Sony Engineer Sees 'Challenges' Meshing ATSC 3.0's 'Runtime' With Smart TVs

The “biggest thing” about ATSC 3.0 from the Sony Electronics “perspective” is that it’s “a system designed to last, to evolve and endure,” Paul Hearty, vice president-technology standards, told last week’s ATSC conference in Washington. “When we did ATSC 1.0, I think it took us nine very painful years,” said Hearty. ATSC 3.0 “has taken us six and a bit,” he said. “But 3.1, maybe it will be only a year or six months or eight months. So we’re on the track of a system that we’re not going to have to change out in its entirety in 10 to 15 to 20 years. That’s a big thing, I think, for the consumer electronics industry, to be able to build for many, many years against the same core system.” The HTML5 “ship” that’s at ATSC 3.0's IP core also “has sailed into our products, and we’re all supporting it,” Hearty said of the prevalence of smart TVs in the consumer tech market. “One of the challenges we’re going to have to face is that we’re got to figure out how we’re going to accommodate the runtime platform” in ATSC 3.0 “with the platforms that we already have in our devices,” he said. “There’s some work that needs to be done to harmonize, for example, our Android platform with the runtime platform that’s coming out of S34,” he said of the specialist group with ATSC that’s working on runtime standards. “Obviously, we’ve been making a lot of investment in time and expertise in helping develop that specification, but there’s still work to be done, as we get S34 completed, to get it fully integrated” into the platforms CE companies are already using, he said.