Road To NAB: Transmission Vendors Heading South For ATSC 3.0

With the U.S.’s transition to the ATSC 3.0 digital television standard in a holding pattern as broadcasters await an FCC rulemaking on key issues like the simulcasting requirement and a potential ATSC 1.0 sunset date, transmission vendors are looking overseas for growth. In particular, their gaze is trained on Brazil, as the South American country is moving to a new digital TV system that uses ATSC 3.0’s physical layer as its foundation.

That new TV 3.0 system, which is being marketed as “DTV+” to consumers, was officially ratified by a presidential decree last August. Low-power TV 3.0 pilot stations in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo have been on-air since last year, but now Brazilian broadcast giant Globo is preparing to launch high-power 3.0 stations in those two cities by June 11, in time to broadcast 4K HDR coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Additional TV 3.0 stations in the capital city of Brasilia, from Globo and other broadcasters, are expected by this summer.

The TV 3.0 rollout in Brazil means fresh sales for traditional RF vendors like transmitter manufacturers and antenna suppliers, that have seen their ATSC 3.0 activity in the U.S. stagnate after a big push to launch early “lighthouse” 3.0 stations from 2020 through 2022. Rohde & Schwarz, Dielectric and GatesAir have all shipped new TV 3.0-compliant gear to Brazil over the past month, and software vendors like Triveni and Enensys are also supplying key parts of the broadcast chain for the launches. Vendors expect the overall transition to TV 3.0 could take up to a decade.

Brazil’s Unique Opportunity

“When you look at Brazil, the rollout there, the significance is the future scale,” says Erik Balladares, VP of broadcast, North America for Rohde & Schwarz.

Brazil is a unique opportunity for ATSC 3.0 transmission technology in that 94% of its 78 million households have a TV set, 91% have internet access and 78% have high-speed broadband. But only 12% use pay TV. And 61% of the households already have a smart TV connected to the internet.

Globo and other Brazilian broadcasters plan to use ATSC 3.0’s capability to combine OTA and OTT delivery to better serve that audience through a common user interface that will depict both OTA channels and OTT programming as individual apps. Live programming will be delivered as traditional OTA, while interactive content like multi-camera views for sports, video-on-demand, targeted advertising or e-commerce will be delivered via broadband.

Globo’s World Cup coverage will showcase the hybrid capability of the new TV 3.0 standard, with the primary match delivered live on the OTA feed and interactive content like alternative camera angles and real-time statistics delivered via OTT. Globo has its own popular OTT platform, Globoplay, and also operates its own CDN, and is expert in delivering streaming content.

While the early TV 3.0 pilot stations have been using traditional tall tower, single antenna technology, Globo’s new high-powered stations will employ MIMO [Multiple Input-Multiple Output] transmission and LDM [Layered Division Multiplexing]. MIMO uses multiple antennas to both transmit and receive the signal via spatial multiplexing, sending multiple data streams on the same frequency. LDM allows two separate services to be simultaneously carried in a single RF channel, such as offering a robust, low-bit rate service aimed at mobile devices alongside the core program feed, or simply sending different, targeted advertising.

MIMO promises spectrum and energy efficiency, as it can transmit the same amount of bits at a lower power. More important, it is designed to deliver robust indoor reception and eliminate the need for an external antenna, a key requirement for Brazilian broadcasters.

Cesar Donato, director for Brazilian reseller and systems integrator Foccus Digital, says the eventual goal for DTV+ TV sets is a “plug and plug” device that makes watching over-the-air TV as simple as watching Netflix or Amazon Prime Video.

“We still have a significant part of the population watching over-the-air TV, but the DTV+ is there to deny the shrink in market share that they are facing with the competition from different platforms that deliver streaming video,” Donato says.

MIMO indoor antennas, along with TV 3.0 tuners, will eventually be included with all television sets sold into the Brazilian market with plans to integrate the antennas directly into the TVs. For now, the initial plan is to offer DTV+ accessory dongles with TV 3.0 tuners and Wi-Fi connectivity to allow the large existing base of smart TVs in Brazil to enjoy the new broadcast service. Remote controls will feature a prominent “DTV+” button to access the TV 3.0 content.

Bruno Tariant, VP of Latin American sales for Enensys, says that prototype set-top boxes from several manufacturers have already been tested by some early TV 3.0 stations, including a pilot station from Record TV in Sao Paulo that broadcast a soccer match in 4K last month. Enensys, which provides a software-based broadcast chain for TV 3.0 including packaging, signaling, scheduling and content stitching, is working with Globo and public broadcasting organization EAD on several TV 3.0 rollouts. Tariant expects that six TV 3.0 stations should be on-air by the summer.

Getting The RF Ball Rolling

Rohde & Schwarz hosted Globo executives last month at its factory in Teisnach, Germany, for acceptance testing of the transmitters that will be deployed in Rio and Sao Paulo, and Dielectric did the same at its Raymond, Maine, plant for the antennas it is supplying.

Each Globo station will use two 25-kilowatt transmitters, as one is required to feed each MIMO antenna. Rohde & Schwarz was able to easily configure its high-power, liquid-cooled TE1 transmitters for the Brazilian market through a firmware update of its software-based exciter, with no additional hardware needed.

Providing antennas for Globo’s high-powered MIMO launch was a much bigger undertaking for Dielectric, as it necessitated the development of a brand-new product. That’s primarily because the high-power TV 3.0 transmissions in Brazil’s major markets will be using a new frequency band, loosely referred to as the “300-megahertz (MHz) band,” which hadn’t previously been used for TV transmission.

VHF TV chs. 7-13 reside in “Band Three,” 174 MHz to 216 MHz, and UHF starts at ch. 14, which is Band Four, 470-698 MHz. The 300 MHz band for DTV+ runs from 231 to 363 MHz.

“It’s not a Band Three product or a Band Four product, it’s kind of a Band 3.5 product,” says Dielectric VP of Sales Jay Martin. “It required us to develop a new product in a new band and with the MIMO technology. We were able to do that at breakneck speed. We started talking with the Brazilians back just before SET [the Brazilian trade show in August] last year. We signed a contract in November of last year, and we’ve since delivered the product.”

To ensure optimum coverage in a mix of reception environments, including penetrating urban structures, Globo will be using the two transmitters at each station to feed the large MIMO panel antennas with different polarizations, with horizontal polarization going to one and vertical polarization going to the other.

“It’s basically twice the feed system for a given antenna, because you’re feeding the polarizations independent of one another, whereas historically, we feed the polarizations together [in North America],” Martin says.

Beyond the major markets, TV 3.0 will eventually be broadcast on the traditional Three and Four bands as Brazil gradually transitions away from its current ISDB-T transmission standard. Dielectric is developing products for those incremental bands as well but is currently focused on the big-market rollout.

Foccus Digital’s Donato says that the use of MIMO will make the TV 3.0 rollout expensive, which is why he sees some Brazilian broadcasters waiting to see how the Globo launches go before placing orders themselves.

Besides requiring double the number of transmitters, MIMO will also present challenges in siting the new antennas, which due to their lower frequencies are bigger than the slot-type UHF antennas typically used for ISDB-T or ATSC. As a systems integrator, Foccus Digital is working with customers to find space on towers for the MIMO antennas while maintaining existing services, which will sometimes mean juggling TV and radio antennas.

“We are at the very beginning of this transition to the new technology,” Donato says. “But that’s good, because we have a lot to do.”

GatesAir is also pursuing TV 3.0 business with its transmitters. It has integrated MIMO functionality into its exciters and conducted successful interoperability testing with Brazil’s Mackenzie Institute (a leading authority on receiver testing affiliated with Mackenzie Presbyterian University). It has also developed a new power amplifier for use with the “300 MHz” frequency band, says GatesAir CTO Ray Miklius.

While there was a “flurry of activity” from prospective TV 3.0 customers for transmitter quotes before World Cup rights were finalized, Miklius says that some broadcasters pulled back on their plans when they didn’t wind up securing them. But he is optimistic going forward.

“When people are ready, we want to be ready with an offering, and I think with that frequency range and with MIMO and some of the other feature sets that they want, we’re well positioned to hopefully garner some business in the future,” Miklius says.

In fact, GatesAir has shipped its first TV 3.0 transmitter to EAD, which is expected to use it launch a new station in Brasilia and perform some testing in the next few months.

Another U.S. vendor working to bring TV 3.0 to Brazil is Triveni Digital, which competes with Enensys in providing packaging, signaling and scheduling systems. Triveni also offers analysis and monitoring tools like its StreamScope MPEG analyzer, with a new ISDB-T version to be unveiled at NAB. That product is aimed at helping Brazilian broadcasters support their current “TV 2.5” transmissions alongside TV 3.0 during the expected long transition period, says Triveni Digital CEO Mark Simpson.

Triveni is supplying its software-based broadcast chain tool to Globo as it prepares to launch a low-power TV 3.0 station in Brasilia, hopefully in time for the World Cup. And it has also been working with Brazilian firm Mirakulo to support targeted advertising using TV 3.0’s broadband pipe. At NAB, Triveni and Mirakulo will demonstrate a joint dynamic advertising delivery platform for ATSC 3.0 and TV 3.0 that enables targeted ad selection and playback at the TV receiver based on criteria such as viewer location and viewing habits.

While Simpson is happy to see the growth prospects in Brazil with its U.S. business being fairly static, he says the company hasn’t seen a big revenue impact yet. But he thinks U.S. broadcasters could learn some lessons from Globo and other Brazilian broadcasters in how to use ATSC 3.0’s technical capabilities to boost their core video programming and advertising delivery businesses. While he appreciates the potential of new initiatives like datacasting or BPS (Broadcast Positioning System), he doesn’t think they represent “the whole answer” when it comes to ATSC 3.0.

“The key thing about Brazil is they’re actually pushing the business edge forward in a way that I think is ahead of the U.S., which sounds ironic, since we’ve been at this for a while,” Simpson says. “In the U.S., we’ve got EdgeBeam [which on Tuesday announced it has acquired Sinclair’s BroadSpan data delivery platform] trying to make revenue in datacasting.

“I think they’ll succeed, I think it’s important, but they’re not really focused on the video part of a broadcaster’s product,” he continues. “That’s the main product, after all — their programming. And how is that monetized? Through advertising, through cable carriage fees. Cable carriage fees are in a long-term decline. What are you going to do about the advertising?”

Simpson thinks Brazil is ahead there. “They’ve had dynamic advertising on the air in what they call TV 2.5 for quite a while,” he says. “And a lot of the innovation there, yes, there’s technical innovation, but a lot of it is business innovation. How do you strike a deal with the CE manufacturers to enable dynamic advertising to work within this broader platform? Actually, a lot of that thinking, at least, can be brought to the U.S.”

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