First Broadcast Of Both ATSC 1.0 And NEXTGEN TV ATSC 3.0 Announced

ENENSYS Technologies and ARK Multicasting have announced the first broadcast of both ATSC 1.0 and NEXTGEN TV ATSC 3.0 from the same equipment stack.

The broadcast took place in the ARK trial market of Crockett, TX, USA with cooperation from Hitachi-Comark and their Comark Digital Services (CDS) division. The ATSC 1.0 signal was tested with a new Hitachi-Comark E-Compact series transmitter and an Ateme TITAN Live encoder installed last week. With the same equipment and an ATSC 3.0 stack by ENENSYS, the signal was converted to NEXTGEN TV.

Using a 64 QAM modulation scheme, it ran at full power for 2 hours and was tested on the fringe of the 41 dBu broadcast pattern 35 miles away from the tower. Testing was completed using a Airwavz.tv Redzone Receiver™ in conjunction with the TvXplorer™ running on a laptop as the field test receiver. This successful switch back and forth between the legacy standard and NEXTGEN TV was the first of its kind. In comparison to the cellular unicast model, ARK demonstrated their ability to serve the small town of Crockett, TX with 150 petabytes (PB) of data transmission per day. This would translate to ~10,500 PB per day in a large market like ARK’s Dallas station.

ARK CEO, Vern Fotheringham said: "We remain excited about the many opportunities NEXTGEN TV represents, and will continue to play our part as leaders in the new technology given the vast network of broadcast assets we control and our ability to be nimble as Low Power TV (LPTV) operators. ARK’s business application for the standard will very shortly be tested in the rural city of Crockett where we hope to come along side local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to improve rural broadband services. This recent test is just the beginning of many firsts that we intend to be able to announce."

ARK was the first broadcaster to conduct end-to-end ATSC 3.0 broadcasting in September 2018. That demonstration originated the content in Cedar Hill, TX using the transmission International Broadcasting Network (IBN). Intelsat provided the satellite IP transmission via their gateway and uplink services using a Newtec supplied hub. The signal was pulled down into the ARK lab environment at the Hitachi-Comark headquarters in Southwick, MA. It was then transmitted through an ARK ATSC 3.0 broadcast television stack to a 3.0 Samsung television. The test last week used the IBN network feed for the content stream.

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