I think this is clever: a TV station in Oregon is delivering on the promises of ATSC 3.0 with ATSC 1.0.
They are broadcasting a mix of high-definition channels, including four channels in 4K, two in 1080p, and eight in 720p, all on a single RF channel. Viewers can experience some of the benefits of ATSC 3.0, like higher resolutions, without needing a new ATSC 3.0 compatible TV or tuner.
If you click through to the full interview, the owner of the station (who bought the station for a place to test his ideas) says there are even some fringe benefits, like increased effective range.
> Viewers can experience some of the benefits of ATSC 3.0, like higher resolutions, without needing a new ATSC 3.0 compatible TV or tuner.
How many TVs/tuners are compatible with HEVC over ATSC 1.0 is a real question I have. I'm pretty sure my computer based tuners would be fine; AIUI, it's still an mpeg transport stream, and demultiplexing doesn't care about the codec, and my player app can figure that out (or not, but I think it would), but I don't know if even my recent atsc 1.0 only tvs know about this and they do have the codecs supported for smart tv.
Otoh, if they're broadcasting in ac-3 audio instead of ac-4 that's common on atsc 3.0, that's a big compatability win. I can't get ac-4 to work well at all.
> How many TVs/tuners are compatible with HEVC over ATSC 1.0?
Great question to which I don’t know the answer. My intuition is the video decoder is the compatibility limiter but it’s beyond my expertise but not my interest.
There's very little incentive for an OTA broadcast station to offer a stream. These stations are always claiming to work on constrained budgets (what company doesn't?). They can't just air the same ads on the stream they do OTA, so there's that loss of revenue on top of the additional cost of hosting the streams. Replacing the ads in the stream with streaming friendly ads comes at an additional tech cost too, plus you need to either hire people to run it or pay someone to manage it for you. Also, you can typically find all of the content via other streaming platforms, so the station may not even have streaming rights for the content they have broadcast rights for
There's no major obstacle that I know of that wouldn't make DVB-T possible for HEVC for an even closer analog to the ATSC 1.0 situation, except there's no point as Europe is now broadly speaking on a high level of DVB-T2... it having been a standard since 2008 after all.
It dates from 2014. And the main reason it hasn't become popular is because Europe has an extremely high level of cable and satellite penetration. Switzerland no longer has terrestrial television at all for example, with some curious minor exceptions where terrestrial distribution to end-users isn't actually the goal - it's for foreign cable companies to legally rebroadcast a freely received signal on their own networks. That's right, terrestrial television exists solely as a facilitator for a legal loophole.
The whole ATSC 3.0 discussion and its DRM and personalised ads has set back innovation in technology standards for a decade. That said, the false choice between either expensive paid cable or terrestrial is probably just as much to blame.
That said, Australia, ironically being one of the most terrestrial TV countries on the planet despite its low density, did trials of DVB-T2 with UHD and HEVC way back in 2018. But it hasn't eventuated into anything further, probably because the apps are taking over and happen to also carry with them DRM and personalised ads.
For some sense of completeness' sake, the terrestrial signal of Rai 4k is a 720p terrestrial channel advertising that Rai 4k can be streamed over the internet with HbbTV, so that doesn't count.
ATSC is a North American modulation standard for transmission of Transport Streams over RF signals. Transport streams can carry any kind of a payload, including data. When the spec came out it was mandatory to use mpeg-2 for video encoding because that was the popular codec at the time. However there is nothing in the spec preventing broadcasters using other video/audio codecs (many already do). This is what this tv station did. You have approximately 19mbps of bandwidth to pack in as much payload in there as you can fit. ATSC3 brings about other features such as higher bandwidth, improved RF signals transmission efficiency (lower costs), error correction, etc…
I remember there being a fairly strict set of encoding tools and formats within the ATSC standards for broadcast video. I did a little searching (Wikipedia and atsc.org) but could only find mention of extensions to add H.264 and then only up to 1080p (in A/72), but nothing about H.265 of any resolution.
This is pretty cool but I'm wondering if it's compliant?
digital TV never worked as well as analog. in my opinion, the switch should have never been justified until it could be qualitatively proven that digital > analog. by "greater than" / better I mean not interrupting the viewing experience, especially the audio. This test would be done using stock antennae within reasonable distance from the transmitter. or even better, actually ask users which they prefer: UHF analog or digital. don't switch until 2/3 or more prefer digital. I've never consistently watched DTV, because inevitably a disruption will come and block the audio for about 1.5s, and completely freeze the video. It's simply a waste of time.
> digital TV never worked as well as analog. in my opinion, the switch should have never been justified until it could be qualitatively proven that digital > analog. by "greater than" / better I mean not interrupting the viewing experience, especially the audio.
I'm not sure I agree with you. Audiowise, you may be right, but video wise, it took a lot to have near perfect video receiving, without ghosts and other weirdness, whereas if you've got a comfortable margin from the digital cliff, you can get an uninterrupted picture and audio, and it will be as good as it gets.
Now, when someone at the station decides they should stuff 8 subchannels of 1080i over the 20Mbps carrier with static multiplexing, that's going to look awful. Dynamic multiplexing helps, but doesn't work miracles either. If the broadcaster does 1 HD stream with about 12-15Mbps, it can look pretty good, as long as it's not flowing water or Olympic diving, one or two, maaaaybe three SD subchannels for the rest of the bandwidth is ok too.
If you don't have a comfortable margin, it is much worse though. Analog TV audio was usually pretty decent even with a very snowy picture. And then there's the delays in tuning to a new channel.
The big difference to me about analog vs digital broadcast is that analog could receive part of the signal and display the poor video and then cleaned up the image/sound as the signal was dialed in. With digital, you're either receiving the stream of 1s&0s or your not. If you miss enough, you have no signal to decode.
I met an old timer satellite dish installer (big giant dish types) that used this to align newly installed dishes. He knew the location of a specific satellite and the frequency it was broadcasting one. He had a tuner dialed in for that channel. Once he found it, he'd move along the one axis to count the number of signals he'd pass until he got to the satellite meant for receiving. He'd then swap out to the receiver for that signal to verify.
The loss of analog just made the playing and experimenting much less fun
"analog" used high-power horizontal and vertical sync pulses. These were hard for the receiver to lose / mess up, if there was any signal at all. Put another way, the receiver would receive the sync pulses (aka 'blacker than black) before even a shred of the video could be decoded. Another way to say this: The sync pulses had such good SNR compared with the picture content, so when the picture content was even barely visible, it was solidly in sync.
In the video of the full interview (linked below the main video), he explains that some of the formats he uses overcome those disruptions, where there is a weak signal.
Huge fan here. I've been following your work. I downloaded your PDF slideshow a year or two back, and I was very impressed with what you were doing with the vanilla flavor of ATSC. I was particularly impressed in your ability to secure a testing ground for it.
I'm hoping to being my HDHomeRun with me next time I'm in the area and check it out first hand (although a portable VHF setup might not be easy).
Please keep up what you're doing and I look forward to hearing about your progress!
Broadcast stations are the epitome of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially if it's going to cost money". They also do not like roll your own solutions. They want a rock solid piece of equipment typically from someone like Snell&Wilcox or Tektronix type of devices. They do not want to deal with "are we on the air" type questions because some one's nephew's science experiment can't be maintained. If there's a chance that something can go out that's non-standard, fines can be levied, and those can get expensive.
Is OTA TV even relevant anymore, except for the specific content that OTA has that isn't (yet) available over the net for free / ad-supported?
I believe it's a waste of valuable spectrum to burn it on TV. It would be better to allocate TV's spectrum to cell services (for example).
Radio should be used when things are moving relative to each other; AM and FM Radio make sense as receivers are often in cars. People don't watch TV in cars.
If the communications is point-to-point, run the wires/fiber and hook up. If you're in a car, boat, airplane, or train -- fine, use 'wireless'. Yet, even today, wi-fi / 5G + some wide-area services for special cases (planes, boats) gets you there.
The quality of OTA TV is certainly superior to anything you're gonna get over fiber or coax.
If you're in the US and you have an online provider for cable channels, try swapping an NFL game between the online broadcast and the OTA broadcast. There's a night and day difference in terms of picture quality.
Yes, the bandwidth argument. OTA TV uses MPEG-2 for ATSC-1 as the OP's video describes. If the content is available in higher-res but the streamers aren't sending that, sounds like a marketing reason. Netflix will sell you 'premium' 4K for $ 22.99/mo
There's no good reason the NFL is better OTA than streaming except streamers aren't complaining enough, I would guess. Note this last season, there was one game that was not available on regular TV, only on streaming. That was a 'test run' but clearly, the NFL is there to make money, and if they can make more streaming... well, there's your answer.
I agree, despite the fact that I use OTA TV. I would prefer to just get an internet stream, but I need to pay like $70/mo+ to get the content (plus a ton that I don't want), and it still has ads.
I would be willing to pay a reasonable price to access a live CBS/NBC/ABC/Fox stream, but no one (legitimately) offers that. So OTA it is.
Exactly. OTA remains a little walled garden of content, justifying (?) their wasting of the precious spectrum.
There are some bundles of content (youtube TV, I think)?
But operationally, for the viewer at home -- HOW the bits get delivered to your screen is irrelevant; what's ON the screen is what we care about.
I'm thinking the TV operators are running a scam, in a desperate attempt to hold on to $ and spectrum -- both of which they are less and less capable of justifying.
OTA TV is a vital, free public service. We take high speed internet for granted and think everyone has access. They don’t. OTA is not as it once was, but it isn’t going away for a long, long time.
ATSC 3.0 is dangerous because it brings encryption to the table, and it's already clear that encryption will not only be limited to entertainment and for-profit content, but also E/I content like news.
OTA TV has one advantage over all of the delivery alternatives: no ongoing access fees. I agree that the spectrum is wasteful, but at least it still belongs to the people in some sense. If we give it up, it will be sold as more 5G spectrum that you then have no option other than to pay for.
Yes, that's true. Until local municipalities consider wifi a service they provide their communities, like parks and libraries.
Until then, yes, probably some spectrum should be devoted to OTA; maybe in SD, mainly PBS, I dunno, because this would be for the 'no access fee' case. That means cheap folks, or really poor folks. Society should be doing everything possible to eliminate the latter.
If TV receivers were built into smart phones, it would be easier to make this case.
I think this is clever: a TV station in Oregon is delivering on the promises of ATSC 3.0 with ATSC 1.0.
They are broadcasting a mix of high-definition channels, including four channels in 4K, two in 1080p, and eight in 720p, all on a single RF channel. Viewers can experience some of the benefits of ATSC 3.0, like higher resolutions, without needing a new ATSC 3.0 compatible TV or tuner.
If you click through to the full interview, the owner of the station (who bought the station for a place to test his ideas) says there are even some fringe benefits, like increased effective range.
> Viewers can experience some of the benefits of ATSC 3.0, like higher resolutions, without needing a new ATSC 3.0 compatible TV or tuner.
How many TVs/tuners are compatible with HEVC over ATSC 1.0 is a real question I have. I'm pretty sure my computer based tuners would be fine; AIUI, it's still an mpeg transport stream, and demultiplexing doesn't care about the codec, and my player app can figure that out (or not, but I think it would), but I don't know if even my recent atsc 1.0 only tvs know about this and they do have the codecs supported for smart tv.
Otoh, if they're broadcasting in ac-3 audio instead of ac-4 that's common on atsc 3.0, that's a big compatability win. I can't get ac-4 to work well at all.
> How many TVs/tuners are compatible with HEVC over ATSC 1.0?
Great question to which I don’t know the answer. My intuition is the video decoder is the compatibility limiter but it’s beyond my expertise but not my interest.
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https://www.rabbitears.info/screencaps/or-eug/185855-0_0.htm
Are they also offering the streams online? Very cool project!
There's very little incentive for an OTA broadcast station to offer a stream. These stations are always claiming to work on constrained budgets (what company doesn't?). They can't just air the same ads on the stream they do OTA, so there's that loss of revenue on top of the additional cost of hosting the streams. Replacing the ads in the stream with streaming friendly ads comes at an additional tech cost too, plus you need to either hire people to run it or pay someone to manage it for you. Also, you can typically find all of the content via other streaming platforms, so the station may not even have streaming rights for the content they have broadcast rights for
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Any licensed content would have to be separately licensed for streaming online.
France is doing terrestrial UHD on DVB-T2, a 2008 standard, with HEVC for the Olympics: https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=R9&liste=1&live=1...
There's no major obstacle that I know of that wouldn't make DVB-T possible for HEVC for an even closer analog to the ATSC 1.0 situation, except there's no point as Europe is now broadly speaking on a high level of DVB-T2... it having been a standard since 2008 after all.
Here's an application note by a reputable vendor doing UHD with HEVC on DVB-T2 with real products they are shipping: https://scdn.rohde-schwarz.com/ur/pws/dl_downloads/dl_applic...
It dates from 2014. And the main reason it hasn't become popular is because Europe has an extremely high level of cable and satellite penetration. Switzerland no longer has terrestrial television at all for example, with some curious minor exceptions where terrestrial distribution to end-users isn't actually the goal - it's for foreign cable companies to legally rebroadcast a freely received signal on their own networks. That's right, terrestrial television exists solely as a facilitator for a legal loophole.
The whole ATSC 3.0 discussion and its DRM and personalised ads has set back innovation in technology standards for a decade. That said, the false choice between either expensive paid cable or terrestrial is probably just as much to blame.
That said, Australia, ironically being one of the most terrestrial TV countries on the planet despite its low density, did trials of DVB-T2 with UHD and HEVC way back in 2018. But it hasn't eventuated into anything further, probably because the apps are taking over and happen to also carry with them DRM and personalised ads.
And as an extra note, DVB-T2 HEVC at HD resolutions is uncommon but definitely in use in places across Europe: https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=MUX-M1-D4&liste=1... https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=NET-21&liste=1&li... https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=... https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=... and in fact in some it's all that's left for terrestrial television because of the aforementioned predominance of IPTV, cable, and satellite.
And just found out Spain has HEVC UHD DVB-T2 as well, without anything too obvious that it's still a test: https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=ESP41&pid=40003&l...
For some sense of completeness' sake, the terrestrial signal of Rai 4k is a 720p terrestrial channel advertising that Rai 4k can be streamed over the internet with HbbTV, so that doesn't count.
Somewhat interesting is that Brazil has been testing ATSC 3.0 with LCEVC on VVC.
And VVC is another codec that many in the EUR are testing with DVB-T2.
Slideshow "UltaHD over ATSC 1.0" from station owner Anton Kapela.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hysslJsp6rTYkWuOmDBK...
I'm driving through Eugene in a few months. Guess I'll be bringing my HDHomeRun and an obnoxiously huge VHF antenna!
Interesting to see cloudflare TV on the list. https://youtu.be/e_94q9TCCDY?t=259
I thought cloudfare only did online steaming.
There is an little screen recording too. https://youtu.be/e_94q9TCCDY?t=277
Looks like he got the rights to broadcast their educational ("Cloudflare U") content: https://cloudflare.tv/
Here's the source of the first screenshot: https://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=station_searc...
ATSC is a North American modulation standard for transmission of Transport Streams over RF signals. Transport streams can carry any kind of a payload, including data. When the spec came out it was mandatory to use mpeg-2 for video encoding because that was the popular codec at the time. However there is nothing in the spec preventing broadcasters using other video/audio codecs (many already do). This is what this tv station did. You have approximately 19mbps of bandwidth to pack in as much payload in there as you can fit. ATSC3 brings about other features such as higher bandwidth, improved RF signals transmission efficiency (lower costs), error correction, etc…
> ATSC3 brings about other features such as higher bandwidth, improved RF signals transmission efficiency (lower costs), error correction, etc…
And DRM that requires receivers to get official blessing before they’re allowed to sell their hardware.
I remember there being a fairly strict set of encoding tools and formats within the ATSC standards for broadcast video. I did a little searching (Wikipedia and atsc.org) but could only find mention of extensions to add H.264 and then only up to 1080p (in A/72), but nothing about H.265 of any resolution.
This is pretty cool but I'm wondering if it's compliant?
digital TV never worked as well as analog. in my opinion, the switch should have never been justified until it could be qualitatively proven that digital > analog. by "greater than" / better I mean not interrupting the viewing experience, especially the audio. This test would be done using stock antennae within reasonable distance from the transmitter. or even better, actually ask users which they prefer: UHF analog or digital. don't switch until 2/3 or more prefer digital. I've never consistently watched DTV, because inevitably a disruption will come and block the audio for about 1.5s, and completely freeze the video. It's simply a waste of time.
> digital TV never worked as well as analog. in my opinion, the switch should have never been justified until it could be qualitatively proven that digital > analog. by "greater than" / better I mean not interrupting the viewing experience, especially the audio.
I'm not sure I agree with you. Audiowise, you may be right, but video wise, it took a lot to have near perfect video receiving, without ghosts and other weirdness, whereas if you've got a comfortable margin from the digital cliff, you can get an uninterrupted picture and audio, and it will be as good as it gets.
Now, when someone at the station decides they should stuff 8 subchannels of 1080i over the 20Mbps carrier with static multiplexing, that's going to look awful. Dynamic multiplexing helps, but doesn't work miracles either. If the broadcaster does 1 HD stream with about 12-15Mbps, it can look pretty good, as long as it's not flowing water or Olympic diving, one or two, maaaaybe three SD subchannels for the rest of the bandwidth is ok too.
If you don't have a comfortable margin, it is much worse though. Analog TV audio was usually pretty decent even with a very snowy picture. And then there's the delays in tuning to a new channel.
The big difference to me about analog vs digital broadcast is that analog could receive part of the signal and display the poor video and then cleaned up the image/sound as the signal was dialed in. With digital, you're either receiving the stream of 1s&0s or your not. If you miss enough, you have no signal to decode.
I met an old timer satellite dish installer (big giant dish types) that used this to align newly installed dishes. He knew the location of a specific satellite and the frequency it was broadcasting one. He had a tuner dialed in for that channel. Once he found it, he'd move along the one axis to count the number of signals he'd pass until he got to the satellite meant for receiving. He'd then swap out to the receiver for that signal to verify.
The loss of analog just made the playing and experimenting much less fun
"analog" used high-power horizontal and vertical sync pulses. These were hard for the receiver to lose / mess up, if there was any signal at all. Put another way, the receiver would receive the sync pulses (aka 'blacker than black) before even a shred of the video could be decoded. Another way to say this: The sync pulses had such good SNR compared with the picture content, so when the picture content was even barely visible, it was solidly in sync.
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In the video of the full interview (linked below the main video), he explains that some of the formats he uses overcome those disruptions, where there is a weak signal.
Cool, realtime fuzzing of atsc 1.0 hardware that is long since supported.
hey, thanks for sharing this link, and the interest in my work.
station owner here, feel free to AMA.
Huge fan here. I've been following your work. I downloaded your PDF slideshow a year or two back, and I was very impressed with what you were doing with the vanilla flavor of ATSC. I was particularly impressed in your ability to secure a testing ground for it.
I'm hoping to being my HDHomeRun with me next time I'm in the area and check it out first hand (although a portable VHF setup might not be easy).
Please keep up what you're doing and I look forward to hearing about your progress!
This is pretty neat!
tldr the station does this by usingusing more efficient codecs like HEVC instead of the common MPEG2
Broadcast stations are the epitome of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially if it's going to cost money". They also do not like roll your own solutions. They want a rock solid piece of equipment typically from someone like Snell&Wilcox or Tektronix type of devices. They do not want to deal with "are we on the air" type questions because some one's nephew's science experiment can't be maintained. If there's a chance that something can go out that's non-standard, fines can be levied, and those can get expensive.
Agreed! It literally takes an experimenter buying a station to see innovation like this.
2 replies →
Is OTA TV even relevant anymore, except for the specific content that OTA has that isn't (yet) available over the net for free / ad-supported?
I believe it's a waste of valuable spectrum to burn it on TV. It would be better to allocate TV's spectrum to cell services (for example).
Radio should be used when things are moving relative to each other; AM and FM Radio make sense as receivers are often in cars. People don't watch TV in cars.
If the communications is point-to-point, run the wires/fiber and hook up. If you're in a car, boat, airplane, or train -- fine, use 'wireless'. Yet, even today, wi-fi / 5G + some wide-area services for special cases (planes, boats) gets you there.
TV is a vast wasteland (of spectrum).
The quality of OTA TV is certainly superior to anything you're gonna get over fiber or coax.
If you're in the US and you have an online provider for cable channels, try swapping an NFL game between the online broadcast and the OTA broadcast. There's a night and day difference in terms of picture quality.
Yes, the bandwidth argument. OTA TV uses MPEG-2 for ATSC-1 as the OP's video describes. If the content is available in higher-res but the streamers aren't sending that, sounds like a marketing reason. Netflix will sell you 'premium' 4K for $ 22.99/mo
There's no good reason the NFL is better OTA than streaming except streamers aren't complaining enough, I would guess. Note this last season, there was one game that was not available on regular TV, only on streaming. That was a 'test run' but clearly, the NFL is there to make money, and if they can make more streaming... well, there's your answer.
1 reply →
I agree, despite the fact that I use OTA TV. I would prefer to just get an internet stream, but I need to pay like $70/mo+ to get the content (plus a ton that I don't want), and it still has ads.
I would be willing to pay a reasonable price to access a live CBS/NBC/ABC/Fox stream, but no one (legitimately) offers that. So OTA it is.
Exactly. OTA remains a little walled garden of content, justifying (?) their wasting of the precious spectrum.
There are some bundles of content (youtube TV, I think)?
But operationally, for the viewer at home -- HOW the bits get delivered to your screen is irrelevant; what's ON the screen is what we care about.
I'm thinking the TV operators are running a scam, in a desperate attempt to hold on to $ and spectrum -- both of which they are less and less capable of justifying.
Analog TV needs a lot more spectrum than digital TV, and in the US analog TV spectrum has already been reallocated.
OTA TV is a vital, free public service. We take high speed internet for granted and think everyone has access. They don’t. OTA is not as it once was, but it isn’t going away for a long, long time.
ATSC 3.0 is dangerous because it brings encryption to the table, and it's already clear that encryption will not only be limited to entertainment and for-profit content, but also E/I content like news.
Encryption must be banned in OTA television.
US TV spectrum has been halved in the last 20 years. Used to have channels 2-69 (minus 37, reserved for radio astronomy). Now it's just 2-36.
Channels 70-83 were reallocated away from TV in 1983.
For those that did not 'get' my reference to TV as the 'vast wasteland' --- that is a shout-out to Newton Minnow, the FCC Chairman in the 60s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_N._Minow?useskin=vector
The TV industry was ticked off by that comment, and do you recall the name of the ship on Gilligan's Island? The S.S. Minnow
OTA TV has one advantage over all of the delivery alternatives: no ongoing access fees. I agree that the spectrum is wasteful, but at least it still belongs to the people in some sense. If we give it up, it will be sold as more 5G spectrum that you then have no option other than to pay for.
Yes, that's true. Until local municipalities consider wifi a service they provide their communities, like parks and libraries.
Until then, yes, probably some spectrum should be devoted to OTA; maybe in SD, mainly PBS, I dunno, because this would be for the 'no access fee' case. That means cheap folks, or really poor folks. Society should be doing everything possible to eliminate the latter.
If TV receivers were built into smart phones, it would be easier to make this case.