Digital TV Facts: The Latest

The Advanced Television Systems Committee plans to develop a standard for delivering digital TV broadcasts to mobile and handheld devices.

“The ATSC-M/H standard will facilitate broadcasters’ use of their DTV broadcast channels to provide new services directly to small hand-held receivers, laptop computers and vehicles moving at a high rate of speed,” said ATSC President Mark Richer. ATSC-M/H is to be backward-compatible with existing digital TV receivers.

ATSC is the standards body that coordinates the technology used for over-the-air (OTA) digital TV broadcasts in much of North America and in South Korea.

News of yet another attempt at a mobile TV standard was greeted with a “you’ve got to be kidding” from the folks at Engadget. Fact is, though, the world needs more than one such standard. If you want to catch plain old “Today Show” broadcasts from your local NBC affiliate in Cleveland, that will be one technology. A viewer in Tokyo, watching whatever comparably fatuous morning show that I imagine people wake up to in Japan, will make use of another. And if you prefer to sit at the bus stop watching video-on-demand (VOD) clips delivered via your cell phone provider’s network, that will require an entirely different technology. Even if you could somehow smash together all the various technologies into a single standard, I’m not sure you’d want to—hashing out all the details would take just slightly longer than forever, and the result would be riddled with compromises.

That said, I’m not sure U.S. consumers will need A-VSB and MPH and ATSC-M/H for OTA mobile digital TV broadcasts. (It’s not even clear to me at present whether ATSC-M/H will compete with the other two technologies or perhaps somehow incorporate them.)

In a must-read post at Display Daily, DTV analyst Aldo Cugnini considers some differences between A-VSB (backed by Samsung) and MPH (backed by LG/Zenith and Harris). Cugnini, whose involvement with DTV technology dates to the “Grand Alliance,” suggests that MPH builds on E-VSB (enhanced VSB) technology developed by LG Electronics. Making use of E-VSB, he suggests, could offer LG the opportunity to pick up additional royalties after the company’s patents related to the 8-VSB modulation method used in ATSC run out in the years to come.

• Links: ATSC, Engadget, Display Daily