Wednesday, October 02, 2013

Futurecast Universal Terrestrial Broadcast System Proposed as Foundation of Next Generation Standard

An innovative new television transmission system, with breakthrough technologies that significantly enhance broadcasting performance and flexibility, has been proposed to the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) as the “physical layer” for the emerging ATSC 3.0 standard.

The “FUTURECAST Universal Terrestrial Broadcasting (UTB) System” – proposed by LG Electronics, its U.S. R&D subsidiary Zenith, and Harris Broadcast – was developed as the foundation of next-generation terrestrial broadcasting in the United States and around the world.

• The FUTURECAST UTB System is designed to increase data throughput by 30 percent while maintaining reception coverage and to improve multipath performance (compared with the current DTV standard) for fixed and portable TV reception.
• For mobile TV reception, FUTURECAST UTB includes energy-saving features for consumer receivers and enhanced indoor TV signal penetration, thanks to flexible coding choices.
• Advanced modes also deliver very high data rates or very robust transmission capabilities.

Speaking on behalf of the co-developers of the FUTURECAST Universal Terrestrial Broadcasting System, Dr. Skott Ahn, President and Chief Technology Officer, LG Electronics Inc., said, “Future television broadcast standards will require blazing new trails in many areas, starting with a transmission system that’s powerful, spectrum efficient, robust, flexible and extensible. That’s what our joint system proposal is all about. In a word, FUTURECAST.”

In addition to significantly increased data capacity and improved robustness, the FUTURECAST UTB System includes state-of-the-art error correction coding and signal constellations. The system’s optimized pilot patterns promise enhanced performance over traditional OFDM modulation approaches.

Designed for easy extension to various current and future transport formats, the FUTURECAST Universal Terrestrial Broadcasting System optimizes efficiency for the most-used data formats (Internet Protocol, Transport Stream) via customized stream compression.

The system supports single-frequency networks and/or multiple transmitters, and its use of a single RF transmission’s flexible physical layer profile assures optimum quality of service. The extensible new system is designed to support evolution to future broadcast systems even beyond ATSC 3.0.

In their comprehensive, 250-page technical proposal to the ATSC, LG Electronics, Zenith and Harris broadcast detailed the core technologies that will create the optimum transmission solution for next-generation TV broadcast systems.

Expected to redefine TV broadcasting for decades to come, the overall next-generation broadcast television system will require higher capacity to deliver Ultra-High-Definition services, robust reception on mobile devices and improved spectrum efficiency, according to the ATSC.

The FUTURECAST Universal Terrestrial Broadcasting System, which meets those goals and more, is the latest collaboration among LG, Zenith and Harris Broadcast, co-inventors of the transmission system behind the ATSC A/153 Mobile Digital TV Standard, adopted by the industry in 2009. Zenith invented the core transmission system at the heart of the ATSC A/53 Digital Television Standard, approved by the Federal Communications Commission in 1996.