Brazil. ATSC, the Broadcast Standards Association, announced that Brazil's Forum of Brazilian Digital Terrestrial TV System (SBTVD Forum) has recommended to the Brazilian government the selection of the ATSC 3.0 "physical layer" as the over-the-air transmission system for the country's upgrade to next-generation terrestrial transmission services "TV 3.0".
The long-awaited recommendation follows extensive testing in Brazil to meet the demands of the market in the country of more than 200 million people, and reaffirms the previous selection of several other ATSC technologies for the TV 3.0 system.
The ATSC 3.0 suite of standards – the world's first IP-based system to combine broadband and transmission – is already on the air in South Korea, Jamaica and the US, and will soon arrive in Trinidad and Tobago. Other countries are also studying the ATSC 3.0 system because of its Internet Protocol backbone, spectral efficiency, and other advanced features.
On July 22, Brazil's SBTVD Forum released its final Phase 3 recommendations and sent them to Brazil's Ministry of Communications, which will consider them for adoption as the country's TV 3.0 system, including ATSC 3.0 broadcast technology.
"We are deeply pleased with the ATSC Physical Layer 3.0 SBTVD Forum's recommendation for over-the-air transmission," said ATSC President Madeleine Noland. "ATSC is also excited about the opportunity to work with the Forum and Brazilian stakeholders on the documentation, development and full implementation of TV 3.0 in Brazil. We have valued the opportunity to share experiences and exchange ideas with our colleagues in Brazil throughout this four-year selection process. We have learned a lot and we look forward to continuing to collaborate. "We are preparing to introduce ATSC 3.0 at the annual SET Expo broadcast trade show in São Paulo, which begins on August 20," said Noland.
"The technology recommendations for TV 3.0 are the result of four years of exemplary work by the SBTVD Forum in the request, evaluation and careful selection of components for TV 3.0," added Skip Pizzi, president of ATSC's implementation team in Brazil. "We are proud to see so many elements of ATSC 3.0 (at the physical, transport and content layers) chosen to become part of Brazil's next-generation TV broadcasting standard, and we anticipate that TV 3.0 decisions could ultimately have a regional impact beyond Brazil."
The SBTVD Forum is a non-profit organization of public and private companies, including broadcasters, manufacturers, software developers, and academics, that advises and makes recommendations to Brazil's Ministry of Communications on digital TV technology and policy issues. Brazil's "TV 3.0 Project," which is the title the Forum has given to the country's next generation of digital television, includes both over-the-air and above-the-line broadband components, including some optional technologies among the latter. The recommendations made or reaffirmed on 22 July are the result of a call for proposals and subsequent testing and evaluations carried out by the Forum since the start of the TV 3.0 Project in July 2020.
The last phase of this process took place from December 2023 to May 2024, when the SBTVD Forum conducted field tests with two candidate technologies for the physical layer. After a thorough evaluation, which took into account all the data collected since the start of the project in 2020, the Technical, Market and Intellectual Property Modules of the SBTVD Forum unanimously decided to recommend the ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer to the Ministry of Communications as the final selection of the technological component for the TV 3.0 system.
The recommendation on the ATSC 3.0 physical layer transmission method is in addition to five other key technologies proposed by ATSC and previously selected by the SBTVD Forum as recommendations for mandatory inclusion in both the transmission and broadband components of the "TV 3.0" system:
1. ROUTE/DASH Transportation
2. MPEG-H Audio
3. IMSC1 Subtitles
4. HDR10 High Dynamic Range Video (with optional dynamic HDR metadata based on SMPTE ST 2094-10 and SMPTE ST 2094-40)
5. ATSC 3.0 Advanced Emergency Information
ATSC's proposed additional technologies were previously selected only for the broadband component of TV 3.0:
• H.265/HEVC video base layer encoding
• HLG High Dynamic Range Video (optional)
• SL-HDR1 High Dynamic Range Video (optional)
• AC-4 audio (optional)
A pronouncement by the Brazilian government on H.265/HEVC video base layer transmission technology from the SBTVD Forum TV 3.0 recommendations are expected to be presented soon. In the meantime, ATSC has pledged its support to the SBTVD Forum for the continued development of TV 3.0 specifications, best practices, and compliance documentation. The implementation of TV 3.0 in Brazil is expected to begin in 2025.
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