The ATSC in July approved Broadcast-to-Everything (B2X) as a candidate standard and announced the approval with great fanfare earlier in October.
The work’s overarching goal was to advance ATSC’s vision of enabling broadcast and mobile technologies to work more closely together, according the committee’s announcement. It also extends the reach of broadcast so unicast networks can leverage the one-to-many strength of broadcasting.
TV Tech reached out to Madeleine Noland, ATSC president, to put this development into context for broadcasters.
In this interview, Noland discusses B2X, the thinking behind its development, who will likely use it, the parallel development of bridge technology that will bring some B2X use cases to broadcasting and how B2X is intended to address the future.
(An edited transcript.)
TV Tech: Earlier in the month, ATSC announced its membership’s approval of Broadcast-to-Everything (B2X) as a candidate standard. How are the ATSC 3.0 suite of standards and B2X related?
Madeleine Noland: There are a couple of things that are part of B2X. One is pure standalone B2X, and that is its own thing that would be running in different spectrum and doesn’t ride alongside of ATSC 3.0.
It’s a different physical layer, and it enables many new use cases that are pretty exciting. At the same time, there is something that the group is working on called bridge technology, which is a way that an existing ATSC 3.0 broadcaster can implement a wide variety of the use cases that B2X can offer.
TVT: Such as?
MN: B2X enables you to do a couple of things you can't do as easily with ATSC 3. Although the bridge technology is going to get you some of the way, one of the things about B2X is that its unique physical layer design is perfect for very low-power devices.
Imagine you've got a sensor out in the middle of a cornfield that has no power other than solar, or it's battery-operated and nobody wants to get on a tractor and go out there and change the battery.
There are aspects of B2X that could be particularly useful in certain verticals for certain use cases that you might not want to use ATSC 3.0 for.
Then there are other use cases where you could really use either technology. It sort of depends on what you have deployed already, what your larger business model picture is all about.
Take, for example, if you wanted to do broadcast traffic offload of a unicast network. That’s a pretty good example. There are some things that you could do with B2X that you can't do with 3.0, but there are a lot of things you can do with the bridge technology that you can do with 3.0.
One of the things that they’re bringing to bear as part of this work is they are working on a broadcast core network, which will apply to 3.0 or B2X and will be closely integrated with 3GPP technologies. The concept behind that is that if you’re a mobile network operator and you want to take advantage of the opportunity to move some broadcast traffic off your network, this makes it much more seamless. It uses 3GPP-defined interfaces between core networks and between radio access networks.
TVT: So will ATSC 3.0 broadcasters take advantage of the standard’s bootstrap to tuck B2X into their existing NextGen TV transmissions?
MN: My guess is that they will use their ATSC 3.0 transmissions, and they will use the bridge technology to take advantage of some of the new verticals that they would be able to access, but that they wouldn’t necessarily change what they’re doing.
It's possible they would interleave ATSC 3 with B2X using the evolutionary frame capability, but my guess is that there’s some overhead to doing that. Are the advantages of B2X within an ATSC 3 transport or physical airframe structure strong enough that you would deal with some of the overhead that is necessary to interweave two standards together?
I don't know what the answer to that question is. My guess is that in the U.S. for the foreseeable future, they would look to the bridge technology, which is coming.
We're working very hard to make people think about their broadcast infrastructure in new ways.”
Madeleine Noland, ATSC
TVT: So who will be the users of B2X? Wireless network operators? Broadcasters around the world?
MN: One of the things that B2X has is it works in 5-, 10-, 15- and 20-MHz bandwidths, as well as 6, 7 and 8 [MHz], which is traditional broadcast. It can absolutely operate in any number of the frequency bands, including traditional television broadcasts, but also going up into the frequency bands that mobile network operators use.
Whether they will ultimately use it or not is certainly going to be a market decision. But it will become available to them to use for broadcast and multicast use cases. I could see that as a possible outcome.
I could also see broadcasters allocating different spectrum for this. For example, say that some consolidation takes place in the United States if the ownership cap rules ultimately are changed, and that there’s a possibility that broadcasters are going to be working together. They could say, "Well, we want to work with B2X in some of our spectrum, and we want to work with ATSC 3 in some other of our spectrum.” I think that in the U.S., though, that would require a regulatory change as well. I think that would be a little bit further down the pike if it were to come.
But then you start looking at other countries where they're thinking about what do they want to do with their digital strategy. What do they want to do with mobile offerings? What do they want to do with broadcast networking reaching rural areas? I think that some of these greenfield areas might be earlier fruit for the B2X technology.
TVT: What is driving an organization called the Advanced Television Systems Committee to develop a standard that may or may not be used by TV broadcasters?
MN: I think what's driving this is almost a philosophical understanding that when you look to the future, it's a network of networks. There's not any one network that is perfect for all use cases.
What you really need is the ability for the networks to operate together according to the data session and the need. When you start a standard that's needed right now, you are too late.
So, we think about B2X as really preparing broadcasters—and frankly, network operators—for this future of converged service. The idea behind B2X is to prepare us for that time, which is already here in many ways, and make us as close to 3GPP standards as we can be, and that's really the genesis behind B2X.
It's very much a future-thinking standard, and the goal is to have the standard complete and ready for testing and for exploration and implementation, with the understanding that as the world changes, we're going to be looking more to interchangeable networks that can be shifted seamlessly within devices and seamlessly on the transmit side.
I also think that ATSC for a number of years has been recognizing that broadcast infrastructure is way more than TV and, as you know, we have rebranded ourselves to take the word “television” specifically out of the name of the organization on the market-facing side of things.
We're working very hard to make people think about their broadcast infrastructure in new ways.
