Note that this blog post (and the associated video) were a quick off-the-cuff thing while I was on the NAB show floor—I have been talking to a few of those involved in the testing at NIST, Sinclair, and Avateq (among others), and will hopefully have a lot more in a follow-up.
Right now it's in the experimental stage, with only 6 towers total deployed (only 5 were operational during NAB, and only one in Nevada... so timing, not navigation yet).
The ultimate plan—which is probably dependent on how well ATSC 3.0 rolls out (which has plenty of hurdles[1])—is to encourage broadcasters to add on the necessary timing equipment to their transmitter sites, to build a mesh network for timing.
That would allow the system to be 100% independent of GPS (time transfer could be done via dark fiber and/or ground-satellite-ground directly to some 'master' sites).
The advantages for BPS are coverage (somewhat) inside buildings, the ability to have line of sight nearly everywhere in populated areas, and resilience to jamming you can't get with GPS (a 100 kW transmitter signal 10 miles away is a lot harder to defeat than a weak GPS signal hundreds of miles away in the sky).
The demo on the show floor was also using eLoran to distribute time from a site in Nevada to the transmitter facility on Black Mountain outside Vegas, showing a way to be fully GPS-independent (though the current eLoran timing was sourced from GPS).
[1] ATSC 3.0, as it is being rolled out in the US, doesn't even add on 4K (just 1080p HDR), and tacks on 'features' like 'show replay' (where you tap a button and an app can stream a show you're watching on OTA TV through the Internet... amazing! /s), DRM (at stations' discretion, ugh), and 'personalized ad injection' (no doubt requiring you to connect your TV to the Internet so advertisers can get your precise location too...). Because ATSC 3.0 requires new hardware, consumers have to be motivated to buy new TVs or converter boxes—I don't see anything that motivates me to do so. I feel like it may be a lot like the (forever ongoing) HD Radio rollout.
I bought an atsc 3 tuner, and the experience turned me off of OTA tv. Since then, things managed to get worse as when I was poking around, DRM wasn't in use, but now it is.
I was hoping to get better fidelity between the roughly 2x bitrate per channel, and the video codec update. And probably overly optimistically was hoping the 1080p feed source was progressive so there wouldn't be a deinterlacing step.
Otoh, local broadcasters use an audio codec I can't easily use, integration with mythtv is poor, and there's no sign anything is going to get better soon.
Maybe if I had a tv with an atsc 3 tuner, live tv would be an option, but I'm not buying a tv for that.
ATSC 1.0 took a while before gathering momentum, so maybe that's going to be the same here, and in another few years, it might make sense to consider a transition. OTOH, maybe the writing is on the wall and OTA broadcasting will die on this hill. I was an OTA enthusiast, but between ATSC 3 being terrible, and the reallocation of spectrum that means cellular base stations sometimes overwhelm my pre-amp, it's not much fun anymore. (I have a filter post-pre-amp but it'd be better if I got on the roof to put it pre-pre-amp, but roofs are scary) Maybe I'm just getting curmudgeonly though.
> The demo on the show floor was also using eLoran to distribute time from a site in Nevada to the transmitter facility on Black Mountain outside Vegas, showing a way to be fully GPS-independent (though the current eLoran timing was sourced from GPS).
There's been a consistent call by many people that there needs to be a diversity of options for navigation and timing:
Well... and there's the electricity grid which can be used for timing needs accurate enough to a single second, and in Europe there's DCF77 [1] which can not just be used as a 2*10^-12 seconds-accurate timing standard but also a frequency standard.
Why is US ATSC 3.0 so bad? It is nearly a decade since it was South Korea have it deployed and operational. The standard itself is no longer "next gen". Brazil's TV 3.0, also uses ATSC 3.0 is so much better in every aspect.
Even if someone mandate it as requirement for TV sold next year all the tech inside are at least 10 years old ( HEVC ? ) . Not to mention the roll out time. Do Americans only watch Cables and Netflix? And not Free to Air TV? Which is what I belief what most of the worst still do to a larger extend other than Internet streaming.
They might as well look into the standards before putting a mandate into it.
Broadcast TV modernisation is trapped between a load of enemies.
To the north, competition from a huge installed base of last-gen technology, which is mostly good enough.
To the south, streaming services, youtube and cable. These let people watch whenever they want (nobody has VCRs any more) and they've offered 4k for over a decade.
To the east, the industry's dumb decision to build the 'next gen' technology atop a patent minefield, and load it with DRM. So if you manufacture this tech, you can face huge surprise bills because in implementing the spec you've unknowingly infringed on some nonsense patent.
And to the west, the commercial reality that showing someone an advert in 4K isn't any more profitable than showing the advert in 1080p. If you're a broadcast TV station when you up your quality everything gets more expensive but you don't make any extra money. So why bother?
> If you're a broadcast TV station when you up your quality everything gets more expensive but you don't make any extra money. So why bother?
In a functioning, competitive market, the answer to this is "Customers choose a competing broadcast TV station with higher quality." Unfortunately what we have is far from that.
Yes. Satellite dishes also provide service like cable does, a number of "basic" channels included plus options for "premium" channels that cost extra. The basic channels include the broadcast networks for one's geographic area.
They're not that popular but there are similar bundles available over the Internet, YouTube TV is one.
All the national broadcast networks have Internet options, Hulu has shows from multiple networks, Paramount+ has CBS. Both also have shows made for cable & satellite channels and Internet-only programming.
There's a lot more than Netflix too, Amazon Prime, AppleTV+, Disney+, Max, and many others.
Live sports kept people signed up to cable & satellite for a long time, I think now there are Internet options (and probably exclusives, I don't watch sports).
Be aware that the cable tv infrastructure is also the main Internet service provider, many people are like me, paying the cable company for home Internet but not for TV (my plan does include a legally mandated minimum TV service and a TV box but I only have it because it's cheaper than Internet alone for some reason).
Broadcast TV after the digital rollout was so bad many people just stopped watching TV. Picking it up is such a hassle it's simply not worth the effort for some ad laden TV.
At the time of the switchover in the early 2000s I lived about 40 miles from a major metropolitan area, Minneapolis, which is pretty close in US terms. We spent hundreds of dollars on different antennas (indoor and outdoor) and signal boosters and what not and it was simply never reliability.
In 2008 I moved to my current location, three miles outside of downtown Minneapolis. Again I tried a number of antennas and still found operation to be anything but reliable. I gave up and began just watching Netflix.
The people who live close enough to the broadcasts to pick it up have easy access to cable TV. The people who live in the countryside who used to depend on it can't pick it up. There's just no place for the TV system we were given.
> Broadcast TV after the digital rollout was so bad many people just stopped watching TV.
That is the first time I've heard that. Everything I've heard has been positive - people amazed that others aren't doing it. Are there any numbers on user satisfaction?
I used it myself once or twice and it worked simply with antennas that were relatively cheap (<$50 iirc). Maybe there was a problem in Minneapolis?
> The people who live close enough to the broadcasts to pick it up have easy access to cable TV.
Cable is expensive for many people and broadcast is free, of course. (Also, Broadcast is more private, for now.)
> I used it myself once or twice and it worked simply with antennas that were relatively cheap (<$50 iirc). Maybe there was a problem in Minneapolis?
I don’t know about Minneapolis is particular, but 40 miles is far enough that it gets tricky, and in my Canadian city, I’m close to the towers as the crow flies, but in the RF shadow of a huge hill - so I’d actually get better reception if I was further away from the broadcast towers.
Minneapolis is in a river valley (the Mississippi River). From an airplane at cruising altitude the area will look fairly flat, but down at ground level there is a ton of 50-100 foot undulation. The elevation of your antenna is probably far more important than the quality of your antenna.
Fun: if you’ve got Apple Maps (I’m sure Android has this as well), ask for walking directions from Minneapolis to something 35-40 miles away. I chose “Elko New Market” - 36 miles from downtown. Click on the walking details and you can see the elevation change. You’re going from around 800 feet above sea level to 1100 feet above sea level, a difference of ~300 feet. But the total change over the course of the walk is nearly 4000 feet!
I live in downtown Chicago and get tons of channels, despite no line of sight due to buildings in the way. Though they tend to go out when the El passes by.
Did you actually mention what BPS actually stands for in the article? I read the whole thing and don't recall reading that. Yes, I'm capable of searching and finding the information myself, but in an article about something something esoteric like this, explaining the acronym would be useful.
Edit: Broadcast Positioning System for anyone that didn't figure it out.
How does it solve for time without location? With GPS location and time are one solution to an equation with 4 unknowns (x,y,z,t). Without location you won't know the time delay between you and the transmitter.
Perhaps they were just hand-fed to demonstrate accuracy.
If instead of PPS it gave a 10Mhz reference, then there is a pretty good use in keeping nearby systems sample-synchronized. In which case you don't care about 'time' just about frequency accuracy.
Right now it's in the experimental stage, with only 6 towers total deployed (only 5 were operational during NAB, and only one in Nevada... so timing, not navigation yet).
The ultimate plan—which is probably dependent on how well ATSC 3.0 rolls out (which has plenty of hurdles[1])—is to encourage broadcasters to add on the necessary timing equipment to their transmitter sites, to build a mesh network for timing.
That would allow the system to be 100% independent of GPS (time transfer could be done via dark fiber and/or ground-satellite-ground directly to some 'master' sites).
The advantages for BPS are coverage (somewhat) inside buildings, the ability to have line of sight nearly everywhere in populated areas, and resilience to jamming you can't get with GPS (a 100 kW transmitter signal 10 miles away is a lot harder to defeat than a weak GPS signal hundreds of miles away in the sky).
The demo on the show floor was also using eLoran to distribute time from a site in Nevada to the transmitter facility on Black Mountain outside Vegas, showing a way to be fully GPS-independent (though the current eLoran timing was sourced from GPS).
[1] ATSC 3.0, as it is being rolled out in the US, doesn't even add on 4K (just 1080p HDR), and tacks on 'features' like 'show replay' (where you tap a button and an app can stream a show you're watching on OTA TV through the Internet... amazing! /s), DRM (at stations' discretion, ugh), and 'personalized ad injection' (no doubt requiring you to connect your TV to the Internet so advertisers can get your precise location too...). Because ATSC 3.0 requires new hardware, consumers have to be motivated to buy new TVs or converter boxes—I don't see anything that motivates me to do so. I feel like it may be a lot like the (forever ongoing) HD Radio rollout.