M+E Connections

By Chris Tribbey

LG Electronics has successfully tested the first-ever end-to-end 4K broadcast using the next-generation ATSC 3.0 standard, the company announced, marking the first time a live camera feed with real-time IP transmissions was used for a 4K broadcast.

Developed as a standard by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), ATSC 3.0 marks the first IP based broadcast system that combines broadband and broadcast. The signals in the LG Korean test used IP technologies based on the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) streaming media format and Real-Time Object Delivery Over Unidirectional Transport (ROUTE) IP delivery protocol.

Previously, ATSC 3.0 broadcasts used pre-recorded material loaded directly to a transmitter, LG said. This time around, the test (a joint project of LG, Korean broadcasters SBS and MBC, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) of Korea, and others), the test sent real-time broadcast transmissions from the SBS network studio in Mokdong, to the broadcaster’s transmitter on Gwanak Mountain. The IP signals transmitted were received using a simple antenna, and then decoded by a 4K Ultra HDTV ATSC 3.0 receiver developed by LG.

The test comes about a year before the first UHD broadcast services are expected to launch in Korea.

“The success of this trial highlights the potential for Korea’s launch of terrestrial UHD TV commercial services using ATSC 3.0 in February 2017,” said Young-Soo Park, SBS’s technical director. “And the fact that Korean companies are playing such an important role in ATSC 3.0 provides a good opportunity for Korean equipment manufacturers to advance in the U.S. market.”

K.Y. Kwak, EVP of LG’s Advanced Standard Research & Development Lab, added: “We will continue to develop technologies to help commercialize ATSC 3.0 as the next great advance in terrestrial broadcasting.”

On March 16, at the “Metadata Madness, the Media & Entertainment Interoperability Summit” at the Microsoft Technology Center in New York City, Harold Geller, chief growth officer for Advertising Digital Identification LLC (Ad-ID) will lead a panel discussion on ATSC 3.0.

The panel — “ATSC 3.0: What Is It and What Does It Mean?” — will include Mark Corl, vice chair of the Personalization and Interactivity Implementation Team for ATSC, Madeleine Noland, consultant for the standard technology and development team at LG’s Convergence R&D Lab, and Anne Schelle, managing director, Pearl TV.

“ATSC 3.O changes the way we interact with broadcast TV, and we have to be prepared for all of this innovation that’s going to be happening in the coming year,” Geller said. “It’s more significant a transition than the transition from analog to digital.”