SAN DIEGO—As part of relationships with News-Press & Gazette Broadcasting, the National Association of Broadcasters and Pearl TV, broadcasters in Santa Barbara, Calif., Cleveland and Phoenix are deploying the Verance Aspect watermark, per Verance Corporation.

The Verance Aspect is designed to give broadcasters two-way connections, census-like audience measurement and household-level addressability, allowing for greater interactivity and personalization. Verance states that Aspect enables these capabilities to reach 100 percent of TVs across all distribution paths, including ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0.

News-Press & Gazette’s KSBB-TV in Santa Barbara included Aspect in February 2019 within the NAB-led ATSC 3.0 interoperability test at the station. Based on the successful embedding and detection of Aspect within the test, the watermark will continue to be embedded by KSBB moving forward.

In Cleveland, the Tribune Media-owned WJW is incorporating the Aspect watermark in an ATSC 3.0 test led by the NAB and Consumer Technology Association. This test is to establish proof of concept for various ATSC 3.0 elements and act as an incubator for new products and services based on the Next Gen TV standard.

In addition, Pearl TV’s Phoenix Model Market testing ATSC 3.0 has embedded Aspect as part of the development of basic TV service, automotive use cases and ongoing consumer testing.

“The rapid increase in Aspect deployment across the country is a clear indicator that broadcasters are eager to level the playing field with digital platforms,” said Nil Shah, Verance’s chief executive officer.

For a comprehensive source of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see ourATSC3 silo.

CLEVELAND—NAB and the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) have deployed a fully integrated ATSC 3.0 Hitachi Kokusai Electric Comark demo system at the Tribune Broadcasting-owned WJW-TV in Cleveland, the company announced today.

Comark Digital Services (CDS) delivered, installed and activated the ATSC 3.0 demo system after initially integrating it at the company’s lab in Southwick, Mass. The system was shipped to the transmitter site in a short portable “fly-pack” equipment rack.

The demo system, capable of transmitting UHD content from WJW with Comark’s Titan Live HEVC software-based encoder, includes a ROUTE encoder, an Enensys Broadcast Gateway, a Triveni Digital GuideBuilder, an EXACT-V2 DTV exciter and 3.0 test and monitoring equipment. The system drives a Comark DCX-3H three-tube IOT-based transmitter operating on DTV Channel 31 originally deployed in 1999.

“Having already provided ATSC 3.0 solutions to Dish Networks, the OneMedia Dallas SFN and PBS member station WKAR, CDS has been set up with the experience and integration capability just for these types of projects,” says Dick Fiore, Comark president and CEO.

More information is available of the Comark website.

For comprehensive coverage on ATSC 3.0, visit TV Technology's ATSC3 silo.

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CLEVELAND—Triveni Digital this week announced it has joined with NAB, the Consumer Technology Association, Tribune Broadcasting and other technology companies in setting up an operational ATSC 3.0 test station at Tribune’s WJW in Cleveland. The test station will serve as “a neutral laboratory” in the words of Lynn Claudy, senior vice president of technology for NAB. It will test “anything and everything” related to the next-generation television standard.

Triveni Digltal's StreamScope XM MT at the ATSC 3.0 Test Station WJW-TV in Cleveland.

All broadcasters and technology vendors are welcome to participate in the 3.0 test station to evaluate and experiment with the new capabilities enabled by ATSC 3.0, he said. “With companies like Triveni Digital spearheading this effort, the industry will be well-prepared to go on-air with ATSC 3.0," said Claudy. The test station is using Triveni Digital’s GuideBuilder XM signaling and announcement generator to ingest schedule updates from listing services, apply them to relevant services and output program and service guide data to multiplexers.

The setup will make it possible for WJW to test delivery of advanced electronic programming and service guides and localized emergency alerts. The company’s StreamScope XM MT is deployed to analyze ATSC 3.0 streams and data structures to detect and resolve errors quickly.

“We got our part on the air about a month and a half ago and have been working on integration with other vendors,” says Ralph Bochofen, vice president of sales and marketing for Triveni Digital in Princeton, N.J. “We have been working closely with the Harmonic team on the encoding and packager side. On the gateway side, we have been working with Enensys. We are the plumbing in between.”

For a comprehensive list of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see our ATSC3 silo.