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[Monday at NAB]
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DTV Reception on Tap in Video Sessions
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by Mary C. Gruszka,
~ April 14, 2008
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TV TECHNOLOGY
This year’s Broadcast Engineering Conference, which began Saturday, continues through Thursday with a full line-up of sessions addressing issues facing television and radio engineers today, plus a preview of where technology is headed in the future.
The BEC sessions for TV and video will tackle such issues as DTV reception, distributed transmission networks, HD newsgathering, developments in file-based workflow, new codecs, and quality control.
The conference is co-produced by the Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE) and the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society (BTS).
With the February 2009 cutoff of analog transmission in the U.S. less than a year away, there’s concern that many viewers may have problems with DTV reception as things stand now. And it could get worse, if proposals for spectrum being vacated by analog transmissions come to reality.
Today’s session “DTV Reception Issues,” 10:30 a.m., and chaired by Al Grossniklaus, director of engineering & operations, WTHR NBC 13, will look at DTV reception in urban areas, performance of indoor antennas, and whether wireless microphones and consumer devices can coexist in the so-called white spaces.
“TV News and Live Production” will be in the spotlight this afternoon, 5:30 p.m. This session will be chaired by Wayne Kube, technology manager, Broadcast Media, Belo Corp. Included will be a field test report on high-definition electronic news gathering (HD-ENG) from Walter Sidas, director, broadcast transmission engineer, CBS Broadcast Inc., and a description of NBC Universal’s new IPTV distribution system presented by Robert Goldfarb, director, Distribution and Affiliate Projects, NBC Universal. Other topics will include metadata, managing multiformat images, and using IP in broadcast TV and for newsgathering.
The “Video Content Creation & Manipulation” session, tomorrow, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., is chaired by John Turner, president, Turner Engineering.
Morning topics will include file formats for TV archiving and content exchange, watermarking and fingerprinting, non-real-time services, integrating and distributing digital media, the promise of reduced costs and increased revenues, and seam carving for video.
Afternoon topics will include file-based production workflow for HDTV, from MXF to SOA from a presenter from MOG, distributing broadcast servers over IP infrastructures, forensic marking for HD VoD, managing aspect ratio, leveraging IT technologies to enhance HD sports, viewer contribution — dealing with massive media, and broadcast automation.
“Monitoring and Measurements in the Broadcast Plant — TV” is scheduled for Wednesday, 9–11 a.m., and chaired by John Merrill, director of engineering, CBS 5 KPHO-TV. Presentations will include optimizing the QC process in a file-based workflow facility, system-wide video quality assurance, controlling and measuring loudness for DTV, and reducing the effects of bit errors in SDI links.
“Digital television is more complex than analog broadcasting, making it difficult to ensure that the quality of the broadcast meets standards necessary for viewer satisfaction and retention,” said Ralph Bachofen, director, product management and marketing, Triveni Digital Inc., and presenter of “System Wide Video Quality Assurance.”
“Some common issues ‘visual’ to consumers are video tiling, audio lip sync errors and intermittent tuning. Root cause [is] created by any of the MPEG affecting devices in the broadcast chain,” he said. “An effective architecture that enables centralized monitoring, analysis, and resolution of faults over an entire network or service not only supports a high standard of service, but also reduces overall operational costs.”
The “Television RF & Transmission Systems” session, running from 11 a.m.–4:30 p.m. with a break from noon– 2:00 p.m. is chaired by Louis Libin, BroadComm Inc., and Victor Tawil, senior vice president, Association for Maximum Service Television. The session will include presentations on distributed transmission networks, building penetration loss, vertical polarization for UHF DTV, a mobile TV transmitting facility and RF coverage and tower motion.
Finally, on Thursday, “Codecs, Compression Systems & Scaling for Video” will take the stage, 9 a.m.–noon. Chaired by Graham Jones, director, Communications Engineering, NAB, the session will include presentations on 10-bit MPEG-4 AVC, scalability, practical applications of compression standards, 1080P HD, JPEG 2000 for long-form EFP acquisition, and HD transcoding.
For a preview of new technologies, stick around Thursday morning for the “Technology Innovations” being held 9–11:30 a.m. and chaired by Charles Jablonski, consultant. Presentations include: “Super Hi-Vision Transmission Experiment in the 21 GHz Band,” “HDMI as Television Application Platform for Interactive and More,” “11.88 GB/S SDI Continuing the Evolution of SDI,” “Audio Mixing Requirements in Next Generation Broadcast Receivers for Audio Description and Other Enhanced Features,” and “HDTV System Onboard the Lunar Explorer Kaguya (SELENE).”
Some BEC sessions cover issues relating to broadcast engineering in general, whether radio or TV.
The BEC session “Future Broadcast Technologies — A Worldwide Perspective” will be a golden opportunity to learn about exciting advanced research taking place all around the globe. This session will be held Tuesday, 2:30–4 p.m. and will be chaired by David Wood, Head of New Technology, European Broadcasting Union.
Panelists include: Andy Bower, controller of Broadcast Research & Innovation, BBC; Bernard Caron, Communications Research Centre; Klaus Illgner, director and CEO, IRT; Alberto Morello, director, RAI; K. Tonioka, director, NHK; and Colin Whitbread, head of Research and Innovation, BBC.
For those in the U.S., changes afoot in Emergency Alerting Systems will affect every broadcast station in the country. Almost two years after FEMA was directed to lead the way in developing new EAS technologies, where do things stand now?
Also on Tuesday, the session “Next-Generation Public Alerting,” 4–5 p.m. will bring attendees up to date. Chaired by Clay Freinwald, corporate engineer, Entercom, the panel will include Edward Czarnecki, senior vice president, SpectraRep; Jerry LeBow, co-chairman, Sage Alerting Systems; and Darryl Parker, senior vice president, TFT Inc.
“The changes coming to EAS will be considerable and, from a station’s perspective, will likely be as large as the change from EBS to EAS,” Freinwald said. “This session will provide some insight, via the manufacturers on the panel, a preview of what the next-generation EAS equipment might look like and what it will be capable of doing.”
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