Well, okay, no doubt the cellular industry emerged from spectrum given up by TV
broadcasting, but much of this piece consists over overstatements, to say the
least.
First off, the technological breakthrough of cellular communications was the
ability to reuse spectrum so effectively that one could offer *two-way*
wireless communications, that actually scale and are affordable. There's
nothing in ATSC broadcast, either 1.0 or 3.0, that can play in this field. The
"one-to-millions" model that is hyped up here is totally opposite of the
motivations behind cellular comms.
And, what makes OTT services most attractive is the on demand and interactive
aspects (i.e. unicast). If you can be satisfied by linear broadcast, then it
makes little sense to pretend you're the "last mile" of OTT sites. You've lost
the features that make OTT service different and attractive. That "efficient"
linear broadcast, when it makes sense, can be done today with ATSC 1.0 too,
with or without the unnecessary IP overhead.
"ATSC 3.0 offers an interesting opportunity for broadcasting to reassert itself
with its unique advantage of one to millions. You marry that up against what’s
happening in the over-the-top video world."
Not sure what this means, other than same old broadcast that ATSC 1.0 and NTSC
have done all along. Yes, the mobility possibilities with ATSC 3.0's COFDM are
new perhaps, but let's get real. IP overhead, in a one-to-all OTA broadcast, is
unnecessary. Nothing here looks like Internet service.
"It’s literally a world where 95 percent of the downloads are about 5 percent
of the titles. That’s a broadcasting paradise. We were made for that mission."
Come now. This describes what broadcast has been doing non-stop, from the 1920s
to today. If the receiver has to be running at just the right time, either for
linear viewing or for time-shift recording, what's new? That mission does not
need ATSC 3.0. The big advantage of the Internet client-server model is NOT
having to do these functions on someone else's schedule. (Plus, two-way comms,
of course.)
Push comes to shove, we're always back to ATSC 3.0's main advantage being
mobility. Unfortunately, with mobility comes a less efficient fixed service.
You can’t fool mother nature.
True story: Our publications person, a forever-long-time cable subscriber, just
recently gave up her cable service and her cabled-Internet service. She now
relies ENTIRELY on OTA TV and on her iPhone, with 3G/4G service. She excitedly
told me how she bought one of those pin-up flat antennas, did a channel scan,
and got an astounding number, 50+ channels. Apparently, she does not mind still
watching TV by appointment (she might have bought a PVR, I didn’t ask). But
cool, right?
I didn't have the heart to tell her that broadcasters were about to cut way
down those channels she was receiving. I did mention the repack, I did tell her
she should probably rescan, but I did not have the heart to tell her that the
ATSC 1.0 spectrum would be looted for ATSC 3.0, and more importantly,
mobile-friendly, inefficient coding. Ouch.
It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out. We've had a small
taste of this already, when ATSC 2.0 grabbed spectrum. It came, and it went.
Channel scans got less impressive during ATSC 2.0, and then recovered as that
service was removed. This time, I expect a more draconian drop in ATSC 1.0, and
it's hard to say how these many newly-acquired OTA users will react. I guess
these test markets will provide hints, whether the much-ballyhooed new
possibilities make sense to anyone, or not.
Bert
-------------------------------------------------
https://www.tvtechnology.com/atsc3/3-0-is-next-gen-salvation-of-tv-industry-says-ark-mediacom-ceo
3.0 Is ‘Next-Gen Salvation’ of TV Industry, Says ARK Mediacom CEO
Vern Fotheringham envisions 3.0 alternative for OTT home delivery and much more
Phil Kurz9 hours ago
DALLAS—A new company with hundreds of LPTV stations and CPs is pinning its
hopes for a vibrant, profitable broadcast industry on ATSC 3.0.
Specifically, ARK Mediacom is hoping to leverage the inherent one-to-many
strength of broadcasting and reliable wireless IP delivery via the OFDM-based
Next-Gen TV standard to become an affordable last-mile alternative for OTT
providers to reach the home and data to reach vehicles in the future.
In late September, the company performed a proof-of-concept test with the
assistance of Hitachi Kokusai Electric Comark in Southwick, Mass., designed to
evaluate the connectivity and integration of all elements needed to deploy an
ATSC 3.0 service. Comark is serving as system integrator with 13 technology
companies providing products and services for the test.
On Oct. 11, religious broadcaster IBN television announced its test of the ARK
5G Broadcast Network.
In an interview with TV Technology Contributing Editor Phil Kurz, ARK Mediacom
CEO Vern Fotheringham discusses the initial test, a broader-based trial slated
to begin sometime in Q1 2019, how broadcasters can leverage ATSC 3.0 to grow
into OTT delivery and new wireless data delivery services and the need to
address challenges like intercarrier operations, billing, settlement and
roaming in broadcasting to support a nationwide IP data delivery service to
vehicles.
(An edited transcript.)
TVTechnology: What is ARK Mediacom?
Vern Fotheringham: It’s a new company, the go-to-market brand that we’ve
created as the service delivery platform spinning up from Edge Spectrum Inc.
Edge Spectrum Inc. is the company we’ve operated under. It’s the broadcast
holder of 283 television assets—145 licenses and the balance are construction
permits [CPs] we intend to build here in the third phase of the repack and the
displacement process. We are primarily a low-power TV licensee.
We launched ARK Mediacom in July as our publicly facing brand, and it is a
broadcasting entity that’s leveraging all of the wonderful things that
broadcasting has always been with linear TV services, but most important for
us, we are leveraging the new capabilities of ATSC 3.0, ultimately to deliver
one to millions IP multicasting.
TVT: ARK Mediacom announced a recent test of using 3.0 to deliver last mile
service over-the-air for OTT providers and more broadly datacasting IP packets
to consumers. What’s broadcasting’s role here?
VF: At the highest level, we are adding a multicasting extension to the unicast
internet. For the first time with the new standard, we literally can be
integrated seamlessly into the internet.
The internet has evolved as a one-to-one-based service with remote data centers
hosting multiple layers of networks transmitting information across the core of
the internet to whatever first and last mile distribution network, always
subsidized by the public at their own expense.
ATSC 3.0 offers an interesting opportunity for broadcasting to reassert itself
with its unique advantage of one to millions. You marry that up against what’s
happening in the over-the-top video world.
It’s literally a world where 95 percent of the downloads are about 5 percent of
the titles. That’s a broadcasting paradise. We were made for that mission.
TVT: So, you envision offering an alternative to traditional ISPs when it comes
to delivering OTT content.
VF: By offloading the vast majority of the most commonly replicated video
content into a broadcast-based offload network, we bypass all of that
one-to-one connectivity from remote data centers, third party transiting and
the consumer’s first and last mile network.
TVT: Your press announcement refers to this as the "ARK 5G Broadcast Network."
Why 5G?
VF: When we call ourselves part of 5G, I believed that it is absolutely
essential for the broadcast industry, just like the satellite industry, to
raise its hand and say, “Hey, we are part of 5G, too, everybody.”
5G, the next generation of telecom and infrastructure, is a heterogeneous
combination of networks, of which we are one.
We the broadcasters really need to put our flag on the flagpole and say we are
part of this evolution, too.
TVT: ARK Mediacom is predominantly LPTV-based. LPTV is a secondary service, and
in the repack it is possible some stations will be unable to find vacant TV
spectrum to continue service. Are you confident you will remain intact and be
able to move forward with your plans?
VF: Yes. We have a few MX [mutually exclusive] markets that we are working
through. I think we have four of them, principally in larger markets. But by
and large, we have lost no licenses out of the entire footprint.
TVT: Tell me about your 3.0 test.
VF: What we wanted to do is put end-to-end connectivity and integration of all
of the network elements that are needed to deploy a full end-to-end ATSC 3.0
service to the test.
We originated from our sister company’s [IBN’s] master control in Dallas at the
Westar facility on Sept. 26 and transited via fiber in an IP format over to the
Atlanta Teleport.
There our sister company –our own satellite content delivery network, called
V-Satcast, which is in partnership with Intelsat—distributed our test content
via an Intelsat satellite.
We use Newtec and Broadpeak as our network elements—both for the tiering of the
various caches.
We are layering caches in four tiers—the origination, which is likely to be
various cloud and hosting environments into our own private cloud, which starts
at the satellite uplink. Then at each transmission facility there is a next
tier of caching, essentially extending the cloud out to each layer of the
network. Then ultimately at the consumer receiver edge.
TVT: Where was the signal downlinked?
VF: Yes, back to the link. The satellite uplinked via a Newtec hub and then
down into a Newtec receiver at the Comark facility in Southwick, Mass.
From there, into the chain where all the magic happens in ATSC 3.0 and all the
different elements, the ATEME encode, the Enensys scheduler, another layer of
caching and then into the encoder and out through the Hitachi-Comark
transmitter.
Then a short, attenuated 3.0 transmission to a Samsung 3.0 receiver for the
linear TV feed. We also in parallel used a DigiCAP home gateway. That was with
four parallel streams—all different content, all encoded in the same ATSC 3.0
data stream.
This was a parallel test, by the way. It was not part of an end-to-end
origination. It was all done locally at Comark. Then into four separate
receivers: a television receiver, a laptop, a tablet and a cell phone—all from
Wi-Fi streaming out from the home media gateway that DigiCAP provided in 3.0.
It was incumbent upon us before we went out into the field where we are going
to deploy our first four trial markets [plus ARK’s headquarters] that we made
sure that the handshakes between everything worked properly, that the APIs
between all the vendors’ different equipment was functioning smoothly.
TVT: Where will the field trial happen?
VF: We’re deploying in Ardmore, Okla., Lawton, Okla., Tyler, Texas, and Lufkin,
Texas, and our headquarters in Dallas. They will be the first five locations
where we do our testing of different market environments for our 3.0
infrastructure to test and prove out both the technology side as well as the
different market applications enabled by this new technology.
Over the coming year, it’s a "crawl, walk, run environment." We want to make
sure all of the network elements are functioning before we send people out into
the field to bolt hardware down far from home.
So, we are starting with a cluster around our corporate headquarters in Dallas.
That should be coming together late this quarter and early next.
We picked these sites for the test because they are all different; they all
represent different types of second and third tier markets. A college town, a
military base, flat as a pancake, hilly, vegetation, no vegetation.
TVT: Besides last-mile delivery of OTT content via 3.0 broadcast, what other
markets interest ARK Mediacom?
VF: In terms of the other markets, our big belief is 3.0 enables mobility
services.
Sinclair has been making a lot of progress on their mobile first strategy. Our
version of mobility is vehicular. We think 3.0’s first and perhaps most
profitable application in the datacasting world may very well be the connected
car.
What is interesting about that is with mobility now being a part of the ATSC
3.0 ecosystem, what is its impact on the broadcast industry? We as an industry
face some really interesting challenges that were never part of the
broadcasting landscape.
TVT: What new challenges?
VF: Roaming, intercarrier operations, billing and settlement—all of the things
that we wrestled with back in the early days of cellular when we had lots and
lots of independent owners on the non-wireline side of the cellular industry.
But we had no common branding.
We’ve been trying to organize and lead a transition where broadcasters can
create new areas of cooperation. If you are going to serve a connected car
market, no single broadcaster has the ubiquitous footprint necessary to make
that happen. It is going to take the creation of a national consortium of
like-minded operators and broadcasters to combine efforts to create that
national footprint. Together, they will have to enable the intercarrier and
control the intercarrier authentication and roaming that will be needed.
So, I think the future of ATSC 3.0 will not only be the exciting technology
evolution and new things we can do as broadcasters, but also ways and business
models that broadcasters can come together to operate and provide broadcasting
as a combined industry.
We can give the cellular operators a run for the money.
TVT: That sounds like quite a significant change in how broadcasters view
themselves.
VF: We’ve been laying back and taking a nap for about 25 years while the
cellular industry ate our lunch.
Broadcasters forgot they were wireless operators. One of the really fascinating
things is the $2 trillion cellular industry has been built on spectrum that
virtually came out of the broadcast industry’s hide–with the small exception of
the PCS spectrum, which was an old railroad microwave band.
It was all us. We gave it all up. It’s amazing that we are finally awakening to
the fact that broadcasters are wireless providers, not just in the retrans
business. 3.0 is our next-gen salvation as an industry.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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