RALEIGH, N.C.—Capitol Broadcasting Co. has named Heather Gray vice president and general manager of WRAL-TV and WRAZ-TV here.

The move brings Capitol-owned NBC affiliate WRAL, Fox station WRAZ and the stations’ new media and digital solutions departments under a unified leadership structure for the first time, Capitol Broadcasting said.

Gray will oversee the Raleigh stations’ cross-platform strategy and operations, Capitol said.

Gray has worked for Capitol since 2017, rising through the ranks from creative services director to brand director to station manager to, most recently, interim GM. She’ll be the first woman to serve as WRAL VP and general manager in the station’s history.

“Heather’s leadership is rooted in vision, authenticity, and deep commitment to our mission and people,” Capitol Broadcasting President and CEO Jimmy Goodmon said.

Gray brings more than two decades of local media expertise to her new role. Before joining Capitol, she led marketing and programming at Tegna-owned NBC station KPNX Phoenix, where she launched the station’s digital brand and built one of that market’s first integrated social-media teams, Capitol said.

Gray serves on the boards of United Arts Wake County and the Local Media Association and is a past chair of the NBC Station Marketing Council.

WRAL-TV will be offering a public preview of its new ArchiveAI-powered media platform, WRAL Archives, to industry users attending the last day of NAB Show New York, Oct. 26. Anyone interested in trying the new platform can create a free account at wralarchives.com. 

“WRAL Archives is a revolutionary new platform that will change the way people access and use archival footage,” said Jimmy Goodmon, COO of Capitol Broadcasting Company. “With WRAL Archives, content creators can easily find the exact clip they need from our library, regardless of how old or obscure it may be.” 

WRAL Archives uses state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to automatically extract metadata from media assets, including facial sentiment, audio transcription, logo identification, subject demographics, object identification, weather conditions, and much more. The company is currently using its ArchiveAI™ platform to process its entire content library from WRAL-TV’s 67 years of broadcasting. 

“The detailed AI-powered search capabilities of this platform is incredible. You can search for a specific person saying a specific phrase during a year range and then filter the footage by sentiment and an AI-powered search score,” said Jon Accarrino, VP of Transformation at Capitol Broadcasting Company. “And it only takes a few seconds. I’ve never seen anything like it before.” 

The team at WRAL-TV, the powerhouse Raleigh TV station anchoring the broadcast arm of Capitol Broadcasting Company (CBC), partnered with Eon Media to leverage their AI technology to power the WRAL Archives. Eon Media was recognized with a win for best “AI/Machine Learning” at the NAB Show’s Product of the Year Awards in 2022 for their Eon Extract product. 

“Working with WRAL and Capitol Broadcasting has been an immense learning and positive opportunity to challenge the status-quo and enable unique monetization opportunities,” said Ashish Agrawal, Founder & CEO of Eon Media. “WRAL Archives is a testament to the power of AI to transform the way we interact with and consume video content.” 

Internally, the WRAL team has already made some important discoveries in their archives because of the new AI-generated metadata.  

“We keep finding clips from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that we thought were lost,” added Pete Sockett, Director of Engineering and Operations at WRAL-TV.  “Video tape was expensive back then and people would often try to put as many clips as they could on one tape. So, a tape with an air-check from the 1980s might have some bonus clips at the end that we didn’t know that we still had.” 

WRAL-TV began broadcasting in 1956 and has an extensive collection of over 500,000 hours of archive footage. In addition to its older archive media, the company produces over 11 hours of new content per day. To approach this challenge, the team is ‘burning the candle at both ends’ and having AI process both the newest and oldest footage in their archive at the same time.  

The project team started testing with a collection of digitized tapes.  Consisting of a mix of news packages and air-checks from the 1970s and 1980s, these longer clips with lower resolutions were a good test of the AI’s capabilities. Lower resolutions can be challenging for both humans and AI to identify things like faces, objects, and logos. Another major test for the AI was segmentation. Because the longer air-check tapes can contain multiple newscasts, the AI needs to use contextual clues to automatically split clips into smaller segments. 

While the AI was processing WRAL’s older archives, the project team then began building automations for their newest content. After each WRAL newscast, assets now automatically move into a server that sends them to the ArchiveAI™ for metadata processing and inclusion on wralarchives.com. 

“WRAL Archives is a game-changer for the TV news industry,” said John Conway, Director of Special Projects at Capitol Broadcasting Company. “It gives broadcasters and other media organizations a way to make their archival content more accessible and valuable than ever before.” 

Teams at both WRAL and Eon Media have been working on the WRAL Archives project for over a year. In addition to the 11 hours of new daily content being produced by WRAL, an additional 1,000+ files are processed by artificial intelligence every day. WRAL is months away from having AI process 100% of its archive, but the platform is at a point where it’s ready for a test drive. 

“We are still finalizing everything. A lot of footage still needs to be processed. But we are at the stage where we want user feedback from the NAB community,” Accarrino added. “This AI-powered platform is a tool that other media organizations will be able to take advantage of, and gathering valuable feedback from our industry peers will help make it even better.”  

Capitol Broadcasting Company plans to officially launch WRAL Archives in Spring 2024. But both industry professionals and NAB attendees are invited to join the WRAL Archives public preview now and use the feedback tools to submit comments. 

RALEIGH, N.C.—WRAL-TV, channel 5, is the NBC affiliate serving the Research Triangle area in North Carolina and is locally owned and operated by Capitol Broadcasting Company. Our station produces about 12.5 hours of live news every day, offering viewers a mix of breaking news, weather, sports, entertainment, and educational content. 

The volume of content we manage is growing rapidly, driving us to optimize our news archive. We wanted to upgrade our archive to enable faster access to historical content and simplify search, enabling digital news assets to be reused and monetized more effectively. 

The Key Challenge
Our existing archive consisted of a mix of spinning disk and an optical disk archive system. Given the sheer size of our archive, one of the challenges we faced during the upgrade was deciding whether to store the archive in the public cloud or on-site. Ultimately, we chose to host the new archive on-site to speed up access to content and ensure high reliability with no reliance on internet service.

Our key requirement in an archive solution was support for an S3 connector. Supporting S3 would ensure seamless integration with third-party solutions, like artificial intelligence platforms. We also wanted an archive solution with high scalability, flexibility, and a predictable cost model.

We worked with Bridge Digital, a Nashville, Tenn.-based systems integrator, to ensure a seamless implementation. After evaluating the available archive solutions, we chose Perifery’s Swarm S3 cloud-native in-facility archive for its fast access to media content, S3 compatibility, and reliability.

We installed Swarm software on a 500 TB storage platform that will continue to grow as our station’s needs evolve. Deploying Swarm has transformed our archive operations—the S3 cloud-native solution reduces complexity by offloading content from online workspaces. Once content is offloaded, Swarm keeps it online and easily accessible anywhere, anytime, providing us with a powerful web-based search tool and enhanced metadata awareness. 

At WRAL, we need to be ready to cover breaking news 24/7, and Swarm offers instant access to all of the assets in the archive whether we have an internet connection or not. Beyond speeding up the archive workflow, Swarm software provides us with flexibility, scalability, and a predictable cost model. We aren’t locked into a particular cloud vendor or piece of hardware. 

Integrated Access
Swarm software compatibility with the S3 open standard for object storage ensures that we can integrate third-party applications with the archive. Currently, Swarm is integrated with Eon Media’s Eon Archives AI product and BitCentral’s Oasis media asset management software. Integration with Eon Media’s platform to Swarm allows WRAL’s archives to serve as a highly advanced AI-powered media store, supplying hyper-local and media clients, as well as content creators across the globe with stock and archival footage.

In addition, Swarm software is scalable, allowing us to grow in capacity and throughput. We can rapidly scale up to hundreds of nodes, and dozens of clusters as needed—from a few 100 TBs to hundreds of petabytes and beyond. 

Furthermore, Swarm includes multi-layered security, encryption in-flight and at-rest, immutability, WORM, and automated replication capabilities to ensure that internal or external parties never violate the integrity of WRAL’s content. 

Our data storage requirements will continue to grow. With Perifery’s Swarm software, WRAL is ready for the foreseeable future. Swarm provides us with a flexible, scalable, and reliable S3-compatible archive solution that speeds up access to digital assets and improves content discovery. 

More information is available at www.perifery.com.

RALEIGH, N.C.—As a fast growing urban center not far from the Atlantic coast, the Raleigh-Durham, N.C., area has seen its share of natural disasters, including Hurricane Dorian last fall. So it’s not unusual for WRAL-TV, the Capitol Broadcasting Company-owned NBC affiliate to be prepared for the unexpected. 

Preparing for the coronavirus pandemic, however, prompted a longer-term technical challenge, though, as news crews, anchors and managers had to quickly arrange for in-home broadcasting as well as keep their employees safe in a situation that sees no immediate end in sight. 

“We realized early on that we needed to act quickly and decisively and our primary focus was how we could distance key personnel from the newsroom,” said Leesa Moore, director of news operations and special projects for WRAL-TV. “That was our primary focus.”

Of the 151 employees, managers had to first determine what was the minimum number of staff who could remain at the station and who was able to broadcast from home. 

“Right off the start, we identified personnel who we knew were outfitted to work from home,” Moore said.  “We needed to make sure that any staff working in the field were well equipped to do their job safely, but they were not going to come back in the building.

“I think we went about it as systematically as you could and I did document dayparts and jobs, so we have a spreadsheet of who is allowed where and when,” she added. “How we determine who is in the building is not number driven but rather shift driven.” 

Remote production is not new and in this age of file-based workflows and working in an IP and cloud environment, the process of home setups was more about expanding capabilities and ensuring reliability, according to Tony Gupton, technical project coordinator for WRAL.

“We have a lot of the technology, we just needed to learn how to use it in a bigger fashion—we're talking IFBs, LiveUs, frame syncs coming into the control room, that sort of thing,” Gupton said. “I had to separate our reporters and photographers and figure out how they were going to go about working in tandem without being in close physical contact 8-10 hours a day.”

The station’s master control is “state of the art,” according to Moore, so social distancing was not as much of an issue. 

“We closed entry to that room so it is only essential personnel, and we've given people pretty strict instructions on how they should enter and leave their workspace,” she said. “We just built a new news set, so thankfully that has really served that purpose well. Anchors are no more than 6 feet in proximity, even on the set.”

Gupton was responsible for setting up home studios for reporters and anchors, which created its own set of challenges.   

“The idea was to build them a studio that was user friendly—something that you didn't need to have an entire crew or control room to put on the air,” Gupton said. “Anchors are interacting with reporters, meteorologists need to see their weather maps from their home, so we needed an in-home setup that was robust and durable enough to last three to four hours at a time, when you start thinking about batteries, bandwidth things like that.” 

For ENG crews in the field as well, protection was a priority. Crews are given survival kits including sanitizer wipes, microphone covers and boom extensions to keep reporters and subjects at least 6 feet apart.  

“As the pandemic progressed, we added additional measures in terms of distancing,” Moore said. “Perception is a big part of this too. If the viewer doesn’t think you're practicing what you're preaching, they will call you out and they’ll say, ‘what part of social distancing does your crew not understand?’

“So we not only had to be duly diligent in making sure our people are protected  but we're also protecting our viewers,” she added. 

Ensuring a reliable connection with an in-home studio is vital to keeping viewers informed. Gupton says they’ve done well so far. 

“We're LiveU customers, so we're using the combination of cell modems and in some cases, when I go into the anchor's homes and realize that their home network is stable enough and good enough, then we can use some units that don’t require cells,” he said. “So it's kind of half and half—it depends on their own home network and how reliable it is, but so far, we have figured that out and gotten the right combination of units in the right homes. Knock on wood, everything is running very, very smooth.” 

Has the experience of the past month and a half prompted the station to think about how news reporting will change in the future?

“I think on the back side of this, there could be some changes,” Gupton said. “Could we have done this five years ago? Probably not, we were still running satellite trucks. What will we do in the future when this dies down? It could change some of the way we do some things. I'm not sure.”

With 11 hours of news to produce daily, Moore thinks the station’s response has helped bring them closer to their viewers. 

PLUS: Maintaining 'Broadcast Quality' During Coronavirus

“We started producing nightly specials at 7:00 called ‘Facts Not Fear,’ and we started telling viewers early on, you can trust us, we're going to give you the facts, we're not going to try and invoke fear,” she said. “And I think it really paid off, if they don’t think we’re ‘walking the walk,’  they call us out on it. And we answer every single email personally.

“When issues arise or our employees have questions or concerns, they’re addressed immediately, because they are the backbone of what we do and if we show any type of hesitation or unease on air, that’s going to translate to our viewers,” Moore added. “So we need to make sure everyone is comfortable with the new expectations and I think we're pretty much there.”

RALEIGH, N.C.—WRAL-TV is the Raleigh-Durham, N.C. NBC affiliate owned and operated by Capitol Broadcasting. Our station is known for having achieved a number of technological firsts over the years, including our 2016 launch of an ATSC 3.0 TV station with the first live simulcast of a commercially licensed TV station.

Capitol Broadcasting is a member of ATSC, and we play an active role in the ATSC Technology Group 3 (TG3) responsible for developing the ATSC 3.0 broadcast TV standard.

We’re also part of the Advanced Emergency Alerting (AEA) Implementation Team focused on supporting integration of rich-media alerting into ATSC 3.0. One of our many valuable partners is this work has been Digital Alert Systems (DAS).

MORE THAN JUST AN EAS ENCODER

Digital Alert Systems’ DASDEC Emergency Alert System platform has been the mainstay of our EAS presence for more than a decade, and today it supports all of our call letter stations (WRAL, WRAZ, and WILM) by processing EAS/CAP messages for a total of nine streams leaving our building. Through continual upgrades, our DASDEC platform has evolved into more than just an EAS encoder-decoder; today it also serves as a content management server and middleware for AEA applications.

Enabled by ATSC 3.0, AEA capabilities on the DASDEC platform support delivery of rich media such as live video updates, video clips, escape route maps, images or diagrams, and location-based information. (ATSC 3.0 also enables geo-targeted public alerts and messages to first responders.) Though our EAS capabilities have grown far more robust, none of the existing EAS messaging will go away. We’ll still put banners on screen and play those familiar attention tones, but we have many more options in providing emergency information.

In fact, we’re also working with DAS and other partners within the Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN) Alliance to optimize—in a more social sense—the touch, look, and feel of rich media alerts to smartphones, tablets, and fixed television receivers. AWARN members are focusing on the advantages of ATSC 3.0’s higher data throughput, more robust transmission, and improved indoor reception not only to deliver rich media, but also to wake up devices and to deliver alerts even when the cellular network is jammed or the power grid is down.

The broadcast television infrastructure in the U.S. is very robust. We’re prepared to stay on air through natural disasters. We’re not reliant on the internet, but we can leverage connectivity as available to offer the public another level of support, be it additional information or a link by which people can report power outages and so forth. ATSC 3.0 opens the door to a lot of exciting new possibilities, and our DASDEC system gives us the tools we need to realize the next-gen standard’s potential with respect to EAS.

The industry intelligence of the DAS team is evident not only in their contributions to TG3, the AEA Implementation Team, and the AWARN Alliance, but also in the valuable capabilities added to the DASDEC platform over time. Our EAS system has grown increasingly sophisticated through regular software updates—our DASDEC box just keeps on running smoothly through every update.

EAS is near and dear to our hearts at Capitol Broadcasting, and we’re proud to be working with Digital Alert Systems and other industry leaders to bring advanced alerting into the EAS landscape.

Pete Sockett currently serves as Capitol Broadcasting Director of Engineering and Operations at WRALTV in Raleigh-Durham. He can be reached atPSockett@wral.com.

For more information, visitdigitalalertsystems.comor call 585-765-1155.

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

ARLINGTON, VA.--Broadcast engineers from around the globe converged here for three days last week to exchange information about the industry and broadcast technology developments at the annual IEEE Broadcast Technology Society Fall Symposium.

In spite of the demands of the ongoing television spectrum repack, some 160 engineering consultants, equipment manufacturers, and broadcast group personnel took time away from their duties to join academics and others from as far away as Russia, Brazil and South Korea at the Oct. 9-11 tech con.

Next-Gen TV was the hot topic this year, with nearly half of the presentations falling into this category and nine directly focused on ATSC 3.0’s potential, field testing, deployment, business models, and evaluation metrics. Presentations even included some “one step beyond” views into the future television experiences. One described methodology for transmitting information to provide sensory stimulation beyond sight and sound, and a lunchtime keynote presenter described taking virtual reality out to the ball game.

BRINGING BACK THE ACTION WITH VR

In her presentation, Uma Jayaram, engineering director for Intel Sports True VR division, described why her company decided to launch a virtual reality TV sports production element, and discussed some of the technical issues that had to be resolved to make it possible.

“The timeline for [introduction and acceptance] of new use cases is dramatically shortening,” Jayaram said. “The telephone took 75 years to reach the 50 million user mark; ‘Angry Birds’ took just over a month to reach this mark.

“Companies such as Intel realize that you cannot afford to join the party after it’s well underway and things are moving really fast," she continued. "So, you place some bets, you get into the ecosystem, you play with it, you try to move it, and essentially see what’s going on in a more involved manner.

“When you think of Intel, you ordinarily think of the more traditional segments—CPUs, graphics and so on, but some of the big bets we are making have to do with artificial intelligence, VR, hygiene, and automated driving” observing that all of these emerging technologies involved moving and processing massive amounts of data, an Intel specialty.

“These areas are moving so fast that you want to be in that ecosystem,” said Jayram in explaining Intel’s decision to launch the sports business unit two years ago.

“On ‘game day’ we show up with our cameras, we set up alongside the networks and stream VR experiences in near real time,” she said. “We provide [feeds] to about 10 right’s-holding broadcasters.”

In her presentation, Jayaram did flag some VR limitations, noting that perhaps the biggest centers on the cumbersome headgear that consumers must don.

“I can’t watch with a headset for more than a few hours,” she said.

As one solution, her unit is creating shorter duration or “snackable content” sports highlights packages. “We’re also working to provide a better user interface…something that would allow a person to do VR viewing while still interacting with friends,” she said.

She also described some technical considerations in VR that don’t really exist in ordinary television coverage.

“Time synchronization is very important when you have six separate cameras that all have to be synched together along with the audio," she said. "Seamless ‘stitching’ of the multiple views is also very important.”

Branding of the viewing apps for consumers is also something of a challenge as Intel's Sports unit is dealing with multiple broadcast entities operating in several countries. “In the U.S., NBC has the rights, so we have to have an NBC app with the 'NBC look and feel' and colors. We now have to put out about 33 of these apps [to accommodate the various broadcast entities and viewing devices].”

Jayaram also noted that a business model has to be established before widespread deployment of VR sports coverage can take place.

“We’re looking at subscription models,” she said. “In the end you have to make money. This is still being worked out.”

WHAT’S HAPPENING OUT IN THE [3.0] FIELD?

Status reports on ATSC 3.0 rollouts in three U.S. markets were part of the conference program, with WRAL-TV’s Transmitter Supervisor Matt Brandes describing activities at his company’s Raleigh-Durham, N.C. test facility. Fred Baumgartner, director of Next Gen TV implementation for Sinclair Broadcast Group, provided an update on the station group's Dallas-Ft. Worth ATSC 3.0 single-frequency network initiative, and Pearl TV’s Dave Folsom described goings-on in connection with the "Phoenix Model Market project.

All offered some lessons learned and dos and don’ts takeaways.

“If you’re a person blessed with the privilege of setting up a brand new ATSC 3.0, please download and read the ATSC recommended practices on the Physical Layer, go play with your toys, and then come back and read the recommended practices again,” said Brandes. “Also, buying a new encoder might do more for your coverage than putting in two transmitters. If you can get three dB improvement [in encoding], this is equivalent to doubling your power.

Speaking for Pearl TV, Folsom noted that early equipment implementations are still not complete and software versioning is a big issue

“Anytime someone makes a software upgrade, everything downstream quits working, including the receivers," he said. 

Folsom added that the ability to interchange encoding, packaging and encapsulation units isn’t fully developed yet. “You should be able to connect up the unit and it should work, but it doesn’t," he said. "The standards are clear, [but] there’s a lot of misunderstanding among manufacturers about what needs to be there.”

Baumgartner observed that monitoring and control in connection with SFN transmitter sites is a potentially big issue. “We’re just starting to put our toes in that water and we can run [the Dallas-Ft. Worth installations] from our handheld devices, but at some point, it’s going to start to look like MediaFLO and then you’re got 300 transmitters out there and you have to start thinking about trucks, spare parts, and support infrastructure," he said. "You have to figure out how to make it all run economically.”

‘HACKING’ NEXT-GENERATION TELEVISION

Although the ATSC 3.0 racehorse is barely out of the stable, due to its hybrid broadcast/internet delivery, concerns are already surfacing about vulnerability of signals to manipulation by pranksters or others with darker agendas. Broadcast cybersecurity expert Wayne Pecena examined this in his presentation, “Hacking ATSC 3.0.”

He noted that the broadcast community was not exactly a stranger to nefarious intercepts of program streams, citing the 1986 takeover of HBO’s satellite transponder by “Captain Midnight,” and the “Max Headroom” incident the following year in which the studio-to-transmitter feeds of Chicago stations WGN-TV and WTTW were breached and third-party content aired.

Pecena observed that those incidents had required a lot of technical savvy and large equipment costing many thousands of dollars. “Now someone with a tablet computer sitting in a coffee shop can wreak a lot more havoc,” he said.

He cited the potential risks to broadcasters of ATSC 3.0 stream hijacking, including dead air, loss of revenue, public embarrassment, data breaches, potential legal liability, loss of public trust, and impact on station resources.

Pecena urged station operators to gain a thorough understanding of their IP systems and think about ways in which they might be compromised, observing that “the Internet of Things really provides only minimal, if any, safeguards against hacks, with security often being an afterthought or a ‘neverthought.’”

He said that even with the security components inherent in ATSC 3.0 and a tightening of security at broadcast facilities, there still could be breaches occurring within the home environment.

“The consumer industry must adopt stronger IoT security features,” he said. “The weakest link determines the overall security of any system.”

During the gathering the society also recognized Merrill Weiss with its highest honor, the Jules Cohen award for excellence in broadcast engineering. 

The BTS Symposium moves to Hartford, Conn. in 2019. Conference dates are Oct. 1-3.

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

Two years ago, NAB launched its PILOT program, an initiative designed “to bring together leading-edge companies, organizations and educators to advance broadcast technology and broadcaster innovation.” Numerous companies including Accenture, Frankly, IBM, Google and Nielsen have joined the coalition that helps drive the research, creation, testing and implementation of new technologies and solutions.

Last month NAB announced its third annual PILOT Challenge. The program recognizes creative ideas that leverage technological advances in the production, distribution and display of engaging content. It also provides support to the winners for development. The challenges are supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

I had a chance to talk with the winner of the grand prize in last year’s challenge, UNC-TV, which won for its proposal to use the ATSC 3.0 standard to enable North Carolina’s public safety community to provide timelier response to emergencies by datacasting over broadcast signals.

Fred Engel, senior director of technology at Public Media North Carolina/UNC-TV explained the proposal, which stemmed from a suggestion from Red Grasso, North Carolina’s FirstNet Single Point of Contact with the state Department of IT. Grasso, a former firefighter and fire department communications expert, was concerned that a local fire department was considering purchasing new analog voice paging radios, but “the idea of ‘new’ and ‘analog’ just didn’t roll off his tongue real well,” Engel said. Grasso approached UNC-TV to inquire whether ATSC 3.0 might provide a new means of alerting for first responders.

Those of us old enough to remember the TV series “Emergency,” will recall one of its signature moments when an emergency was called into the local fire station; after the tones sounded, a voice would announce the details of the emergency, including who was to respond and what they were responding to. In the real world, that part of the alert could last up to a minute depending on the severity of the emergency. That technology, which is still being used in many stations, is analog-based, which limits its capabilities, according to Engel.

Based on a real life event of a multiunit dispatch for a fire Engel said it took 67 seconds from the time the very first tone alert was generated to the end of the voice alert. “During that 67 seconds, if there’s any other incidents that happen, they all have to wait until that one is fully communicated before the next one will be announced,” Engel said. “So, depending on what else is going on, whether it’s a car accident, cardiac arrest, whatever, those all have to wait.”

The goal was to provide a text-based protocol that would provide instant alerts to first responders’ pagers, and help reduce delays in providing follow up alerts. And providing text alerts would allow those first responders to better retain the information. Cellular was not an alternative because insurance carriers don’t recognize cellular as an approved method of delivering this kind of message to first responders, Engel said. So how about broadcast?

[Read: NAB Launches Third Annual PILOT Innovation Challenge]

Around this time, in late 2016, the National Institute of Science and Technology issued a grant request for proposals to improve public safety communications, including new ways to “provide resilient systems to deliver emergency messaging.” UNC-TV, along with PBS, local broadcaster WRAL-TV and local public safety officials collaborated on applying for the grant but were unsuccessful, so Engel turned his attention to the PILOT challenge that was issued around the same time.

Engel said UNC-TV had previously done some 911 dispatch testing with ATSC 1.0 but there were several factors that led them to propose ATSC 3.0 as a solution, namely the mobility factor and the robustness of the Next Gen TV signal, particularly for indoor penetration.

Engel and his group successfully conducted their first test this spring, transmitting emergency information from a local fire department dispatch center to the UNC-TV campus using WRAL’s ATSC 3,0 test signal. Engel says further testing is in the works, based on feedback his group received from a meeting with public safety officials and commercial product manufacturers in July.

There are a lot of elements to take into account, not the least is getting manufacturers to add ATSC 3.0 receivers into the pagers but Engel acknowledges that the project is in the very early stages, adding that there has been interest from other corners of the public broadcasting community.

“They’re all interested in this, to see how this might take off, because it’s the kind of thing that that just makes our networks more vital to the states we serve,” Engel said.

The deadline for entering the third annual PILOT Challenge is Oct. 19. For more information, visit https://nabpilot.org/challenge.

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

As I write this, the 2018 NAB Show and the ATSC Next Gen TV Conference have come and gone. Since my last column I also had a chance to visit WRAL-TV in Raleigh and see the demonstration of the PyeongChang Olympics broadcast over their ATSC 3.0 station, complete with interactive content.

These events gave me a glimpse of the future of over-the-air TV broadcasting from the perspective of broadcasters, manufacturers and the engineers who created it and are now building that future.

ATSC 3.0 MATURES

Thanks to Pete Sockett and Capitol Broadcasting for inviting me to see the Next Gen TV demonstration in Raleigh at the State Club at North Carolina State University, and allowing me to help with the setup. It was great to see how ATSC 3.0 works in the real world.

WRAL-TV’s ATSC 3.0 transmitter has an ERP of only 40 kW, well below what most broadcasters will eventually use for ATSC 3.0, but even at this power we were able to receive the Olympics UHD programming with a Mohu Leaf antenna attached to a curtain behind the TV.

The more robust stream with WRAL-TV’s HD programming was received reliably around the room on prototype ATSC 3.0 dongles and a standard Windows 10 tablet. For more information and pictures, see www.wraltechwire.com/tag/next-gen-tv/.

The opportunity to see how ATSC 3.0 worked over-the-air in Raleigh and see the options available gave me more confidence broadcasters will be able to successfully roll out this complex standard.

[Read: Verifying TV Facility Coverage]

For a successful rollout, it will be important that station engineers have a chance to play with the technology, try different transmission parameters and explore the options the standard offers for delivering content and emergency information in different ways before the number of viewers increase and business needs limit station engineers’ opportunity to experiment.

At the NAB Show broadcasters were able to see ATSC 3.0 content over low-power transmitters in the exhibit hall and from a transmitter on Black Mountain.

Overall, this year’s demonstrations were similar to those from last year, but more polished, with extended features. For me, it was a sign the ATSC 3.0 landscape is maturing, getting ready for rollout.

One exhibit in the LVCC lobby highlighted all the stations currently on the air with ATSC 3.0 broadcasts — Sinclair’s single frequency network in Baltimore and Washington, the NAB test station in Cleveland, WRAL-TV’s station in Raleigh and new test stations in Phoenix and Dallas. For more on the Phoenix project, see www.pearltv.com/model-market.

Another sign that ATSC 3.0 is maturing was the number of companies showing products for ATSC 3.0 at the NAB Show. Two years ago most transmitter manufacturers promised some upgrade path to ATSC 3.0. Last year, all the ATSC 1.0 transmitter manufacturers I’m aware of offered an ATSC 3.0 exciter option of some sort.

For ATSC 3.0 to succeed, we need to get more ATSC 3.0 stations on the air, even if the number of viewers may be limited.

What was new this year was an increased number of products for receiving and decoding the ATSC 3.0 signals from those transmitters. Other manufacturers offered standalone receiver/decoder solutions.

The price of these receivers — approaching $20,000 or higher depending on the options — seemed high until I thought about what we paid for analog TV monitoring. A proper monitoring setup for an analog TV station around 1990 consisted of a Tektronix 1450 television demodulator (with the TDC downconverter), a VM-700 analyzer and a BTSC audio modulation monitor. It would be tough to put together an ATSC 3.0 monitoring package that cost as much as that setup!

I know many readers are looking for a less expensive way of viewing ATSC 3.0. I had the opportunity to test the Airwavz dongle at the NAB Show. I plugged the dongle into my laptop and was able to view the characteristics of the Black Mountain ATSC 3.0 signal I received in my hotel room. This used an early version of the software that did not allow viewing content on the laptop.

Airwavz said they had tried routing the IP output from the program to the network input of a Sony ATSC 3.0 TV set in the same booth and it was able to decode and display the stream. I’ll have more on this product when I have a chance to upgrade to the latest software and test it in a location with an ATSC 3.0 signal.

In discussions with some manufacturers at the show, it looks like there may be some other ATSC 3.0 dongles appearing at some point in the future. Don’t expect the price to match that of an ATSC 1.0 dongle, but pricing around $250 or less may be possible. Final price and timing for ATSC 3.0 dongles and “converter boxes” (which will likely stream content over an IP connection to a smart TV, tablet or PC running an ATSC 3.0 application) will depend on the availability of lower-cost demodulator chips as well as IP (intellectual property licensing) costs.

WHAT’S NEXT?

At the ATSC Next Gen TV Conference in Washington in May it was clear ATSC 3.0 had the support of broadcasters, consumer electronics manufacturers and even government. Unlike the previous conference, which focused primarily on the technology and the potential of the standard, this year’s conference highlighted real-world applications, some of which are being rolled out now in limited form with ATSC 1.0.

Emergency alerting, with the ability to provide detailed information in the form of maps, videos and text with an ease that would be impossible using cellular messaging is a key feature for governments.

More precise measurement of TV viewing is of interest to advertisers and broadcasters competing with on-line advertising. Both are available now.

The transition to ATSC 3.0 will be complicated, not only for broadcasters but cable companies as well. Cable carriage of ATSC 3.0 content is going to require cooperation between broadcasters and cable companies. I was pleased to hear about the progress made towards this in ATSC TG3/S37, the Specialist Group on Conversion and Redistribution of ATSC 3.0 Service.

For ATSC 3.0 to succeed, we need to get more ATSC 3.0 stations on the air, even if the number of viewers may be limited. In the early days of ATSC 1.0, station engineers had a one-to-one relationship with early adopters of HDTV, sometimes changing settings to help them get reception when one manufacturer’s receiver had a problem with their transport stream.

While all indications are the first-generation ATSC 3.0 receivers are working much better, I expect there will still be a lot of broadcaster-viewer interaction. That’s a key focus of the Phoenix test and essential for a transition to ATSC 3.0 to succeed.

Until full-power stations are willing to put their ATSC 1.0 programming on another station’s signal and switch to ATSC 3.0, finding transition spectrum is going to be difficult. Class A and LPTV stations have a role to play. While the lower ERP (about 4.3 dB less than the WRAL-TV ATSC 3.0 station) may make indoor reception more difficult at higher bit rates, the early adopters of ATSC 3.0 may be willing to make an extra effort to get a decent signal. Setting expectations will be important.

I’m looking forward to seeing more ATSC 3.0 stations on the air, using the Airwavz dongle to see how they work in the real world, and hearing the experiences of engineers putting ATSC 3.0 on the air!

As always, your comments and questions are welcome. Email me atdlung@transmitter.com.

[Want more information like this? Subscribe to our newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox.]

RALEIGH, N.C.--Joel Davis has been named VP and general manager of WRAL-WRAZ in Raleigh. Davis comes from KGTV San Diego. He spent nine years at that station, rising from news director to general manager.

Davis succeeds Steve Hammel, who is retiring, at WRAL-WRAZ. He starts July 16.

The stations are an NBC-Fox pair.

[Read: WRAL-TV Showcases Next Gen TV’s Potential]

“The WRAL and FOX 50 team conducted an exhaustive nationwide search for the next vice president and general manager,” said Jimmy Goodmon, president of WRAL-WRAZ parent Capitol Broadcasting Company. “We looked for someone who can help fulfill our mission and commitment to the people and community of North Carolina and know that we have found the right person in Joel. His experience, leadership and integrity will help lead us into the future while maintaining the WRAL journalistic standards and ideals for which WRAL is known and respected.”

Davis was news director at KBAK Bakersfield and KFSN Fresno before being named managing editor at WFTV Orlando. He joined KGTV as news director in 2009.

“The opportunity to work for Capitol Broadcasting and WRAL and FOX 50 is one of the best in the business,” Davis said. “Their commitment to the community, quality journalism, and the station staff is well known in the industry. I look forward to getting deeply involved in the local community and helping lead the team to even more success.”

RALEIGH-DURHAM, N.C.—WRAL-TV, with the help of NBCU and NAB, put on quite a display of Next-Gen TV last night at the State Club near the station’s studios.

Ostensibly, the reason for the gathering was to view NBCU’s 4K UHD HDR coverage of the Winter Olympics from PyeongChang, South Korea, being transmitted over-the-air by WRAL on Channel 39.

Jim Goodmon Jr. presenting during Next Gen TV Monday in Raleigh, N.C.

But there was far more to this event than a demo of Ultra HD. This was a public showing of a complete ATSC 3.0 ecosystem that is as well suited to delivering 4K HDR as it is to serving up mobile television, interactivity and advanced emergency alerts. In other words, next-generation TV today is delivering on its many promises—not simply in South Korea where it has been deployed to deliver that nation’s coverage of the Winter Olympics over the air in 4K, but also here in the United States.

“I think what you are seeing… is the standard has now been completed,” said NAB CTO Sam Matheny during an interview in the hallway outside the event. “It [ATSC 3.0] was finished in January. Here we are in February broadcasting the world’s largest sporting event in a demonstration like we have tonight.”

Inside, WRAL Director of Engineering and Operations Pete Sockett walked the roughly 75 people in attendance for the VIP Next Gen TV event through the demonstration. WRAL broadcasts ATSC 3.0 to Raleigh from an elliptically polarized antenna affixed 1,740 feet in the air on one of its towers in a nearby rural community, according to Sockett.

“It’s a 40kW transmitter that’s covering all of Raleigh,” he explained. “To put that into perspective, this signal is 40kW; WRAL’s main signal is a million [watts ERP].”

MORE POWERFUL & EFFICIENT

ATSC 3.0’s OFDM modulation scheme is so much easier to receive than ATSC 1’s 8VSB –even at the comparatively low power WRAL is using—that the new standard will make it possible for broadcasters to reach viewers over-the-air using smaller home antennas, on the road and even in their basements, he said.

[Next-Gen TV Using Olympic Stage as Showcase]

On two tables arranged side-by-side, the demo illustrated how the standard enables different physical layer pipes (PLPs), to deliver a high data rate bitstream to a Samsung 4K UHD HDR television using a simple Mohu Leaf antenna and a much lower data rate bitstream to deliver a highly robust 1080p signal to ordinary media tablets equipped with a Next Gen TV dongle and antenna from South Korea’s ETRI electronics institute.

“This is PLP 1, which is the enhancement layer of LDM [at] 19.5Mbps HEVC,” said Sockett during a one-on-one interview as he pointed to the Samsung UHD television. “PLP 0 [which was being received by the dongle-enabled tablets] is a robust, lower data rate [of] 4.5Mbps throughput, which is running our regular WRAL [content] HEVC encoded [and] AAC audio,” he said.

Sockett added that he has received a robust mobile signal with a tablet outfitted with a dongle supplied by ETRI (a South Korean government tech research group) at 70mph as he has driven home from the station. Jim Goodmon Sr., CEO and chairman of the board of Capitol Broadcasting Company, interjected at the conclusion of Sockett’s presentation that ATSC 3.0’s robust signal will one day put over-the-air television on mobile phones.

Recounting the failure of Mobile DTV, Goodmon reminded the room that the first go broadcasters had at delivering TV to mobile devices depended upon a separate signal, not the core ATSC 1.0 transmission, because the main signal was not sufficiently robust to be received by cell phones and other mobile platforms.

“We came up with a new plan and created another signal, and guess what the networks said,” recalled Goodmon. ‘The networks said, ‘Guys, that’s another TV station. You can’t put our stuff on that mobile signal.’”

However, with ATSC 3.0, the same type of decoder chip used in a television will be available to cell phone makers to receive the same Next-Gen TV signal, he noted. Jimmy Goodmon Jr., president and COO of Capitol Broadcasting Company, reiterated his father’s comments in an interview outside the event.

“It [the separate A/53 and A/153 signals] created a complicated, a bit convoluted, unknown ecosystem,” he said. “Mobile DTV didn’t take off because we couldn’t get the content. If we would have gotten the content out there, the chip makers would have made the chips, and I think people would have put the chips in the phones.”

The tablet portion of the demo also featured an ATSC 3.0 gateway taking in the off-air signal from a Mohu Leaf antenna and retransmitting it as a Wi-Fi signal to an ordinary media tablet.

AWARN ENABLED

Elsewhere in the room, the latest developments in advanced emergency warning (AWARN) enabled by ATSC 3.0 were on display. Created by NAB and LG for the demonstration, the setup illustrated how AWARN could be used to better inform the public in an emergency through the use of rich media informing viewers what to do and where to avoid.

“We can send all of this information [over the air]. None of this needs the internet,” said Sockett, who also pointed out how much more flexibility the new system offers over existing EAS. “Say there is a missile warning and you want to stop the missile warning—we can actually stop it,” Sockett said, referring to the recent missile false alert in Hawaii.

Pete Sockett, and the rest of the event, highlighted some of ATSC 3.0's capabilities in relation to NBC Olympics' broadcast.

At the ATSC 3.0 interactivity demo, So Vang, vice president of advanced technology for NAB, showed off the latest interface his tech team has created to give users access to Next-Gen TV’s hybrid broadband-broadcast interactivity. In keeping with the evening’s Winter Olympics focus, Vang presented an on-screen tote board used to track the medal count of nations and individual athletes that pulled data from the internet. He also showed the Next-Gen TV connected to an ATSC 3.0 gateway retrieving WRAL weathercasts from the internet, on-demand WRAL content, a WRAL-specific electronic program guide and a user account screen that allows individuals to set up their unique preferences.

[ATSC 3.0 Rollout Can Begin Next Month]

Rounding out the demo area was an ATSC 3.0 signal analysis ecosystem with equipment from a variety of companies including DekTec, Triveni and Rohde & Schwarz. “When we first started this a year and a half ago… there was a lot of guessing going on,” said Sockett. “Well this community is growing up as well, and it’s really made a difference.”

ATSC 3.0 transmission isn’t limited to Raleigh and South Korea, however. Sinclair Broadcast Group has been testing SFN transmission in the Baltimore-Washington corridor and has announced plans to do a full SFN test rollout in Dallas. NAB and CTA are on-air from a Tribune station in Cleveland; and the Pearl TV consortium is setting up a model ATSC 3.0 market in Phoenix.

“There are other stations we have talked to that have intentions of going on the air [with ATSC 3.0],” said NAB’s Matheny. “So, what I think you are starting to see is people saying, ‘OK, the standard is done. What can we do to begin deploying it?’”

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

LOS ANGELES—WRAL-TV will be using Xytech’s MediaPulse platform to get its ducks in a row from now on. The MediaPulse system will be utilized to manage the station’s production and news activities, including scheduling of stations personnel, equipment and trucks, as well as the scheduling of the master control for the station.

MediaPulse enables users to track resources and costs in real time. Its MediaPulse Sky feature enables browser interface at any time, and the MediaPulse iOS app facilitates time entry and schedule access via mobile devices.

According to Pete Sockett, WRAL director of engineering and operations: “WRAL Raleigh, alongside two sister stations in the Capitol Broadcasting family, is now capable of racking daily assignments of newsroom personnel, trucks and equipment for story coverage with MediaPulse. We are planning on better management and tracking of resources with reduced resource conflicts, improved maintenance scheduling, enhanced staff communications and, in the end, an overall ability to better analyze how the station can operate most efficiently, productively and profitably.”

PRINCETON, N.J.—Capitol Broadcasting Company’s WRAL-TV issued the first live commercial ATSC 3.0 simulcast on Wednesday, June 29, with the help of Triveni Digital. Triveni announced that it supplied the station with its GuideBuilder XM signaling and announcement system, Route encoder, and StreamScope XM ATSC 3.0 analysis system as part of a unified PSIP and ATSC 3.0 broadcast station workflow.

GuideBuilder XM

Capitol Broadcasting used the GuideBuilder system to manage metadata, streamlining the delivery of EPGs/ESGs and localized, emergency alerts. The Route encoder was used to convert multiple DASH streams into Route. Then the StreamScope system enabled channel sharing broadcasters to perform analysis of ATSC 3.0 streams and data structures for error detection, isolation and resolution.

Pete Sockett, director of engineering and operations for WRAL-TV, said the goal was to create a test bed to learn as much as possible about ATSC 3.0 and “to be ready to leverage all the new functionalities that it brings.”