President’s Memo

Posted on November 4, 2014 in ATSC News

Gratitude for Progress & Cooperation

November is a month when gratitude is very much on the agenda, with American colleagues now just a few weeks away from celebrating annual Thanksgiving holidays.  Family and friends will soon gather together to share good times, to remember the past year and to give thanks.

At the ATSC, we’re quite grateful for the many volunteers who are working now on the details of what will become the ATSC 3.0 next-generation television broadcast standard.  In this issue of THE STANDARD, you’ll read about the herculean planning effort done to evaluate the likely “ATSC 3.0 Ecosystem,” which was the subject of two marathon sessions last month in San Diego.  Thanks to Merrill Weiss for coordinating this essential and detailed process.  All of our working groups will benefit from the results.

We’re also grateful to the many companies investing heavily in next-gen broadcasting technologies. Several demonstrations and tests already are making news, long before the ATSC 3.0 Candidate Standard is finalized. And, while the focus is on the physical layer (the transmission foundation for the emerging standard), it is also good to see demonstrations of other elements of the system.

Practical demonstrations of what’s possible with ATSC 3.0 will become more important, and I hope we’ll see a variety of options demonstrated for ATSC and its membership to review. Even if your firm is not planning to be part of demonstrations, now is a good time to plan resources appropriately to make certain that the ATSC can meet its objective of reaching Candidate Standard status for ATSC 3.0 next year.

Speaking of gratitude, we are thankful and particularly proud that to learn that ATSC is winning recognition with a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for our A/85 Recommended Practice to improve Digital Audio – specifically to address the annoyance of commercials that sound louder than the programs they surround.

Thanks to the leadership of Jim Starzynski of NBC Universal and the efforts of a volunteer group of industry audio experts, the ATSC’s approach to loudness normalization is now used by both TV broadcasters and pay-TV operators.  This follows action by Congress and the White House, codifying A/85 into law, and the endorsement of our Recommended Practice by the FCC.

Jim’s leadership on this issue speaks volumes about the value of bringing together a wide range of opinions and working through those issues until we could develop a solution that really made a difference.  We look forward to picking up another Emmy statuette in January, as a symbol of the kind of teamwork that has become the hallmark of ATSC.

Lastly, many thanks go to our growing number of members and experts involved in the ATSC process.  Your involvement is key to the ATSC’s success.  Looking ahead, please mark your calendars for our 2015 Broadcast Television Conference scheduled for May 13 and 14 in Washington.  It may seem like a long way off, but 2015 will be here soon!

Mark Richer, ATSC President

Posted in ATSC News