Advanced Television

DigiCAP to demo live ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 reception through single home gateway at ATSC Next Gen TV Conference

May 22, 2019

A live ATSC 1.0 signal will be acquired from WJLA – TV in Washington, DC while the ATSC 3.0 signal will be acquired from the Baltimore/Washington Sinclair ATSC 3.0 experimental SFN. The live signals will be converted to broadband using a DigiCAP “HomeCaster” home gateway device. The Wi-Fi distributed video will be simultaneously displayed on a TV screen and tablet. In addition, the control UI for the demonstration will be viewable on a separate laptop.

According to Sang Jin Yoon, SVP Business Development, “This demonstration is important because it shows that the home viewer experience of watching over the air TV can be as convenient as watching OTT services on the same devices. This can give local broadcasters the ability to compete with new forms of internet protocol services.”

The ATSC 3.0 signal for the demonstration will be delivered through DigiCAP’s ATSC 3.0 “DigiCaster” head-end system.  In the short history of ATSC 3.0, DigiCAP was the first live ATSC 3.0 head-end gateway system provider. This early start began in 2017 as DigiCAP technology was deployed extensively in all TV stations that broadcast live 4K for the 2018 Korean Winter Olympics.

In the two years since that deployment, DigiCaster has evolved along with the ATSC 3.0 standard. The first Korean deployments were hardware-based using 9 separate components to construct each station’s ATSC 3.0 head-end system. Today’s DigiCaster is a completely virtualized system with all functionality supported in a single COTS server. Said Yoon, “We learned from our experiences in our early ATSC 3.0 deployment and used the knowledge to create an improved, virtualized ATSC 3.0 head-end system.”

Because of DigiCAP’s early start, their technology has advanced to virtual platforms more quickly.

Today, DigiCAP offers mature, deployed virtual ATSC 3.0 head-end system that can be installed on a dedicated on-premise COTS server, or on a third party cloud platform such as AWS. According to Yoon, “We have had a demonstration system on AWS for almost a year now and have shown it to many broadcasters in both Korea and the US.”

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