ATEME & Sinclair: Higher quality and efficiency for ATSC 1.0 & ATSC 3.0

ATEME, a global video delivery player, and Sinclair Broadcast Group, a US television broadcasters, have announced a relationship to provide live video encoding solutions that will speed up the transition of over-the-air delivery to ATSC 3.0 “NextGen” television services.

In conjunction with the previously announced Spectrum Co rollout of ATSC 3.0 in the Dallas market, Sinclair has chosen ATEME as supplier for both ATSC 1.0 (MPEG-2) ‘Host Station’ encoding and “NextGen” 3.0 (HEVC) encoding. The systems make use of the TITAN platform for providing the most efficient, Live/Mux statistical multiplexing enabled VBR encoding across both transmission platforms. ATEME, being at the forefront of HEVC research and leading industry committees and research groups, has introduced a High-Efficiency MPEG2 (HE-MPEG2) CODEC. The HE-MPEG2 is compatible with MPEG2 compliant decoders, including legacy set-top boxes, digital televisions and digital to analog MPEG2 converters; it doesn’t require any change nor upgrade on existing devices.

Based on the bandwidth efficiency of HE-MPEG2 in conjunction with industry leading TITAN Live/Mux statistical multiplexing, ATSC stations are provided with the following benefits:

• Lower OPEX: increased mux density by 30% without compromising video quality
• Future-Proof Solution: The TITAN pure software encoder-transcoder provides ‘blink-of-an-eye’ migration path to ATSC3.0, HEVC or SHVC (Scalable HEVC)
• Flexible Architecture: TITAN is server-agnostic and can run on any private/public & on/off-premises Cloud infrastructure with the same benefits and value proposition