dailywireless.org » NAB 2007: Dead Man Walking?

NAB 2007: Dead Man Walking?

Only three days left. Plenty of time to read my Bible and look for a loophole.
– Dead Man Walking

Nobody puts it better than GigOm’s Paul Kapustka, describing the Washington Post’s new online video feature:

A quick visit to Sunday’s Washington Sketch video from D.C. reporting vet Dana Milbank shows how powerful off-the-cuff video can be, pairing the rich (looks like HD) visual images with the deep background and snark of a beat reporter. You feel like you’re sitting in the back of the room with Milbank, listening to him rip apart the pomposity of official Washington in a way you just can’t do on the front page of the print edition.

In other video news — Google. Today they announced a plan to deliver Google TV ads over EchoStar and Astound Cable.

The idea is to help advertisers buy, schedule, deliver and measure television ads. Google will enable advertisers to buy and place ads on EchoStar’s 125 satellite channels distributed over the DISH Network.

Google will analyze the anonymous data culled from the Dish network set-top boxes and only bill advertisers for the portion of the audience that watched a commercial a designated amount of time.

Want more television news? Wait for it at NAB2007, April 14-19 in Las Vegas. Here’s a preview of NAB 2007 products.

One of the bigger announcements is coming from Harris Corporation and LG Electronics with their In-Band Mobile DTV service called the Mobile-Pedestrian-Handheld (MPH).

It would theoretically allow DTV broadcasters to beam signals to set-top-boxes in the home and mobile devices simultaneously from the same transmitting antenna (just like in Europe). Cellphone users would get vanilla SD content without a new transmitter (unlike Qualcomm’s MediaFLO). Backward compatibility with the existing ATSC 8-VSB transmission and receiving equipment would also keep those ATSC royalties coming to LG (Zenith).

Samsung has another approach to mobile television, called A-VSB (Advanced-Vestigial Side-Band). A-VSB, like DVB-H and Qualcomm’s MediaFLO uses time division multiplexing to allow the receiver to turn on, grab a big chunk of data, and then go to sleep. It is a hardened, but largely duplicative of the existing 8-VSB modulated digital broadcast.

Samsung has teamed with Sinclair Broadcast Group to promote the standard to the ATSC and has begun formal tests of A-VSB. Samsung hopes to complete a spec by the first half of 2007.

In A-VSB, broadcasters transmit a supplementary reference sequence (SRS), or reference signal. Current-generation HDTVs would ignore the signal, but an SRS-equipped receiver would look for the signal and lock onto it continuously. At its highest setting, the SRS signal would use 2-3Mbps of the 19.4Mbps of bandwidth allocated to DTV stations.

If an HD station pushes “Turbo Coding” to 4Mbps for mobile applications, and sets aside the maximum 3Mbps for the SRS signal, only 12.4Mbps would be left for the station’s main HD program. It’s hard to squeeze a decent HD picture down to 12 Mbps, of course.

Some industry observers believe the royalty-sharing ATSC partners rejected the more rugged COFDM modulation, now adopted by Europe and much of the rest of the world in the DVB digital standard (and DVB-H), in part because there was no money in it for them. The A-VSB system would allow the ATSC partners to maintain their same “kickback” on each ATSC set, estimated by some observers to be about $50. That was on William Kennard’s watch.

Other players in the mobile television business include:

Verizon’s proprietary MediaFLO is alive and well on Verizon Wireless, broadcasting on Channel 55.

Aloha Partner’s HiWire, using VHF channels 54 and 59, has two channels in the 700MHz band utilizing DVB-H standard. Where is it? Nobody seems to know for sure.

The Modeo service (at 1.7 GHz) includes live DVB-H video from Fox News, Discovery Channel and others, as well as streaming audio content from Music Choice with limited service in New York.

Sprint TV service is partnering with MobiTV to demonstrate WiMAX mobile TV. MobiTV, through a partnership with NDS, allows a channel to switch from unicasting to multicasting if the demand warrents.

In related news, NBC Universal plans to launch 20 TV channels across Europe, Asia and Latin America in a drive to more than double broadcasting revenue outside the United States over the next two to three years.

NBC Universal, which generated international revenue of almost $3 billion last year, is 80 percent owned by General Electric and 20 percent by Vivendi. The company owns the NBC television network and Universal Studios along with other TV channels and theme parks.