The United States regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved an application by WNUV-TV in Baltimore, Maryland for a trial of DVB's OFDM-based DVB-T2 standard. The trial has a 6 months licence from February 15 when the authorization was granted. WNUV, owned by Cunningham Broadcasting and operated by the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, will conduct the tests between the hours of 1am and 5am.

 

The application to the FCC requested "the authority to operate the experimental digital television facility on Channel 40 in Baltimore in order to evaluate the performance of the Second Generation Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T2) in various environments throughout the WNUV(TV) service area".

 

The application states that "the objective of the proposed experiment is to test the impact OFDM will have on making television content more accessible to viewers by:

1. Identifying representative link budgets for a variety of use cases in different locations within the service area;
2. Determining how a scalable Quality of Service offering combined with flexible transmission attributes might facilitate the simultaneous provision of television broadcast to multiple viewing devices;
3. Providing data that may support the development of coverage and service contour matching techniques;
4. Confirming the ability of OFDM to support Ultra High-Definition television within the existing 6 MHz channel assignments; and
5. Exploring technological capabilities that could lead to the ability to evolve a future broadcast standard."

It is expected that a number of broadcasters, as well as vendors and standards bodies will participate in the test and that WNUV will share the results with the National Association of Broadcasters, the Advanced Television Systems Committee and others.

 

Source: FCC.

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The ABU Digital Broadcasting Symposium 2013 has announced its conference and workshop line-up that is to be held from 5 - 8 March in Kuala Lumpur. The theme of this year's symposium is "Next-Gen Media Space and the Connected World". This is the 9^th in the series organised by the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union as a key forum towards the development of the industry in the Asia-Pacific and other regions of the broadcasting world. This year's offering is a mix of conference, workshops, a 60 booth exhibition and several value-add workshops and meetings conducted by other organisations. Last year's event attracted more than 1000 participants.

 

The event is closely supported by leading lights in the broadcasting industry from equipment manufacturers, system integrators, transmission network integrators, frequency planners, internet and broadcast service providers, digital system proponents and regulatory agencies.

 

DVB is sponsoring one of the 16 dedicated workshops during the event. The DVB-T2 Implementation workshop, conducted by Phil Laven, DVB Chairman, is being held on the second day of the event at 16:00 - 17:30. Other DVB-T2 related workshops are being hosted by Enensys, Nevion and Rohde & Schwarz.

 

The main conference also features many representatives from DVB Member companies.

 

For further information, visit the ABU website.

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If you are in Washington, D.C. for the Satellite 2013 Conference and Exhibition don't miss the special DVB-S2 session on March 20th with speakers that include DVB experts and representatives of DVB Member companies.

 

DVB-S2: More Flexibility and Efficiency for the Future 

DVB satellite specifications have become the standards for the satellite industry. For the last 10 years the industry has relied heavily on DVB-S2 and DVB-RCS for their operations and services via satellite. However, over time, requirements have changed and technology has progressed. Following requests from the industry, DVB has looked into its satellite specifications and started a wide range of activities: 

• A second generation RCS specification has been developed. In addition to improved spectral efficiency and a wide range of new operational features, the specification also covers meshed and mobile use cases. 
• With the proposed new Carrier ID specification, DVB will solve the problem of identifying the source of unintentional interference on satellite links.
• The wideband transponder addendum to the DVB-S2 specification facilitates efficient receiver implementations of the reception of signals from transponders with bandwidths above 70 MHz.
• DVB has begun work on upgrading the DVB-S2 specification to allow more flexibility and improved spectral efficiency.
• Discussion points include latest developments and how they will change the satellite industry, as well as questions regarding the standards needed for tomorrow's business.

The moderator for the session will be Louis Zacharilla, Director of Development, WTA. Scheduled session speakers include:

• Bruce Bennett, Program Executive Officer for Communications, DISA 
• Gerard Faria, Executive Officer and Co-founder, Teamcast 
• John McCoskey, Chief Technology Officer, PBS
• Peter Siebert, Executive Director, DVB Project
• Thomas Van den Driessche, Director of Vertical Markets, Newtec
• Thomas Wrede, Commercial Products, Reception Systems, SES

For more details visit the Satellite Today website.

An extensive industry survey was carried out by satellite equipment and solution provider Newtec in order to gauge the temperature in the satellite market on the topic of S2 Extensions, the update for the current DVB-S2 standard. Over a period of two months more than 700 satellite experts from 400 companies answered six questions on the launch of S2 Extensions in the satcom market. The quantity and the quality of the answers reflect a good representation of what the market has to say on the topic of standards today and tomorrow.

 

The survey reveals some striking results as 98% of the respondents consider having standards in the satellite market being important or very important. The acceptance and adoption rate of the new S2 Extensions is remarkably high, proven by the fact that one out of two survey respondents or 51% would switch their operations within one year after the launch.

 

The main motivation to switch to the S2 Extensions would be the increased efficiency resulting in extra bandwidth. In the survey 62% of the satellite experts, nicely spread across different markets and different regions worldwide, state that they will switch to the S2 Extensions if the improvements offer at least 15% to 20% efficiency gain. The obtained extra bandwidth would be used by 40% of the satellite companies to increase their throughput over satellite.

 

The satellite industry has come to a consensus that the Extensions to the DVB-S2 standard are required to accommodate increased profitability, interoperability and growth in the professional satellite communications market.

El Salvador's regulator, SIGET (La Superintendencia General de Electricidad y Telecomunicaciones), has formed a working group to analyze the technological, commercial and social impact of introducing digital television in the country. The group includes representatives of television companies, government, universities and the Church.

 

As part of this study, SIGET has invited DVB to the city of San Salvador to address the working group on the features, benefits and added values to be achieved in choosing DVB digital television standards. Julian Seseña will represent DVB at the proceedings.

 

The country plans to complete its digital switchover by 31 December 2018.

At this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, DVB Member Abertis Telecom demonstrated a live UHDTV transmission using DVB-T2. The transmission was a simulcast utilizing both DVB-T2 for the UHDTV service and DVB-T2-Lite for mobile devices. 

 

The demonstrations utilized DVB-T2 in the same UHF frequency band currently used for television broadcasting in Spain. Collaborating in the demonstrations were the Spanish public broadcaster - RTVE, the EBU, SAPEC, the Technical University of Madrid, La Salle Universities and Sony. Content for the demo was supplied by Apuntolapospo.

 

The transmissions were viewed on an 84 inch monitor to test the image quality offered by the system, four times over current HDTV. The successful demonstration proves that DVB-T2 is an efficient means of delivering UHDTV services.

 

In Korea, a broadcasting consortium has also been on air with test broadcasts of UHDTV at 30Hz terrestrially, using  DVB-T2.

 

Source: Abertis Telecom

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