On June 1, at 3 p.m. E.D.T, NAB will host a webcast designed to demonstrate the kinds of services and applications that broadcasters can develop using the new ATSC 3.0 standard. In this blog post, NAB’s So Vang and OpenZNet founder Azita Manson provide an overview of what we can expect to see during The Authoring Our Future: Developing Applications for Next Gen TV webcast.
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The quest for killer apps is never-ending; we can never really know what makes the viewer’s experience appealing enough to create a must-have and will-pay mentality, but, by leveraging HTML5 in the ATSC 3.0 standard, we have the necessary tools that allow us to rapidly experiment with concepts to determine what works and what doesn’t.
Broadcasters will be able to develop new applications with the ATSC 3.0 standard, like this example of a weather app from PILOT’s next generation TV demo
By using W3C standards in the ATSC 3.0 runtime environment, we have access to a large community of application developers. In addition, there are many drag-and-drop development tools for writing HTML5 pages and JavaScript applications. This is an important piece of the puzzle because some of the most creative media producers are not software engineers. By aligning ourselves with W3C and web technology, we dramatically increase the pool of talented developers, to support our quest of developing next generation broadcast killer apps.
HTML5 has come a long way from the capabilities that markup languages used to provide. It has been extended to provide a rich set of features and will continue to grow in its capabilities as consumers’ needs change. For example, features that were once solely the province of operating systems (OS) and hardware like video streaming have now become part of HTML5.
- Learn how practical and easy it is to modify an HTML5 application, and how quickly you can propagate the changes through the system
- Understand the nuances that have been learned through practical experience
- Gain ideas on a myriad of possibilities that HTML5 provides to present – and monetize – enhanced user experiences
- See how to leverage W3C standard-based interfaces to overcome some of limitations of browser APIs
We can go well beyond just providing a user interface. By using JavaScript with HTML5, logic can be executed to perform an operation without any user awareness; for example, a targeted advertisement could replace a national advertisement in the background with no knowledge or intervention by the user. HTML5 applications can also use other W3C mechanisms to interface with the receivers when the required functionality is not provided by the browser.
Without W3C standardization and HTML5, writing interactive applications that run on multiple brands of receivers would be a daunting task unless all receiver manufacturers agreed on deploying one type of hardware and OS.
The good news for broadcasters doesn’t end there: Receiver manufacturers can also take advantage of such a standard-based environment without costly extensions and intensive software development.
Our conclusion: HTML5 rocks, and it is the future!