The rollout of next generation TV service ATSC 3.0 has been extended to Orlando, Florida.
Fox Television Stations have selected Synamedia and partner Triveni Digital for the deployment. In Orlando, the Fox owned and operated station WRBW will serve as the ATSC 3.0 lighthouse to host infrastructure from other participating stations as part of the ATSC 3.0 lighthouse model.
Fox has chosen Synamedia’s ATSC 3.0 Broadcast Solution, featuring its virtual Digital Content Manager (virtualized DCM) which provides MPEG-2, H.264 and HEVC encoding, transcoding, statistical multiplexing, splicing, advertisement insertion capabilities and more in an end-to-end fashion, from ingest to playout.
“The rollout at our Orlando lighthouse station has gone very well, in large part thanks to Synamedia’s proactive help and support,” said Jeff Roberts, VP Engineering for WOFL and WRBW, FOX Television Stations. “We are quite happy with selecting Synamedia for this project.”
Fox is also using Synamedia’s Media Edge Gateway ATSC 3.0 Receiver for monitoring and acceptance testing of ATSC 3.0 signals. The end-to-end workflow is complemented with Triveni Digital providing their GuideBuilder for ROUTE/MMTP encapsulation, and Broadcast Gateway for final transmission signal preparation.
Synamedia and Triveni Digital are managing incoming streams at the lighthouse station to help ensure that the delivery of high-quality content, such as a live sports event in 4K, will not disrupt the overall market’s bandwidth usage. Synamedia’s 24/7/365 support will monitor the overall workflows from its Technical Assistance Center (TAC) in Atlanta.
“This is an exciting time for our industry as the possibilities of ATSC 3.0 and NextGenTV are becoming a reality,” said Julien Signès, GM & SVP Video Network, Synamedia. “Synamedia brings a unique approach to advanced video capabilities through our VIVID Compression platform, particularly with our state-of-the-art statistical multiplexing solution, the result of more than 20 years of research. With such levels of precision, broadcasters can be assured that the right amount of bandwidth is assigned, frame by frame, to deliver equal and great quality at every point in the viewing experience. Fox would accept nothing less, and we’re thrilled to support their efforts to bring it to market.”
The ‘Lighthouse’ scenario is not unlike the use of multiplexes in Europe. Here existing transmitting infrastructures are used in order to manage the simulcast between legacy ATSC 1.0 services and NEXTGEN TV ATSC 3.0 broadcasting.
