The 2019 Consumer Electronics Show ...

The 2019 Consumer Electronics Show: Coverage begins on p. 5

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President's Message

Ralph Hogan, BTS President

This is my first message to the membership after becoming president of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society. First of all, I would like to thank the AdCom for my appointment, and Bill Hayes for his leadership over the past four years. The Society has changed for the better, and I have some ideas on how we can continue to grow the Society over the next couple of years. As everyone knows, our membership and IEEE overall membership continues to decrease annually. There are many engineers in both industry and academia outside the United States who could potentially become IEEE BTS members. I will be working with BTS staff and volunteers to help increase international membership. We will be concentrating our efforts on recruiting new members from Europe and Asia dur-

Inside

President's Message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 FromThe Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 CES 2019: Artificial Intelligence And 5G, But Still No ATSC 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The CES In Pictures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Sinclair Unveils New ATSC 3.0 Device At CES . . . . . . . . . . 15 C-Band Satellite Users Make Room For 5G Rollout . . . . . . . . 17 Audio Consoles: A Study In Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 U.S. AM Radio Station Transitions To Digital-Only Broadcasting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Mark Richer Stepping Down From ATSC Presidency . . . . . . . 30 EBU Group Examines New Broadcasting Modalities . . . . . . 31 2019 BMSB Symposium Set For June 5-7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 RF News And Views . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 IEEE 2019 Fellows Class IncludesTwo BTS Members . . . . . . 40 The Downward PathTo Broadcast Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Book Review: "Memoirs Of A Broadcast Engineer" . . . . . . . . 43 DVB News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 ITU Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Uruguay BTS Chapter Involved In Multiple Q4 Activities . . . 48 DL David Layer Briefs Spanish Chapter On Digital/Hybrid Radio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 BroadcastTechnology History Quiz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 In Memoriam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Upcoming Events Of InterestTo BTS Members . . . . . . . . . 53 What's New . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

ing the next year, with an emphasis on developing new chapters and getting more students involved with the Society. Not only will we need to attract new members, but we will need to keep them. This will be the challenge; if members do not feel they are getting a benefit from being a part of BTS, they will be lost. We have already started developing a library of webinars and videos which will be available only to BTS members. Partnering with other organizations and societies will also increase professional development and networking opportunities. This is in the works by BTS, partnering with the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), Meintel, Sgrignoli, and Wallace (MSW), and the Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE) in promoting training offered by both IEEE BTS and SBE on the new ATSC 3.0 digital television standard. For those outside of the United States and Korea, there may be opportunities for providing training on the DVB -T2 digital TV in the future. Research opportunities are provided by online access via IEEE Xplore to the following: IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting (1955 to present} and the IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB) digital library. Additional benefits included with BTS membership are: access to the IEEE BTS member roster, print copies of the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, print copies of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society's Broadcast Technology publication, deeplydiscounted savings on BTS conference registrations, and savings on BTS sponsored publications.

With the help of Guy Bouchard, chair of the Broadcast Technology Strategic Planning committee, we completed a Strategic Plan for the BTS last year and will be implementing portions of the plan during the next few years. The broadcast industry is an industry like no other. It was once the main source of information and entertainment that people had available, but this role is shifting to the many sources of entertainment and information in the connected world in which we currently live. The plan calls for increasing participation of members through volunteering efforts, growing student chapters at academic institutions, and providing members with meaningful experiences. The highly-regarded BTS Distinguished Lecturer program may be expanded to provide more opportunity to share knowledge and resources with underserved areas.

The mission statement of the Society as defined in the Strategic Plan is: "to serve the needs of the members of the Broadcast Technology Society to enhance their professional knowledge and vitality by keeping them informed of the latest research results, along with advances in technology and their practical applications." We do a good job of this with the two major conferences held annually. The IEEE International Sym-

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First Quarter 2019

Broadcast Technology

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From the Editor

Changes at the top, Atsc (not) at the 2019 Ces, and some `Good Byes'

By James E. O'Neal, Editor-in-Chief, BTS Life Member

With this issue of Broadcast Technology, we begin a new year and a fresh slate of BTS AdCom officers. Ralph Hogan is our new president; Lanny Nass is now vice president, and Paul Shulins is taking over Lanny's former post as treasurer. Dave Siegler is our new secretary. Congratulations and the best of luck to these new officers. We look forward to working with you as you settle into your positions in the Society's governance. The beginning of a new year also means that the annual "world's biggest technology show," the CES, was waiting in the wings, and the 2019 edition went off right on schedule with none of the drama that accompanied last year's event. (If you were at the 2018 show, you'll certainly remember the heavy, heavy rains that punctuated opening day, and the electrical power failure the following day that placed the Los Vegas Convention Center's Central Hall in total darkness for several hours!) Perhaps you'll also recall the champagne toast celebration during the show by three key players in U.S. television--the NAB's Gordon Smith, the CTA's Gary Shapiro, and the ATSC's Mark Richer--to commemorate the formal arrival of the world's latest (and best) digital television transmission standard, ATSC 3.0, something that a number of BTS members helped to formulate and codify. To put things in perspective, just a few months earlier (Nov. 2017) the FCC had informed broadcasters they could commence transmitting in 3.0 at any time. The 2018 CES ceremony seemed to dispel any doubt as to the new standard's readiness--Korea had already geared up and was getting set to deploy just a few weeks later to provide UHD coverage of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. And as we moved into the new year, it seemed that all that remained was the drying on the ink on the document and broadcasters to light up the skies with 3.0 transmissions. " Your editor, who has followed the development of ATSC 3.0 since its inception, and has also been eagerly awaiting the replacement of the now-antiquated ATSC 1.0 over-the-air delivery standard and its many weaknesses and shortcomings, spent considerable time after that morning's champagne toast in combing the CES exhibition floors looking for ATSC 3.0 products. And as I reported last year, there were none to be had. I was told by the manufacturers (and some of the industry leaders) at the 2018 show that it was a bit early in the game to expect much in the way of TV sets, set-top converter boxes, or maybe 3.0 dongles for tablets and big screen display ports. I

should wait until NAB that April for something definitive (such as broadcasters getting ATSC 3.0 signals on the air and (just possibly) the arrival of some consumer reception hardware in the stores). Others advised: "Wait until the 2019 CES; you'll certainly see ATSC 3.0 TVs on the show floor then."

Fast forward about 365 days (Jan. 8 to be exact) and I was again roaming the cavernous LVCC exhibit halls again in search of ATSC 3.0 technology. As baseball star Yogi Berra would likely have observed: "It was d?j? vu all over again!" No trace whatsoever of 3.0 technology. (At the 2018 show, one exhibitor, Hisense, did display signage (no product though) enumerating the advantages of ATSC 3.0. This time, not even that was present.)

Of course, I asked over and over, why isn't the technology here? After all, someone is obviously making TVs for the Korean ATSC 3.0 market, and as I understood things, there were only minor differences between what that country had locked in on as a standard and what we were going to do in the United States--audio delivery, signaling, etc. And due to the very flexible and extensible nature of the standard as it has been described, it would seem not all that difficult to make a receiver that could accommodate such differences. After all, the UHD sets with ATSC 1.0 tuners and processing now being sold in U.S. stores are equipped to handle--out of the box-- multiple "flavors" of HDR. In this day and age of software-defined radios and easy firmware/software updates, changing 3.0 nuances to line up with the signals being aired in a particular country should be a breeze, right?.

Well, it seems that when you ask several people the same question, you sometimes get as many answers as the number of individuals you quiz. I was alternately told:

? "It's a `chicken and egg' situation with set manufacturers reluctant to produce receivers until there are more broadcasters on the air with 3.0, and broadcasters being reluctant to light up 3.0 until there are enough sets in use to make it practical."

? "It's a political thing; there`s concern over content protection by the networks and content producers."

? "The chips needed for Dolby audio (part of the U.S. 3.0 implementation) aren't available."

? "Chips aren't the issue, audio processing is universally done in software."

? "Broadcasters are too busy with the repack to concern themselves with 3.0 right now."

Broadcast Technology

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