As broadcasters focus their future on ATSC 3.0, one organization in particular is reminding the industry of the importance of maintaining the current ATSC 1.0 infrastructure during the transition.
The National Translator Association, the leading advocate for TV and FM translator systems in the U.S., is holding its annual meeting just up the road from where the industry gathered last week in Las Vegas. During the event, taking place May 6-9 in Reno, Nev. broadcast engineers, regulators and manufacturers will discuss the latest developments and regulatory updates affecting the maintenance of the thousands of translators that ensure reliable transmission for over the air radio and TV broadcast.
'A Mixed World'
One panel, in particular will focus on how broadcasters with the challenges faced during the transition when stations that have deployed ATSC 3.0 also have to maintain their 1.0 signal. Kyle Walker, vice president of technology for Wiegel Broadcasting, will moderate “A Mixed World Of ATSC 3.0 And 1.0,” and will be joined by Mark Colombo, associate division chief of the FCC’s Video Division, Wayne Johnson with Southwest Colorado TV, Mike Schmidt with Heartland Video Systems and long-time TV Tech columnist Doug Lung, vice president of broadcast technology with NBC/Telemundo.
Walker says the panel plans to discuss new techniques and best practices for optimizing translator health in the current hybrid 1.0-3.0 configuration.
“We’re going to talk about maximizing 1.0’s full potential today,” he said, adding that representatives from Harmonic and Heartland Video Systems will be on hand to discuss new developments in encoding.
“Heartland Video, along with Harmonic are going to be showing some different techniques that you can do in 1.0 today that a lot of stations may not be aware of or taking advantage of, and not really just translators, but even full power major group stations," he said.
Walker says he’s eager to see what the companies are doing to “push the 1.0 envelope."
“We are also talking about a potential mixed world of 1.0 and 3.0, and it's not clear at this point that there's going to be a 1.0 sunset,” Walker added. “So what does it look like for broadcasters and translator operators in a mixed 1.0 and 3.0 world and some of the complications that go with that?”
In the session “Building A Reliable, Cost-Effective SRT Network,” Walker will expound on secure reliable transport, open-source video transport protocol developed by Haivision to move high-quality video over unpredictable networks like the public internet, and its increasing importance to broadcasters.
“SRT is starting to be used more and more today by a lot of broadcasters and even major cable providers as a cost effective, effective alternative to traditional dark fibers or dedicated circuits,” Walker said. “One of the challenges we see—from Weigel’s point of view dealing with different affiliates of all makes and models, not just LPTVs, but even some major groups where they have an SRT that's set up— is that they may have video coming out the other end, but the link is not really that resilient. And what we hope to break out in this presentation is to show stations how to build a cost-effective, redundant SRT system that actually has monitoring that an end user would know and understand.
“The ultimate goal is to make an SRT circuit as just as reliable as fiber,” he added.
The Importance of Communication
Walker said the convention will also focus on the challenges imposed by the complex logistics and fragmented management of of today’s translator environment, particularly in western states like Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
“The state of Colorado has two DMAs, Colorado Springs and Denver, with Denver being the vast majority of the state... in Salt Lake City, the entire state of Utah, parts of Idaho, parts of Nevada, make up one DMA,” he said. “And there's no way that a full power station, even on top of a mountain, can even cover 20% of that vast geographical area.
“So they have translators throughout the state, and the challenge with those translators is that in many cases, they're not run by the stations themselves. A lot of times, they're being run by local county government agencies that, like everybody, are on a budget,” he added.
Walker says coordination between station groups, affiliates and regulators is key when it comes to transitioning from 1.0 to 3.0, using a station’s decision to become a lighthouse station to host the transmission facilities of other stations in the same area as an example of the challenges broadcasters face.
When that station decides to flip to a lighthouse (being a 3.0), that station might today be a CBS affiliate in 1.0 currently that's being distributed—in a lot of cases—to 70-80 different translators throughout the DMA, of which most of them they don't even control, Walker added.
“Now imagine a station suddenly decides to convert from 1.0 to 3.0... in many cases, these translator groups have no idea this change is coming down the pipe. And in a lot of cases, that is known once the change has been made,” he said. “So suddenly you have viewers out there that are saying, ‘wait, what happened? Why is my CBS gone?’”
Walker continued, “the government that maintains a portion of those translators is now scrambling to figure out, OK, now they figured out that station converted to 3.0, what do they do? They don't necessarily have $10,000 to buy a converter box for every translator to adapt it back to 1.0. So we're going to talk about the different mechanisms that can be done to better mitigate and manage if a station chooses to make a switch or build a lighthouse so that there's not disruption all the way down the food chain.”
Heartland Video Systems, a leading midwest-based systems integrator and one of the sponsors of the NTA Convention, will participate in several panels, discussing the challenges broadcasters face in deploying ATSC 3.0 including preparations stations should take in the event of a large transition to ATSC 3.0. Mike Schmidt, ATSC 3.0 technologist at HVS, and Gil Yanku, senior director, pre-sales & solutions architecture at Harmonic, will also talk about ways broadcasters can increase ATSC 1.0 and 3.0 channel counts.
“With Heartland Video Systems having taken part in almost every ATSC 3.0 market transition in the U.S, we have learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t,” said Schmidt. “I’m looking forward to being able to share some of that experience and knowledge.
“We are currently testing channel loading in our lab at HVS and have found some very surprising results,” he added. “Increased channel loading will be even more important in a post transition world, so this is an exciting and timely topic.”
Additional topics will cover regulatory issues as well as an update on the Broadcast Positioning System from Bob Weller, vice president of spectrum policy for the NAB.
For more information and to register, visit the NTA Convention website.
