The Advanced Television Systems Committee announced this week it intended to develop a mobile DTV transmission standard. ATSC-M for "mobile," and ATSC-H for "handheld" will be targeted at the distribution of free and subscription TV, interactive services and "nonreal-time" downloads within the 19.39 Mbps terrestrial broadcast payload.
"The ATSC-M/H standard will facilitate broadcasters' use of their DTV broadcast channels to provide new services directly to small hand-held receivers, laptop computers and vehicles moving at a high rate of speed," said ATSC President Mark Richer. "ATSC-M/H will be backward compatible, allowing operation of existing ATSC services in the same RF channel without an adverse impact on existing receiving equipment."
Glenn Reitmeier, chairman of the ATSC board of directors and vice president of Technology Standards, Policy and strategy and NBC, said the development of ATSC-M/H was a top priority for the committee. The Technology and Standards Group will be in charge of the effort.
The announcement comes just a week or so after Harris and LG Electronics unveiled a joint effort to develop a mobile DTV standard. LG subsidiary Zenith is the primary patent holder on 8-VSB, the terrestrial DTV transmission standard in the United States. The Harris/LG technology is going by the acronym, "MPH," for "mobile, portable, handheld," which is clearly where the big vendors believe TV is going. MPH is also said to be backward compatible with 8-VSB, and will be demo-ed at NAB2007 at the ATSC Hot Spot.
Both standards will compete in the mobile arena with A-VSB, developed by Samsung and Rohde & Schwarz, and demonstrated at last year's NAB convention. A-VSB is currently in the standards pipeline at the ATSC.
Broadcasters, particularly Sinclair chief David Smith, have long sought a mobile transmission technology. Smith spoke to a reporter in 1998 about broadcasting into cars. Now Chrysler is putting satellite-delivered Sirius TV into is automobiles. Mobility is part of what drove Sinclair's criticism of the adoption of 8-VSB as the terrestrial standard, although the company was also dismayed with its receptivity.
Sinclair wanted more comparative testing with coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, or COFDM, upon which the European DTV standard, DVB-T, is based. A mobile version of that standard, DVB-H, was adopted in Europe in 2004, and has since been employed in the United States for the transmission of cell phone TV service. Crown Castle's Modeo service, beta launched earlier this year in New York, uses straightforward DVB-H. The other competing cell TV service, MediaFLO from Qualcomm, uses a proprietary technology based on OFDM.
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