC 1.0 is adequate to support the spectrum consolidation that will happen this year.
But multicasting would benefit substantially from the improved compression technology
that delivers OTT services, and broadcasters need to "finally" embrace scalable
technologies that make it easy proliferate their content across multiple distribution
technologies.
That means:
1. Letting go of legacy standards that complicate interoperability and are
inappropriate for a digital system. Specifically, 59.94 and interlace are
throwbacks to analog standards - they complicate operations and reduce
delivered image quality.
2. MPEG-2 compression is outdated. To maximize interoperability broadcasters
should move to h.264 immediately, and consider h.265, if it gains traction
across other distribution platforms.
3. Develop a strategy to offer HDMI update dongles for legacy receivers and
updated receivers for new TVs. This should address the addition of h.264
compression, and could support a HTML5 based program guide and related data
services.
4. Open it up. Don't lock everything down again. Allow both broadcasters and
developers to experiment and create new services.
The existing OTA TV broadcast standard, just like the existing cable and DBSDBS is already a generation ahead with h.264 support.and it looks like cable is
broadcast standards, will no doubt soldier on for some time. Mostly, because
people are already set up to use them, to get to their big screens. No need to
make any sudden changes there. Just leave them as they are, as long as people
use them.
now ready to let go of the legacy analog tier. Cable is already adding h.264 to
new STBs (especially DVRs); these boxes also transcode to h.264 and deliver
streams via WiFi to mobile devices in the home.
People are already set-up to take advantage of the new capabilities I suggested
above. It would be trivially easy to build a cheap device that would connect to
the HDMI port of a TV, and make broadcast streams available via WiFi in the
home.
The evolution of technology that has provided us with today's OTT services did not happen
suddenly. The Internet provided the neutral "test bed" to support the evolution.
On the other hand, the ATSC standard was locked down from day one, which
prevented evolution. It is important to consider the fact that the standard
evolved, but the broadcasters largely ignored the new capabilities. They made
the decision to lock down on Table 3 and a subset of the capabilities in the
base standard - nothin has evolved in 20 years.
Meanwhile, the Internet ways of delivery are gradually becoming the norm, asModulation matters. Another change here makes hundreds of millions of mandated
people buy the appropriate hardware.
TV plays perfectly nicely on all these media. The only technically credible
problem with the legacy media is that they are limited to one-way broadcast
only. Frame rates, codecs, and modulation, are secondary issues at best, and
don't matter much. Let them be.
ATSC tuners worthless. One can argue for a change to LTE broadcast to leverage
the billions of mobile devices in use, but the cost may not be justifiable. The
good news is that you can stay with VSB and still change the other layers
thanks to HDMI.
If broadcasters are to survive, they must embrace the stuff I just wrote about,
if only to fully leverage the Internet and the billions of devices that connect
to it. They already are able to do most of what I wrote above, as other
industries are driving the evolution of content creation tools, and they use
them now for both web and broadcast operations.
Maybe some of this stuff will be on the table at Mark's upcoming technology
summit in the desert...
Regards
Craig
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