Eurofins Digital Testing (EDT), in partnership with the Consumer Technology Association and National Association of Broadcasters, has announced the release of the NEXTGEN TV logo certification test suite v 2022-1.0—the first major release for the new model year applicable to ATSC 3.0 compliant receivers starting July 1, 2022.
Primarily aimed at devices entering the market in 2023, but can be used for certification from today, this release adds:
- More than 80 new tests, bringing the total to 348
- Improved coverage of domains such as MMT, Audio, ESG, AEA, watermark and content recovery, Multi-period, Multi-PLP, IMSC1 IT1 Captions, App lifecycle, Rating, Signal signing, A/344 APIs
- An extended range of feature tags allowing manufacturers to configure the NEXTGEN Certification statement (according to their receivers’ abilities and compliance requirements)
- Continued alignment of certification test suite to A/300 specification
- Improvements to CTA NEXTGEN TV Test Repository Portal search filtering to include Domain and Required Features
- Support for embedded device browser Web Media API Snapshot (WMAS:2019) tests
The release has been built through an industry collaboration funded by CTA, NAB and Eurofins Digital Testing, with contributions from broadcasters, technology vendors and manufacturers to ensure streams are representative of real deployments, interoperable across devices and equipment and compliant to the latest ATSC 3.0 Specifications.
The recent NEXTGEN TV conference in Detroit demonstrated the fast pace of adoption in the United States with many new markets coming online in 2022 and CES 2022 had previously hinted at a number of new receiver vendors preparing devices for the market.
“NEXTGEN TV sales are growing at an amazing rate,” said Brian Markwalter, SVP of Research and Standards at CTA. “CTA expects 4.5 million NEXTGEN TVs to ship in the U.S. this year, all of which have passed the logo certification test suite. Release of test suite version 2022-1.0 is an important milestone as these standards allow the industry to follow the same playbook and work together to accelerate innovation. We look forward to this next generation of entertainment.”
“This updated test suite is a critical tool in assuring that important services and features afforded by ATSC 3.0 are compatible with NEXTGEN TV receivers,” said NAB Executive Vice President of Technology and Chief Technology Officer Sam Matheny. “We appreciate the ongoing collaboration with CTA and receiver manufacturers in developing and appropriately identifying televisions capable of delivering this unique next generation viewing experience to consumers, and we look forward to expanding testing to cover additional advanced services and features to come. Together with our consumer electronics partners, broadcasters are committed to ushering in a new era of television through the ATSC 3.0 standard.”
Bob Campbell, EDT, said “With Jamaica already announcing adoption of ATSC 3.0 and needing low-cost devices to facilitate their digital switchover transformation by 2023, and other markets signalling interest in the technology, the next 12 months are set to be a significant year globally for ATSC 3.0.
The NEXTGEN TV logo is essential to maximizing devices sales in the market, demonstrating compliance to the standards and giving consumers confidence in their product.”
The 2021 Suites will sunset Sept. 30, 2022.
EDT is also releasing Arreios for ATSC v1.8, its automated test harness for ATSC 3.0 conformance supporting both the NEXTGEN TV logo test suite and A3SA Signal Security and DRM test suite. This sees new features such as:
- Support for generating configurable A/300 Certification Statements
- Required feature tags now displayed on the Plan screen alongside each test.
- Filtered test plans to only display relevant test cases based on test case required and configured device features
- Ability to add remarks or comments for each test case for inclusion in the generated test report
- Simplified view for test cases that have associated open Redmine issues
- Support for test cases that need video over HDMI rather than, or in addition to, RF e.g content recovery scenarios
- Support for test cases with a customised test duration timeout
- Support for WMAS:2019 tests.
