ATSC 3.0 and the Future of Broadcast Television: OTA Meets OTT

[Retail Fan+ (Justin Hill)]

ATSC 3.0 and the Future of Broadcast Television: OTA Meets OTT
A new television standard, expected to debut in live broadcasts by 2020, brings the best of streamingâ€"such as 4K videoâ€"to over-the-air delivery.
By Tim Siglin, streamingmedia.com
Posted on January 17, 2019

What if there were a video streaming service that cost nothing, was always available, and delivered ultra-high-quality video well beyond what your typical cable provider offers?

If you’re searching for just such an elusive offering, put down your mobile phone, tablet, or laptop and turn on your television. Today’s over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts via terrestrial towersâ€"at least those aired by ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, and The CW, also known as the “Big 5” networks in the United Statesâ€"still retain the quality edge over most over-the-top (OTT) and cable delivery.

Especially when it comes to sports, where most OTA broadcasts are at least a full 1080p resolution, the quality is stunning. In some ways it has always been this way: Even with the advent of 720p and 1080p high-definition resolutions (HD and Full HD, respectively), many broadcasters use an interlaced format (e.g., 1080i) that offers a smoothing effect for high-action sports. In many ways, this 1080i format has the same effect in 29.97 frames per second as progressive formats at double the traditional frame rate (e.g., 1080p60).

So if all this OTA goodness is available for free, why do consumers continue to pay high cable bills for an often-times inferior product?

If that question is asked only for prerecorded content such as episodic or reruns, the decision to cut the cord should be a relatively straightforward one. Yet the number one reason to remain locked in to a cable bill has little to do with prerecorded content and much to do with sports, breaking news, and other live events.

“[L]ive viewing is still the best opportunity for advertisers,” said Jack Abernethy, CEO of Fox Television, at a recent National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) event held in New York.

Abernethy’s comments acknowledge the fact that OTT has changed the game in terms of prerecorded content, what we in the streaming industry refer to as on-demand content. But he’s also pointing out that broadcasts of live eventsâ€"whether through traditional OTA or newer live-linear OTT offerings that attempt to mimic OTA across an IP networkâ€"is still something that remains as an opportunity.


ATSC 3.0 is a top-level “parent” standard, most likely to be titled A/300. It covers the overall system, the states that must be included in an ATSC 3.0 system, and each of the component standards. (Image courtesy ATSC.)

And, from an advertiser’s perspective, a live local or national nightly news broadcast offers a chance to consistently deliver a message to a large audience in a cost-controlled way.

“People watch the commercials,” said Abernethy, referring to live news broadcasts. “Those ratings have held up pretty well as some of the entertainment properties have dropped.”

The Problem

So going back to the original premise, why wouldn’t consumers cut the cord and just use a combination of live-linear OTT like Sling TV, Hulu, or DirecTV Now and the “usual suspects” of Amazon Prime or Netflix for on-demand OTT content?

The problem for the streaming industry, at least with live events, is the still-galling inability to scale live-event OTT up to television-sized audiences. This is due to a number of factors, one of which is the continued shunning of multicast delivery. More on that topic later.

For the broadcast industry, the major problem is a bit more subtle: Besides the semi-complex issue of serving up on-demand content, broadcasters face a global inability to transmit live-linear and live-event broadcasts in a format that is complementary to IP delivery.


The likely structure of the ATSC 3.0 suite of standards as of late 2018. Note that the names, numbers, and organization are still being finalized. (Image courtesy ATSC)

Broadcasters have been stuck using the legacy interlaced transmission (the “i” in 1080i) ever since the “analog sunset” in which all U.S. broadcasters abandoned analog transmission under a government-mandated switch to digital OTA transmission in 2009. In much the same way that analog color television sets were forced to maintain backward compatibility to mid-1900s black-and-white TV technology, the use of interlaced transmissions in a digital domain was an attempt to maintain compatibility with older analog transmission infrastructures and consumer television sets.

Interlaced delivery makes absolutely no sense for streaming, as it is essentially a doubling of frames over the typical progressive frame rate.

Analog televisions were based on cathode ray tubes. The use of a CRT phosphor “gun” meant the use of interlacing was essential, since the CRT could only “paint” (or display) half the lines of a given frame at any given moment. As a result, when a 30-frame-per-second (actually 29.97) interlaced TV program was transmitted, it was based on 60 fields per second (actually 59.94).

Progressive, on the other hand, displays a full frame at one time, meaning that 30 frames per second only requires 30 frames, rather than 60 fields. This is ideal for unicast-based streaming delivery, as it limits the overall bandwidth required for stream delivery, but also suffers from an appearance of juddery or jerky images when high-motion content such as sports are delivered to an end user’s device. Some broadcasters offer 1080p transmissions, but they’re few and far between.

The Compromise

Is there a balance to be struck between live-linear OTT and classic OTA broadcasts?

Good news: The answer is yes, at least starting in 2020. That balance is an advanced television broadcasting standard being adopted across the broadcast industry called ATSC. The original ATSC standard, proposed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee in 1996, was called ATSC 1.0.

In that initial standard, the major concern was finding a way to replace the analog tuner in most televisions with a digital tuner. In August 2002, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that a series of steps was required for both broadcasters and consumer electronics manufacturers to help meet the stated mid-2009 deadline for the “analog sunset” changeover where broadcasters would cease transmitting OTA signals via analog equipment.

As part of this process, ATSC digital tuners were gradually added to large HDTVs in 2005, and then in 2007 to all new devices including HDTVs, VCRs, DVDs, and even digital video recorders used in cable television set-top boxes.

To aid in that initial transition, Congress authorized a subsidy of digital tuner set-top boxes which contained an ATSC-compliant digital television tuner but had analog outputs to connect to a traditional analog television. There were a few controversies surrounding the program, one of which involved the fact that analog signals output from these digital tuner boxes would not be 720 or 1080 signals but rather lower-resolution “standard definition” signals.

The other controversy was around the pricing of these ATSC digital tuner boxes. While any household in America was eligible to receive up to two $40 coupons (Congress had set aside $990 million to cover the program), the coupons expired after 90 days, after which there was no way to renew them. On top of that, the $990 million ran out quickly, so Congress had to simultaneously push back the “analog sunset” and allocate an additional $510 million in order to keep on track for a 2009 cutoff of analog transmissions.

Even so, almost 250,000 requests were made for coupons after the June 12, 2009 transition to only ATSC-compliant digital transmissions, but the coupons were not available for these consumers.

Here’s the reason I’ve spent a bit of time in this article talking about the transitionary period from analog to digital: When it comes to changing a broadcast standard, it’s more than just changing out transmission gear on a tower or (in the case of IP-based transmissions) a fiber-optic cable, and much more about how consumers will be impacted by the adoption.

How Do We Get There?

On the broadcast front, though, it appears that everything’s on track for a 2020 debut of transmissions using the newest ATSC 3.0 standard. At the NAB show mentioned at the top of the article, a number of broadcast groups announced support for ATSC 3.0 and collaboration on assuring a smooth transition. Besides Fox, there were pledged efforts by NBC, Nexstar (assisting Charter’s Spectrum in its efforts), Telemundo, and Univision.

ATSC 3.0 is an IP-based transmission, meaning that OTA towers will be sending IP in much the same way a traditional Ethernet network would transmit IP packets through a router across the public internet and on to another remote router for delivery to an end-user’s device.

What’s unique about ATSC 3.0, at least as it bears on IP delivery, is that it becomes a form of multicast, that long-available but highly underused capability to send the same IP packets to every single device on a network without requiring unique bandwidth for each device.

In other words, it allows scaling viewership without the need to scale the infrastructure. It makes logical sense, because an analog television broadcast could be received by one device or hundreds of thousands of devices without requiring multiple towers, and the same was true with ATSC 1.0 and its digital transmission.

Yet all this time, multicasting of IP has been a feature that’s been not just overlooked, but has actually been derided as not practical.

That’s about to change, and the streaming industry might just get schooled on the benefits of an IP standard that’s been around for more than 30 years.

Having said that, the transition to ATSC 3.0 is not going to happen all at once. In fact, as TV Technology reported after the NAB show in New York in October, even those broadcasters announcing support aren’t likely to all roll out ATSC 3.0 in 2020.

“It doesn’t mean every station in these groups will be deploying the standard,” Tom Butts wrote in an October 2018 article, “but instead will collaborate with each other to provide a large enough national footprint so that a majority of American consumers will be able to receive some form of ATSC 3.0 service.”

What happened to ATSC 2.0, and why aren’t we transitioning to it rather than leapfrogging to ATSC 3.0? It turns out that the delay in the “analog sunset” threw timing off not just for ASTC 1.0â€"which was initially introduced in 1996 even though it didn’t come to fruition until 2009â€"but also for the next version.

The good news is that the transition from ATSC 1.0 towers (called “lighthouses” in industry terms) to ATSC 3.0 transmission may not create the pain point that the U.S. faced in the 2009 “analog sunset” era.

“The cost to upgrade to an ATSC 3.0 lighthouse is fairly small compared to the existing infrastructure that’s already in place,” said Anne Schelle, Pearl TV Group’s director, in the same TV Technology article. Her group is working with Univision and others to test ATSC 3.0 in Phoenix, testing first on one tower and then adding towers to look at how IP delivery might work in the domain of multiple competing towers and infrastructures.

What Do We Get for Our Troubles?

Maybe this section should be labeled “Is it worth the pain of moving from ATSC 1.0 to ATSC 3.0?”â€"but that’s a bit of a mouthful.

ATSC 1.0 was proposed in a time period where a 1280x720 progressive (720p) broadcast standard was considered achievable, and later extensions to the standard grew the overall transmission cap to 1080p. Given the limited frequency spectrum of each broadcaster’s tower, which is 19.2 MHz or roughly 19.2Mbpsâ€"the 1080p cap was a bit of a stretch, but still achievable, at least for content that didn’t exceed 30 frames per second.

The truth, though, is that even with the ability to transmit 1080p broadcasts from an ATSC 1.0 tower, the number of consumer televisions capable of demodulating a 1080p broadcast transmission is fairly slim. Yes, the TV itself can display 1080p but, thanks to ATSC 1.0-era tuners, the vast majority of consumer HDTVs max out at 1080i for OTA display.

With the ATSC 3.0 standard, the good news is that 1080p is the base level of transmission, and 4K (Ultra HD at 3840 x 2160 pixels) progressive is now part of the standard. If this modern transmission standard is extended, the possibility exists to offer 8K transmissions in the future, assuming of course that consumer electronics manufacturers offer 8K televisions with standards-compliant 8K tuner cards.

LG Electronics, along with Sony Electronics, is providing test TV units as well as test and measurement equipment such as demodulatorsâ€"transmission units that receive a particular encapsulated signal that has been modulated for long-distance OTA transmission, unpacking the transmission back to a format that the consumer TV understandsâ€"for testing in various broadcast locations across the U.S.

In addition to the 4K UHD transmission sweet spot, ATSC 3.0 also offers enhanced imaging features found on a number of today’s OTT set-top boxes. The laundry list of acronyms includes high dynamic range (HDR), which is most often associated with 10-bit color depth delivery, at least from an OTT standpoint.

In addition, the availability of WCG means that OTA transmissions would support the Rec. 2020 specification, which practically brings OTA transmission to the same image quality as a select group of on-demand content offerings by Hulu and Netflix.

Audio has advanced in the OTT set-top box worldâ€"think Dolby’s HDR-centric Atmos, which also includes 7.1 surround sound enhancementsâ€"and the ATSC 3.0 standard follows suit, adding the ability to use Dolby AC-4 audio rather than the prior AC-3 that could only offer 5.1 surround functionality.

Finally, ATSC 3.0 also provides for high frame rate (HFR) transmission. Given the restricted nature of the overall transmission bandwidth, it’s possible that legacy H.264 content may only be able to be delivered at standard frame rates. But if consumer electronics manufacturers offer other codecs in their HDTVs, such as AV1 or H.265 (High Efficiency Video Coding or HEVC), the adoption of high-frame-rate transmissions could increase.

What about mobile devices? After all, anyone who calls the push by the NAB organization to get TV and radio tuner chipsets embedded in smart phones will likely also remember that this push was met with resistance from broadcasters, consumer electronics manufacturers, and consumers alike.

The good news is that ATSC 3.0’s ability to transmit in IP packets means that any device capable of decoding and demodulating ATSC 3.0 signalsâ€"whether in hardware or, eventually, in software as mobile processors increase in speed without impacting battery lifeâ€"will be able to view these OTA broadcast transmissions. In the case of a mobile device without an ATSC 3.0 chipset, delivery appears to be via unicast streaming, so the question of scalability remains for legacy mobile handsets and tabletsâ€"at least until even mobile devices have ATSC 3.0 embedded chipsets.

The End Is Near

With all the enhancements to OTA broadcast, and the potential promise of finally being able to scale live-event streams on a global level, when can we expect to see all of this ATSC 3.0 goodness?

The first step, beyond OTA transmission tests, is for consumer electronics manufacturers to deliver HDTVs with ATSC 3.0 chipsets. So what’s the current status of ATSC 3.0-compliant consumer HDTV units?

LG Electronics already has launched HDTV units in Korea that have ATSC 3.0 chipsets but has not yet done so in the U.S. Sony and others are following suit, with anticipated availability of ATSC 3.0-based consumer HDTVs by 2020.

It’s also possible that we will see ATSC 3.0 HDTVs on display at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in early January 2019 (this article was written in November 2018). But just like early 4K flat panels, which did not have all of the standards-based features for UHD playback, a note of caution should be sounded for those thinking of buying the first-generation ATSC 3.0-compliant displays.

Still, once we reach a point of critical mass for both consumer HDTVs and OTA broadcast groups, the ATSC 3.0 standard appears to hold significant promise in merging traditional OTA delivery with more recent OTT delivery. When it comes to live events, scaled to global television audience levels, it’s ironic that the streaming industry may be following the lead of the traditional broadcast industry it has tried so hard to displace over the past 20 years.

[NJxxJon]

Well daaaaaaayyymmmn. Good graphics/ meanings. OTA is like VHS....soon....POOF

[Retail Fan+ (Justin Hill)]

OTA is like VHS....soon....POOF

What do you mean? Over-the-air is here to stay.