Will ATSC 3.0 Finally Deliver the Promise of a Broadcast Internet?

 

June 15, 2020

Will ATSC 3.0 Finally Deliver the Promise of a Broadcast Internet?

The Advance Television Systems Committee (ATSC) 1.0 standards were first adopted by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1996, and then revised in 2009 to incorporate a broad set of additional audio/video codec support (e.g. H.264 with MPEG-4 AVC), display resolutions, aspect ratios, frame rates (primarily for supporting the European PAL conversion.)  However, ATSC 1.0 wasn’t the only game in town.  Europe, Africa, India, and Australia adopted Digital Video Broadcast Terrestrial (DVB-T) standards instead.  China adopted its own Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast (DTMB) standards, while Japan and South America adopted the Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB) standards.

Unlike the Internet community coalescing around the IP protocol stack across the world, to the point of causing the telecommunications industry to abandon its own Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) and Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET) standards, the broadcast industry remained fragmented.

The Long Road of ATSC and the Rise of the Broadband Internet

The road to market adoption was a very longer process for ATSC 1.0. Even with the affordable HDTV sets today, the rural areas and mobile reception of terrestrial HDTV programming remain a challenge. Majority of the high definition (HD) content is delivered across the Internet now, via wired broadband access, direct broadcast satellites (DBS), and at lower resolution over the 4G/LTE cellular network.

The personalized content consumption has been driving the explosion of the Internet, where over 80% of the Internet bandwidth is attributable to HD video content, from on-demand viewing, streaming TV, to real-time multiparty conferences.  The hunger for more Internet bandwidth is continually driving the broadband access technology progress.  Yet, the rural areas and the mobile users are still suffering in the age of Internet, due to the high cost of laying fibers and the limited capacity over LTE networks.

The ATSC tried to address the market needs and the competitive pressure from the broadband service providers in the ATSC 3.0 standards. The ATSC 3.0 not only underpins the Next Gen TV services, which supports the higher 4K/8K (UHD) resolutions and the high dynamic range (HDR), but has also been designed to become a part of the Internet world, by offering the broadcast medium as broadband content delivery channels (see SMPTE ATSC 3.0 Webinar Part 1: Introduction).

FCC authorized the voluntary deployments of ATSC 3.0 on Nov. 17, 2017, in parallel with its TV spectrum repacking process to clear the 600 MHz channels for wireless broadband use. This move follows FCC’s auction of the 700 MHz spectrum in 2008 to vacate the UHF Ch. 52-69 for broadband wireless network use (which includes services dedicated to public safety). These FCC spectrum reallocation were enabled by the spectrum efficiency of the ATSC 3.0 and 1.0, respectively. But, the moves also responded to the growing demands for broadband communications.

South Korea was the first to adopt ATSC 3.0, with the country’s major television networks launching terrestrial ATSC 3.0 services in May 2017 in preparation for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Commercial launch of ATSC 3.0 services in the U.S. has been planned for late 2020. The Next Gen TV services will leverage the cloud services for content preparation, management, storage and delivery to the broadcast towers. (See Cloud Collaborators: Thomson Broadcast, Triveni Digital, Synamedia, and Pace Combine Efforts to Advance ATSC 3.0.)

ATSC 3.0 and 5G

ATSC 1.0 was designed with IP protocol encapsulation and multicast addressing in its A/92 standard. But, the envisioned datacasting never really took off. ATSC 3.0 redesigned the signaling and protocol stack for better compatibility with the over-the-top (OTT) content delivery.  While it is included in 5G’s 3GPP Rel. 16 specification, there’s no lack of voices questioning whether it will deliver the commercial benefits beyond the traditional broadcast contents in a 5G world (see Can ATSC 3.0 rescue FTA in an OTT world?). The market dynamics and user preference for convenience could continue to lean toward the cellular service providers as their coverage expands and prices come down, similar to the LTE adoption trend.

As more spectrum is being opened up to 5G, such as the C-band frequencies being auctioned for 5G and talks of freeing up digital terrestrial television channels for 5G in Europe, there is more interest in OTT distribution of UHD video streams on 5G networks, as described in 5G: The transformation of video distribution is underway.

Despite the wide adoption of LTE and on-demand OTT content consumption, LTE services haven’t been as robust as desired on high speed vehicles. 5G won’t be any better in this regards. Similarly, even though many in the industry anticipate one of the early 5G adoption scenario to be the fixed wireless broadband Internet access, the rural areas coverage of 5G will likely remain deficient as LTE is today.

The 5G rollout timeline has been delayed and is expected to be lengthy. Due to the limited coverage area of each base station compared to 4G/LTE, large numbers of nano- and pico-cells will be needed, even with the availability of Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) and C-band spectrum. The lengthy deployment time and the massive investment required present a window of opportunity for the ATSC 3.0, to take on a large swath of the content distribution, not only for the broadcast TV, but also the OTT streaming content, as well as the datacasting that has largely remained a niche service on ATSC 1.0 and satellites. (See Datacasting Capabilities Increase with New Public-Safety Benefits)

Thus, beyond the traditional TV broadcast services, the ATSC 3.0 adoption as a primary content delivery medium in an integrated, hybrid wireless broadband access network (see 5G and ATSC 3.0: The New Hybrid?), will be a raceagainst the 5G deployment schedule and highly dependent on the innovation of new applications and services (see 5G and Next Gen TV: Timing or Technology?).

Complex Landscape of Incumbents and New Entrants Interests

Being adopted worldwide, 5G is itself a large sphere with many powerful players, representing the cellular service providers (CSPs), the telecom equipment manufacturers, and the consumer electronics (CE) smartphone manufactures.  The broadcast world, where ATSC 3.0 targets, has a different cast of dominant players, from national and international broadcast networks, cable multi-service operators (MSOs), to the CE manufacturers.

With the dawn of the 21st century and the hyper-growth of the Internet, these two traditionally separate worlds started converging. The move towards “triple-play” in the mid 2000s saw the telecom service providers getting into the content delivery business, with the most notable being AT&T’s acquisition of DirectTV, while the cable MSOs entered the Internet service provider (ISP) business, notably Comcast.

Amidst the battle of the giants, there’s a third set of highly influential players that have strong interests in both the 5G and ATSC 3.0 deployments, namely, the multi-national content producers/owners (notably Walt Disney), which have started streaming their content directly to the consumers (D2C); the FCC, which wants to assure free-to-air (FTA) public services and enable affordable rural broadband Internet access; the auto industry, which is pushing the connected-cars; and the ballooning cruise industry (at least until the recent pandemic shut it down temporarily), which is looking to provide more entertainment content and broadband Internet access to its clientele.

Let’s not forget all of the satellites that are being planned and starting to deploy into low earth orbits (LEO), such as SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellite Internet system. “Low cost” satellite digital TV services have popped up recently, such as Orby TV, which supports both OTA and satellite reception in a $100 set-top box and $40/month subscription. It’s logical to expect these will migrate to ATSC 3.0 and could pick up Internet connection to offer a competitive “converged” home and/or mobile gateway.

Last, but not least, the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic accelerated the move of all sorts of activities online, from virtual conferences, tele-medicine, to distance learning, and more. The explosion of network traffic have strained the network capacity and brought to attention the large gap of the broadband Internet access across the rural communities. Will the scattered rural wireless Internet service providers (WISP) start to bundle ATSC 3.0 enabled HD content delivery and consolidate into yet another major force in the mix?

Market Disruption: A Necessity to A Brave New World

To quote an overused term, all of these forces appear to be shaping a “perfect storm”. We may see more cross-industry consolidation mega-deals. At the same time, the ripping battle lines are creating opportunities for the innovative new entrants that are looking to take advantage of the technological advances coming online to create new and converged services.

While the spectrum being opened up for 5G, in particular the millimeter wave bands, and technologies such as the massive MIMO and chip-scale beamforming will offer up true high speed broadband Internet access, the massive cost and effort will take time and be borne by the consumers.  This reminds me of the long delay of the IPv6 adoption, due largely to the availability of network address translation (NAT), a simple, very low cost, yet effective “patch” solution to the problem of IPv4 address depletion.

Will a hybrid service created from ATSC 3.0 and existing broadband Internet access, i.e. xDSL, cable modem, LTE, offer a quicker, cost effective alternative to the promise of pure 5G network?

From which industry might we see innovators with a clear vision go for the first mover advantage, whom undoubtedly will need to convince a whole host of players to buy into the values, jump out of their comfort zones, and take the plunge to invest along in a major business model change?

Hopefully, the consumers at large will benefit not only from the technological advances, but also the reshuffling of the various types of service providers.

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