COVID-19 Delays, Not Derails, NextGen TV Plans
Broadcast Industry News - Television, Cable, On-demand
tvnewscheck.com
Las Vegas and Portland, Ore. will light up their NextGen TV markets in June from their initially-slated late April launch, but the broadcasters and coalition driving the new industry standard forward say major launches will still move ahead this year. The launches will coincide with the arrival in retail stores of the first 3.0-capable sets.
Channel Stacking
While new deals are required for stations to broadcast network programming in 3.0, the far thornier issue has been figuring out where to move 1.0 programming in order to free up capacity on host stations to launch 3.0. Local stations have also had to convince the networks that such “channel stacking” won’t have a negative impact on picture quality, though 3.0 insiders say the networks are being flexible.
“Everybody’s in a learning mode, especially with things like football,” Fritz says. “Fox, NBC and CBS want to ensure that the quality of sports programming is not diminished. So we’re showing them what the picture quality is going to look like with the new encoders, whether it’s doing one HD and six SDs or two HDs and four SDs.”
Hane agrees: “The networks understand we’re going to be stacking up HDs, and they’re fine with that.”
As for the early 3.0 broadcasts, they will initially just be simulcasts of existing 720p and 1080i HD network programming. In Portland, KRCW will broadcast its own CW feed as well as CBS from KOIN, ABC from KATU and PBS from KOPB, while KPDX will broadcast MyNetworkTV as well as Fox from KPTV, NBC from KGW and PBS Encore from KOPB (the hosting of KOPB content is still awaiting final signoff). With a proposed modulation/coding scheme that will deliver 25 Mbps from each host 3.0 station, each commercial HD feed will initially be allocated around 7 Mbps while the PBS feeds will get around 3.6 Mbps, all using HEVC encoding.
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