Deborah D. McAdams / 01.09.2012 12:00AM
CES: LG Demos Mobile Tweet-TV
Live digital signage telecasts also demonstrated
LAS VEGAS: LG is demonstrating its latest contributions to
mobile DTV at the Consumer Electronics Show, including Tweet TV and near-live
digital signage. LG’s mobile DTV technology also is at the heart of the mobile
emergency alert system being demonstrated publicly for the first time at CES as
part of a pilot project with PBS.
LG’s Tweet-TV social media platform allows people to submit text comments on
broadcast content, and enables broadcasters to encode those comments for retransmission
in a “transparent conversational overlay,” LG says. The fixed-point reception
platform was introduced last year at the National Association of Broadcasters
show in April. The mobile DTV application is new.
LG collaborated with Rounbox for the mobile version of Tweet-TV, which allows
the same overlay on mobile DTV receivers. A Harris MDTV transmitter will
deliver viewer tweets, received as data files and then displayed on a prototype
LG Android smartphone at CES.
Harris is also powering the transmission for LG’s mobile DTV digital signage
demonstration in Vegas in a configuration similar to one used on city buses in
Raleigh, N.C. using LG digital signage displays. At CES, Las Vegas CBS
affiliate KLAS-TV is broadcasting live updates to show the flexibility of the
standard and exemplify this new mobile DTV application.
Information outside the main signal is delivered by KLAS using the ATSC
Non-Real-Time candidate standard for data transmission. As seen on the LG
digital signage display, weather radar information is typically updated every
three minutes. The news crawl gets updated every five minutes, and the
temperature can change every 10 minutes. Advertising is sent directly to the
small Harris InfoCaster Player that is attached to each display, with a
playback schedule that is based on the time of day.
Harris vice president of broadcast technology, Jay Adrick, said a new
generation of geolocation-based advertising technology is in field trials now.
~ Deborah D. McAdams
See "Mobile
EAS Demonstrated"