On November 7, ATSC published a Recommended Practice on Delivery of ATSC 3.0 Services for Redistribution (Document A/371), the culmination of a two-year effort by ATSC’s TG3-S37 Specialist Group on Conversion and Redistribution of ATSC 3.0 Signals (Steve Calzone, Shift2Stream, chair, and Jeff Hamilton, representing NCTA, vice-chair). The 47-page document provides a detailed analysis and technical approach for carrying ATSC 3.0 services on cable and other Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (MVPDs). This Recommended Practice is an important step toward ensuring the benefits of ATSC 3.0 are accessible to all viewers, including those who receive TV service through cable and other MVPDs.
For direct feeds from a broadcaster to a MVPD, the document describes several points of interface with MVPDs, as shown in the figure below excerpted from the document. It also describes interfaces for over-the-air delivery of ATSC 3.0 signals to MVPDs.
Figure 4.2 from the ATSC Recommended Practice identifies four potential interfaces to MVPDs from an ATSC 3.0 signal.
ATSC has worked on technical solutions for carriage of ATSC 3.0 content on MVPDs for the past decade. An ATSC technical ad hoc group (TG3-TG-8) on MVPD Delivery Solutions, chaired by Jeff Hamilton representing NCTA, was formed in November 2015 to explore carriage issues of ATSC 3.0 content on MVPDs. The group formally recommended that ATSC create a Recommended Practice on ATSC 3.0-to-1.0 conversion and delivery of ATSC 3.0 content via MVPDs in August 2016. The first meeting of the ATSC Specialist Group S37 on Conversion and Redistribution of ATSC 3.0 Signals was held in September 2016, chaired by Steve Calzone (then with Cox Communications, now with Shift2Stream). The group produced the ATSC A/370 Recommended Practice on Conversion of ATSC 3.0 Services for Redistribution which was approved and published in December 2019, providing guidelines on converting ATSC 3.0 services to ATSC 1.0 for redistribution on MVPDs.
S37 subsequently went on hiatus for several years, while the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) worked on cable interface issues, including ATSC 3.0 essence signals, ultimately resulting in the SCTE Standard 277 on Linear Contribution Encoding in 2024. In early 2024, S37 restarted its discussions on retransmission of ATSC 3.0 services over MVPDs, which led to development of the current Recommended Practice. The combination of the ATSC and SCTE documents offers a comprehensive and reasoned technical approach for making sure that ATSC 3.0 services can be provided to consumers that subscribe to MVPDs, in addition to the option of free over-the-air delivery. It reflects a broad industry consensus and should address many of the technical questions raised by the FCC in its recent NPRM seeking to accelerate the ATSC 3.0 transition, helping to ensure that technical carriage concerns do not impede an efficient and timely transition.