ATSC ‘Progressing’ on Long-Delayed Choice of ATSC 3.0 Audio Codec, Richer Says

The long-delayed choice of an audio codec for ATSC 3.0 is “progressing,” ATSC President Mark Richer told us Wednesday. “Audio, not uncharacteristically, is the complicated document” in ATSC 3.0, Richer said. “So we have plenty of people working on that, and it’s just complicated, so it’s taking a while longer than we would like.” But ATSC is “still on track to have audio done in a timely manner to allow the standard to be finished on time,” Richer said of elevating the entire suite of ATSC 3.0 specs to the status of final standard by the end of 2016. Richer thinks “there’s a fairly good chance” that ATSC 3.0 audio will “go out for a vote” as a candidate standard by the NAB Show, which opens April 16 in Las Vegas, he said. “I hope that will happen, but I think it will,” he said. ATSC released its call for proposals on ATSC 3.0 audio in December 2014 with a “project schedule” calling for ATSC’s S34 specialist group to recommend a winning codec by August 2015 (see 1412090019). The decision will boil down to a choice between the Dolby AC-4 codec and that of the MPEG-H consortium of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor.