"Road to ATSC 3.0” exhibit in the Grand Lobby of NAB 2018

With the global media and entertainment industries preparing to descend on the Las Vegas Convention Center for the annual NAB Show (April 7-12), the Advanced Television Systems Committee announced that more than 40 exhibitors will be showcasing some type of ATSC 3.0 product or service, an indication of the arrival of the new broadcast standard designed to seamlessly meld over-the-air with over-the-top content.

One of the most important highlights at CES 2017 was at the Fraunhofer IIS booth, showing final versions of several MPEG-H solutions, in preparation for the rollout of the first broadcast services adopting the standard next year. On display was an MPEG-H enabled LG UHD TV, scheduled to be available this year, and the final version of the MPEG-H enabled 3D Soundbar reference design. Fraunhofer IIS also developed a trademark program for products incorporating its MPEG-H TV Audio System.

In the world of broadcast standards, a few countries depend upon their own specific set of terrestrial broadcast technologies, such as the United States, Japan, Brazil, and China. The rest of the world uses DVB standards. Now that everyone is preparing the next generation of standards to support 4K UHDTV, the news that the new DVB UHD-1 Phase 2 was approved is a big deal. More important for the audio community is the news that MPEG-H is part of that standard.

The new ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard, allowing for high quality TV experiences with 4K and HDR images, as well as immersive audio, was one of the major technology highlights at NAB 2016. MPEG-H is one of the candidate technologies for ATSC 3.0 audio standard and NAB 2016 saw a lot of support for the technology with practical demonstration and new product announcements from Korean manufacturers, DS Broadcast and Kai Media.