The Advanced Television Services Committee recently commenced the process of setting a national DTV-based mobile TV standard. The group kicked things off with an invitation to system proponents.
"The mobile and handheld TV market is seeing rapid growth and it is expected to continue to grow," the proposal request said in part. "Mobile and handheld services using ATSC-compatible transmissions from broadcasters could be one of the technologies in this future landscape."
Two teams have been working on mobile TV systems and are likely to respond. These are Samsung/Rohde & Schwarz, the pair behind the A-VSB system, and Harris/LG, the unit that developed the MPH system. Both sets of partners showed their respective systems at NAB2007.
The ATSC emphasized that any system has to be backwards compatible, and cannot interfere or conflict with any existing DTV broadcasting service.
In addition to ad-supported television, the ATSC said the standard could be used for non-realtime content downloading, datacasting, interactive TV and realtime vehicle navigation data.
In order to actualize the standard as quickly as possible, the ATSC asked for preliminary responses by June 21st and detailed proposals by July 6th.
