ATSC Team to Meet on Viability of Terrestrial 3D Broadcast Standards

The Advanced Television Systems Committee’s 3D planning team will meet for the first time next month as part of a process to determine the viability of developing a technical standard for terrestrial 3D broadcasts, ATSC President Mark Richer told us in an interview Thursday. The 3D planning team is one of three the organization has put together, along with those covering next-generation television broadcasting systems and Internet-connected TV technologies.

The 3D committee, chaired by Craig Todd, chief technology officer at Dolby Labs, will do the advance work to look at market requirements “and see whether it makes sense or not for us to do a technical standard,” Richer said. The looming question, Richer said, is whether broadcasters have enough bandwidth to deliver high-quality 3D given their other commitments to HD, SD and mobile DTV. “It’s a very tough problem,” he said. “It’s tough for other media, too, but for broadcasters with a single 6-MHz channel -- with all these other things to do -- they've got to decide which ones they want to offer. It’s a great problem to have -- we invented for broadcasters a lot of flexibility and the ability to offer lots of different services, but right now people are focused on their HDTV service and mobile digital television."

It’s unknown how many more bits would be required for broadcast 3D, Richer said: “For the number of bits you use, what kind of quality do you get, and is it worth doing for a given number of bits that produce a certain quality?” Additional questions surround the strategy used to deliver 3D to the home, he said. “Do you use the existing signal as part of 3D or do you transmit a whole new signal in addition to HDTV or SDTV?” It’s not an issue of whether 3D can be done over the air, he said, but whether it’s technically worth it.

ATSC will also weigh the interest of broadcasters and manufacturers to do 3D before deciding whether to pursue a standard. “I think if 3D is successful, then there will be a way for terrestrial broadcasters to deliver it also,” Richer said. “Clearly they're not taking the lead on it, but they're busy doing other things. We'll see what happens in the marketplace, but I can tell you there’s significant interest in 3D here in ATSC and I expect a significant number of participants in the work of our planning teams.”

Non-real-time (NRT) 3D TV -- downloading files into a receiver with storage -- holds promise as a broadcast transmission option for 3D, Richer said. “The advantage of NRT is you can manage bits more effectively,” Richer said, saying programming can be delivered overnight or during off-peak viewing hours. “The general philosophy is that we think non-real-time is going to become a better way of delivering most content,” he said. “We've been doing a lot of NRT in general and 3D is just one application.” The viewing experience wouldn’t be compromised, he said, because, except for sports, most of what happens on TV isn’t in real time anyway. “By going to non-real-time, we can make more efficient use of bandwidth,” he said. Whether for 3D or standard-def TV, new portable storage devices meet the “ever-increasing demand of consumers to get content when and where they want it. NRT is a big deal and it could be part of the solution for 3D, not necessarily the whole solution,” he said.

NRT is in the candidate-for-standard phase and is likely to be elevated to the level of standard, Richer said. NRT encompasses delivery of 3D, delivery for portable devices, and the ability for consumers to pick and choose the programming they want, he said. “It’s an iPod kind of world where people want to turn on device and have content there,” he said. He said if 3D becomes a standard, it could be bundled into a future package of standards along with NRT and mobile digital TV.

Richer said ATSC will closely track a terrestrial 3D demo in South Korea this fall and expects other demonstrations to follow in the U.S. LG demonstrated an ATSC-compatible 3D broadcast “concept prototype” at the NAB show in April (CED April 15 p6). Richer said ATSC members will be monitoring the different techniques used in the demo, the bit-rate consumption, and how many bits are left over for other services. They'll also observe which programming seems better suited to 3D. He said he doesn’t see serious work beginning on a 3D standard for at least six months, assuming the planning group decides to move forward. “We would probably adopt the coding strategy that comes out of other organizations and that’s already in the marketplace,” he said. “We wouldn’t develop a complete 3D transmission system but would focus just on our one part of it.”