Evoca Using ATSC 3.0 ‘Flash Channel’ to Show Mars Rover Landing, Says CEO
The ATSC 3.0-based Evoca TV content service in Boise has been “exercising flash channels a fair amount in our system” since debuting the offering in September (see 2010200045), CEO Todd Achilles told the virtual Streaming Media 2021 Connect conference. “We set up a flash 4K channel for a sporting event, and we’re actually standing up a flash channel today for the Mars rover landing,” he said Thursday. The rover landed successfully on the Mars surface just before 4 p.m. EST.
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Evoca mixes a hybrid of over-the-air 3.0 signal transmission with content from 3.0's internet backbone for delivery to a proprietary set-top box in the home. The flash channel capability is built into the 3.0 suite of standards to enable broadcasters to “spin up an extra channel” over-the-air “on demand and dynamically, and spin it down again,” ATSC President Madeleine Noland told the conference.
“The system is extremely flexible,” letting broadcasters “spin up and down services as needed according to whatever is important at the moment,” said Noland. “A flash channel is a channel that pops up for a particular purpose and comes back down again.” Flash channels can be a handy remedy, she said, to accommodate viewers who want to watch Judge Judy in its regularly scheduled time slot but are thwarted when the telecast of the Yankees-Red Sox game goes into extra innings.
The protocols for broadcasters to stand up and then tear down flash channels are in ATSC’s A/351 recommended practice document for 3.0 signaling, delivery and synchronization techniques, emailed Noland through a spokesperson Thursday. As for how the viewer finds out about the presence of the flash channel, “that would be done via an app” per the A/344 standards document on 3.0 interactive content, she said.
Achilles thinks 3.0 is superior to 5G for content delivery into the home, he said. The 5G standard “tracks a phone as it moves around the network,” but 3.0 is “a much cleaner, more spectrally efficient way to deliver the bits over the air,” he said. “There’s lots of conversations” about how 5G will become “the new technology to deliver video into the home,” Achilles said. “But I think when you look at the numbers on that, it’s still a really expensive way to deliver bits to a stationary end user.” It will be a “challenge” for 5G to “be a replacement” for 3.0 delivery to the home, and “this is where broadcast TV really shines,” he said.
The 3.0 device market “is developing nicely,” said Noland. “When I think about how the device market developed for the 1.0 transition, which was the advent of HDTV, I think the first television set cost like $20,000. This was in the '90s. Let’s just say it started at the very, very high end.” The technology “matriculated to the full range of models” over time, she said.
Noland is "really happy" with device development for 3.0 because it's "a voluntary transition, unlike 1.0, which was mandatory," she said. "Yes, it is starting in the higher end of the models, but it’s going really fast” toward the mainstream, she said. About two dozen 3.0 TV models came to market last year from LG, Samsung and Sony, “and someone told me we were up to 50 or 60 already,” she said. “They range from the super, super-nice” 80-inch 8K OLED sets to “sub-$1,000" models from LG and Sony, she said.
The “expectation” is that 3.0 TV models, set-top boxes and dongles will arrive on the market at a range of prices “in the coming months and years,” Noland said. “One of the things that gets me so excited and optimistic about that is looking at the silicon vendors,” she said. “You get vendors like MediaTek that are putting out chipsets for ATSC 3.0, and that kind of bodes well” for Chinese TV makers like TCL and Hisense entering the 3.0 market, she said. TCL has no plans to support 3.0 in its 2021 TV line, the brand told us last month (see 2101130029). Hisense didn’t respond to questions Thursday.