WASHINGTON D.C.—The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) is working on adding the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) format as an option to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) used by the ATSC 3.0 standard, it said today.
“ATSC 3.0 was designed from the ground up from a technical point of view to be evolvable,” said ATSC president Madeleine Noland during a March 13 phone interview. “The idea is that if down the road VVC becomes very prevalent in many, many devices, they [broadcasters] wouldn’t stop using HEVC for their content, but they might start putting out some new types of content with VVC.”
At the moment, VVC is being evaluated as an ATSC Candidate Standard that could be added to the full standard, joining HEVC as an encoding option. As a candidate, a standard is put out to ATSC members and the industry at large for comment. It is difficult to predict exactly when the membership might vote to make VVC part of the standard, but the candidate standard period is typically several months, not a year, she said.
“The Candidate Standard period lasts, basically, as long as the technology group thinks is necessary,” said Noland.
To place VVC into perspective, the codec produces an 84% savings in the number of bits needed to compress 1080p HD compared to the bits required by MPEG-2, the compression scheme used for ATSC 1.0. HEVC saves 75% compared to MPEG-2 for the same content, said Noland.
VVC bit savings could one day be used to make 8K delivery a reality for broadcasters. The codec’s efficiency could also free up additional bits for distribution of more channels as well as delivery of new 3.0 services, such as datacasting. “To be clear, there’s the possibility of 8K using HEVC. 8K is part of the HEVC standard that’s part of ATSC 3, but it’s a different flavor,” said Noland. “There’s a lot of facets to what it means to have 8K.”
The addition of VVC to the ATSC 3.0 standard brings the Next-Gen TV standard into alignment with other developments at home and around the world.
“It’s very important for ATSC to stay ahead of the game. We sort of try to place our bets on the right horses, so to speak,” said Noland. “Looking at VVC and what's going on with it in the world today, that definitely seems like something ATSC should invest time into, and certainly we are excited to do that.”
“There are many other standards organizations that already have incorporated VVC. So, you could almost argue that ATSC was a late comer, so to speak. But the ARIB in Japan, DVB in Europe, CTA WAVE, DASH-IF, SBTVD Forum in Brazil and SCTE have all incorporated VVC into their standards. Again, some of this is more future-thinking, and some of this is applicable in the here and now. That's very much a market-by-market scenario.”
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