About Mobile DTV ATSC Mobile DTV Standard
ATSC Mobile DTV Standard
The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ASTC) has approved the Candidate Standard for Mobile DTV. This technology will supply local broadcasters with significant opportunities to provide consumers with new services in their over-the-air digital channel. This new Candidate Standard is the result of an intense development effort involving participants from all over the world and across television and mobile device industries. As experience is gained with the service, the final steps in the ATSC standardization process for this technology are expected to be complete in mid 2009.
The ATSC Mobile DTV system achieves the robustness necessary for mobile reception by adding extra training sequences and forward error correction. The Mobile DTV system converts the current 8-VSB emission into a dual-stream system without altering the emitted spectral characteristics. It does this by selecting some of the MPEG-2 segments (corresponding to MPEG-2 Transport packets in the current system) and allocating the payloads in those segments to carry the Mobile DTV data in a manner that existing legacy receivers ignore. Click here to read more about the ATSC Mobile DTV standard.
History
The standards-development process to enable broadcasters to deliver television content and data to mobile and handheld devices using the DTV broadcast signal began in April, 2007. Since then, a number of committees have been formed to work in three primary elements: a physical layer encompassing backward-compatible additions to the DTV emissions stream to facilitate mobile and handheld reception; a management layer including signaling, announcement, file delivery and other functions such as conditional access and content protection; and a presentation layer, which focuses on the video and audio formats and compression systems.
A significant milestone for ATSC Mobile DTV process so far was an Independent Demonstration of Viability (IDOV) field test conducted in San Francisco, CA in the first quarter of 2008 and supervised by the OMVC.
Click here to read more about IDOV.
The ATSC Standards-Setting Process
A Working Draft standard is written by specialist group (S4) with help from its subgroups. Technology and Standards Group (TSG) develops a consensus recommendation to move the draft to a Candidate Standard for a period of time. It is during this time that the industry is expected to begin to test the standard (i.e., begin product development). TSG members vote to advance to a Candidate Standard.
After the Candidate Standard period, TSG votes to elevate to the Candidate Standard to a Proposed Standard. The Proposed Standard is then balloted to the full membership of the ATSC via a letter ballot. To become a Standard, the ballot must gain a 2/3 majority of all voting ATSC members.
See the ATSC website for more information www.atsc.org.
