A speaker added late to the Broadcasters Clinic line-up will talk about ATSC 3.0 at a session on Thursday.
Joel Wilhite is currently the Senior Systems Design Engineer for North American Broadcasting at Harmonic. For 24 years, his career has focused primarily on broadcast television transport technology. Wilhite has held several positions within Harmonic, including engineering, pre-sales and project engineer as both contributor and lead in the integration group. He also serves as the representative to the ATSC committee and participates in the creation of the ATSC standards. Mr. Wilhite studied Electrical Engineering at DeVry and was also enlisted in the US Navy, While working in Supply he designed, integrated and implemented and maintained a non-secure computer network system while serving aboard the battleship USS Missouri (BB63).
The session will be at 10 a.m. Here’s the description of his session:
HEVC Compression for ATSC 3.0
With processing power 4 times greater than current MPEG 2 systems on air today, the broadcasting industry will have many more opportunities to up their service offerings when making the transition to ATSC 3.0. The compression needed to protect the quality of the growing multiplex market is getting harder to deliver in MPEG 2. We have seen the broadcasters enable the addition of more, diverse channels as in some cases have no choice as they tie stations together in channel share agreements. The LIGHTHOUSE station built in PHOENIX is another necessity for this market and will be typical of how to work around the fact that ATSC 3.0 is not backwards compatible and there are fewer frequencies to operate in. Since the ATSC 3.0 specification has been published for some time now, we have had time to integrate compression technology with the new air chain systems. The system design choices offered in this talk are based on the wide range of experience we have developed over the years of delivering dense broadcast multiplex systems and will show how the choices possible provided in the ATSC specifications can be applied. The talk will review 3 of the use cases being sought after by broadcasters.
