Comment by poxrud

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…