ATSC 3.0—The Next Step in the Evolution of Digital Television

The goals of ATSC 3.0 are to improve the television viewing experience with higher audio and video quality, compression efficiency, robust transmission for reception on both fixed and mobile devices, and more accessibility, personalization, and interactivity. ATSC is also addressing changing consumer behavior and preferences, providing TV content on a wide variety of devices. Furthermore, ATSC is working to add value to the broadcasting service platform, extending its reach and adding new business models-all without the restriction of backward compatibility with the legacy system. Formal planning for ATSC 3.0 began back in 2010 in a planning team tasked with looking at what a next-generation system might look like. Requirements were subsequently developed based on the usage scenarios. Formal standards development work began in 2012, with the first specification completed and published in March 2016. ATSC 3.0 is being built to last. Technology advances rapidly and so methods to gracefully evolve have been built into the core of the system. An essential capability is to signal when a layer or components of a layer evolve-including the ability to signal minor version changes and updates, and major version changes and updates. The goal of this flexibility is to avoid disruptive technology transitions, and to enable graceful transitions from one technology to another.

I. Document Status

When completed, ATSC 3.0 will be a suite of about 20 separate standards. At this writing, nearly a dozen documents that describe various elements of the ATSC 3.0 system were at the Candidate Standard (CS) phase, where implementation experience is gained and the document is expanded and clarified as needed. Nearly all ATSC 3.0 specifications have been made public for review and trial implementations. See Table I.TABLE I ATSC 3.0 Document Suite

Document No.	Document Title
A/321	System Discovery and Signaling
A/322	Physical Layer Protocol
A/324	Scheduler / Studio to Transmitter Link
A/330	Link Layer Protocol
A/331	Signaling, Delivery, Synchronization, Error Protection
A/332	Service Announcement
A/333	Service Usage Reporting
A/334	Audio Watermark Emission
A/335	Video Watermark Emission
A/336	Content Recovery in Redistribution Scenarios
A/338	Companion Device
A/341	Video
A/341 Part 1	Audio Common Elements
A/341 Part 2	AC-4 System
A/341 Part 3	MPEG-H System
A/343	Captions and Subtitles
A/360	ATSC 3.0 Security and Service Protection