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
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