INSIDE THE ISSUE

1 Special Guest

2 Inside the screen

3 More than products

4 Show-Time    

" The analog viewers are fading very fast and LPTV must convert or have no viewers and income at all."

"Thanks to its software nature, the upgrade towards the ATSC-MH Scalable Full Channel Mobile Mode (SFCMM) extended A/153: CMM + SFCMM"

Special Guest

Interview with William Barrow, consultant and owner of Pro Service, Inc, a technical services company with both sales and services for the television broadcast industry

Hi Bill,

Low Power TV are in a difficult situation. Forced to switch off to Digital Transmission but with an unknown future, what’s your opinion about it?

Conversion to ATSC digital could be the salvation for LPTV. The early take was this was going to be very expensive, and it was up to just a couple of years ago. Since many LPTV operators barely break even additional cash to convert to digital was not there. The thinking was that there would be resistance from many viewers to switch to the digital viewing formats since it was more complicated.  Now realization is that the analog viewers are fading very fast and LPTV must convert or have no viewers and income at all.  The process is well under way. Pro Service, Inc. has from the start encouraged clients to invest in quality encoding and programming equipment since many of the existing analog transmitters are capable of suitable digital operation.

Recently encoding equipment, including Mpeg encoders, Multiplexers, EAS encoding and digital servers all have decreased in price due to innovation and making equipment narrowly focus only on ATSC and not the entire digital spectrum of uses. 

The next biggest challenge to LPTV appears to be the reduction of spectrum again to provide Internet and broadband provider’s additional spectrum. This means fewer channels will be available for LPTV.  Love or hate this idea as it impacts the LPTV industry, but the bottom line is that advances in technology will eventually prevail. 

Flash-Cut vs New Transmitter, what’s the best approach and in which case you would recommend one instead of the other?

As I stated in question one, buy the best encoding equipment you can, convert your existing transmitter to get on the air. Then as revenue increases, the purchase of a new transmitter will eventually be required due to age and availability of services for the older transmitter.  That was then. Now, transmitter manufactures have products that can compete with converting older analogs to digital. However, many LPTV operators need every dollar they can get or save then, conversion makes more sense. Next, there are several Micro-Loan companies out there who are willing to do a lease to own transaction, and interest rates are the best they will ever be. Some manufactures like Screen Service America will also offer financing too.

In all your years of experience, tell us a funny tale that happened during one of your job

I was doing service work in Guatemala back in the early 80's. We were heading off to the ancient town of Antigua for dinner when we got a two way radio call for help.  We rushed over to the main transmitter site where an old RCA VHF transmitter was located and found the problem. An Iguana had crawled across a high voltage capacitor (for the dry warmth I guess) causing the HV to short out and place the transmitter in overload.

Inside the Screen

Interview with Giuseppe (Beppe) Gatti, Technical and Production Director of Screen Service Broadcasting Technologies

Ciao Beppe,

At this time, what products are you developing and are any of them close to competition?  Of these products, are any designed specifically for the American Market?

Our flagship product is the ARK-6 software defined – universal transmitter. To many extents this product outruns the competition both from a technological and a marketing standpoint. The product sports a high degree of modularity in its components in such a way that practically every necessary system design can be achieved by a customer handled module swap. Besides the innovative hardware design, the system also has a modular software design and implementation that, together with a very flexible licensing system, unites technical flexibility and operational convenience. Our R&D and production units fully understand the challenges of an ever changing broadcasting environment and poured the experience acquired in over 30 years of industry life in a product deemed to lead the market.

The differences between 8VSB vs. OFDM Modulation is a popular topic in the broadcasting industry right now, in your opinion what are the pros and cons of these two modulations? How does the modulation change in the American Market?

In the past 8VSB standards had some advantages over COFDM based standards mainly based on spectrum efficiency and simplified modulation stages. The advantages coming from COFDM in terms of multipath propagation resilience and capabilities to implement SFN networks were not considered a major advantage. The progress in VLSI design and the adoption of COFDM based modulation in other radio standards, mainly 4G and LTE, show the increasing adoption of the standard in the radio community. The release of the second generation of the DVB standard has greatly enhanced the spectrum efficiency, the bandwidth capability, and the relevant requirements coming from the market in terms of ubiquitous fruition, has pushed towards a more cellularized version of the broadcast network. This debate is becoming increasingly popular around the world and it’s beginning to touch the American market as well.

Between Mobile DTV and SFN, a change is happening in the coverage paradigm.  What is the most efficient way to adapt as progress continues?

The FCC is debating whether to enforce the requirements to adopt an SFN based frequency allotment to ensure optimum use of the spectrum resource or not. This approach has already been adopted, in various ways, in other parts of the world: Europe, with the Geneva RFC 2006 and South East Asia with the deliberation of ASEAN telecommunication ministries in 2008. The market pressure, coming from the insatiable need for network coverage and the need of the regulation authority to provide room in the very tight space of Band IV and V for innovative radio services is a great motivation that pushes towards the increasing adoption of SFN networks.

More than Products

The new SDT ARK-6 Series is the result of years of research and development and represents state of the art technology, not just on a regional scale, on a worldwide scale.  This transmitter technology has been dubbed UNIVERSAL DRIVER because of its incredible and innovative capability to modulate in all schemes by simply uploading the applicable software package.

ARK-6 UNIVERSAL DRIVER is resilient and will progress with the evolution of technology and standardization: this platform is literally capable of upgrading to any standard by applying the new software for any modulation scheme that our R&D department will provide.

ARK-6 UNIVERSAL DRIVER already implements ATSC, ATSC-MH, DVB-T/T2, PAL, NTSC, ISDB-T modulations.

On the North American market the ARK-6 UNIVERSAL DRIVER is capable of working in ATSC SFN configuration, following the latest A/110b standard and to is also capable of working in ATSC-MH A/153 configuration meaning that thanks to its software defined design, this machine will be ATSC-MH Scalable Full Channel Mobile Mode (SFCMM) extended A/153: CMM + SFCMM capable as soon as the technology is available. 

The SDT ARK-6 allows configuration, provisioning and monitoring of transmitter unit in various ways: remotely, using a dry contact; via SNMP commands; via TCP/IP, using the Web graphic interface; and via a dedicated command inserted into the transport stream.

Functional interfaces are available for total remote control of the apparatus by means of serial protocols or TCP/IP ports. Thanks to the internal Web server the ARK-6 can be easily monitored and configured and updated using a LAN connection and a standard Web browser. Moreover, the built-in SNMP agent allows fully automated remote control.For more information visit: www.screenservice.net

"Our R&D and production units fully understand the challenges of an ever changing broadcasting environment and poured the experience acquired in over 30 years of industry life"