LAGUNA BEACH, Calif.—Gaian Solutions unveiled its Mobius Marketplace NextGen TV monetization platform, an AI-based ATSC 3.0 spectrum planning tool intended to enable broadcasters and spectrum owners to earn scalable, sustainable revenue, at the 2022 NAB Show.
Winner of a 2022 NAB Show Product of the Year Award, Mobius Marketplace provides broadcasters with software Platform as a Service (PaaS) on ramps to deploy and commercialize NextGen TV. The platform offers seven services, including the spectrum planning tool, the company said.
The platform views 3.0 broadcasts as a programmatic data pipe due to the inherent ability of the standard to enable broadcasters to slice and dice the physical pipe into multiple smaller pipes, each with its own modulation and coding (mod-cod) setting. The ability to tear down a pipe and start a new one with different settings is also becoming a near real-time operation, ensuring that a 3.0 network is essentially a software-defined communications network, it said.
Although these capabilities are available, broadcasters have found it difficult to attract new services and applications to broadcast spectrum, largely because they have lacked an easy way to plan and design spectrum coverage at various mod-cod settings. Many demand-side customers with applications for 3.0 spectrum are not seasoned broadcast technologists and do not fully understand the benefits and tradeoffs of various broadcast mod-cod settings, Gaian said.
The Mobius Spectrum Planning Tool addresses the problem with a three-layered solution, including:
- Spectrum discovery via an open portal to understand coverage areas at various broadcast and mod-cod settings. Broadcasters can use the tool to plot real-time contour maps at various settings and understand the impact of coverage areas, accounting for terrain and propagation variable.
- Spectrum farming: Meeting the requirements of those from outside the broadcast industry who which to power their service with 3.0 delivery, the platform enables an easy-to-use method for discovery and usage. Some possible spectrum farmers might be those wishing to stream HD Radio and IoT datacasters.
- Spectrum harvesting based on AI tech to optimize yield by ensuring PLP level abstraction across participating broadcasters, enabling solutions and services using broadcast spectrum across large geographical regions by merging complementary subpipes with similar mod-cod settings across broadcast spectrum in near real time.
More information is available on the company’s website.
