One Media has announced that the first complete testing of its Next Generation Broadcast Platform (NGBP) in Austin, Texas was a success, with “outstanding results in transmitting fixed, mobile and data services to set-top and tablet devices,” the company reported.
One Media was set up earlier this year as a joint venture between Coherent Logix and Sinclair Broadcast Group to develop a new broadcast platform. As previously reported, they were planning a test of that system in November.
The tests are one of a number of efforts by companies to develop transmission technologies a new standard for broadcast television that could be adopted by the Advanced Television Systems Committee for its ATSC 3.0 standard.
All of the competing systems are designed to handle both 4k and mobile broadcasts and to provide broadcasters with much more flexibility in developing new business models.
Proponents of the One Media approach argue, however, that their system offers the most flexibility.
“Rather than designing a broadcast television specific standard, One Media’s approach is to deploy an IP service agnostic platform which supports full 4K UltraHD and mobile broadcast television and also supports new one to many data distribution services, essentially future proofing broadcasters flexibility to meet future market demands,” said Kevin Gage, executive VP and CTO of One Media, in a statement.
Gage also noted that “developing the One Media platform to this stage in under 5 months demonstrates the power of our parallel team approach with a powerful development platform. The flexibility of our technology to optimize the rich set of parameters broadcasters can employ to finely tune broadcast services that meet their needs can now be demonstrated.”
The ATSC is expected to make decisions on key parts of the 3.0 standard in the next few months, with a candidate standard expected to be announced in the second quarter of 2015 and completion of the standard by the end of 2015 or early 2016.
In announcing the successful completion of the test, the group also said that full, 24-hour, over-the-air testing of the system would start at the newly commissioned Austin, Texas transmission facilities by the end of the year.
In a statement, Gage also noted that rapid progress in the system was important because of the upcoming FCC spectrum auctions, which have now been delayed to 2016.
“Early adoption of the One Media proposal by the ATSC will align the U.S. broadcasters’ goal of coinciding adoption of a NGBP with the repack of the broadcasters’ remaining channels after completion of the spectrum auction and channel repack,” he argued. “That means an efficient and dramatically easier conversion for broadcasters and viewers.”
