The ATSC Mobile TV protocol, promoted by members of the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC), will be tested in seven Washington, D.C. television stations and additional stations in at least five other cities through this August, according to Broadcasting & Cable.
Anne Schelle, executive director of the OMVC, says in the article that Washington, D.C. is interesting because the seven stations will be testing broadcasts different power levels. In addition, a VHF station, WUSA TV, is testing the protocol, and some engineers are wondering whether VHF is viable because it generally requires a larger antenna than UHF, Broadcasting & Cable reports.
The OMVC in partnership with the Association for Maximum Service Television will be conducting tests in Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.
Mobile TV among regular digital TV
The article notes how the TV stations are integrating their regular broadcast signals with Mobile DTV signals. Jay Adrick, a vice president at Harris, is helping six of the Washington, D.C. stations employ exciters and encoders for mobile television. He says most of the stations are using 3.7M bps for Mobile DTV, out of their total 19.4M bps for digital TV.
The mobile transmissions use MPEG-4 compression and a great deal of forward error correction for reliable performance, the article says. As a result, only about 25 percent of the 3.7M bps — some 900K bps — is employed for transmitting the mobile DTV audio and video signal.
Africk says the Mobile DTV standard enables a station to reduce the error correction and transmit one video stream using a total of 900K bps. Broadcasting & Cable says encoder manufacturers, such as Harris, Harmonic and Tandberg, are working with their customers to help efficiently compress their regular digital program transmissions in order to free bandwidth for mobile TV.
Harris has shipped Mobile DTV equipment to ten stations and has received orders from three more, the article says.
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