NextGen TV: Fox Television Stations Tap Synamedia for Orlando ATSC 3.0 Rollout

Orlando, Florida
(Image credit: Orlando, Florida)

ATLANTA and LONDON—Synamedia has announced that the Fox Television Stations chose its technology solutions to support the rollout of its ATSC 3.0 deployment in the Orlando, Florida market. 

NextGen TV broadcasts were launched in Orlando on July 1

Together with partner Triveni Digital, Synamedia is helping enable Fox stations to launch new and better services, and generate new sources of revenue as business models evolve, Synamedia reported. 

In Orlando, the Fox owned and operated station WRBW serves as the ATSC 3.0 lighthouse to host infrastructure from other participating stations as part of the ATSC 3.0 lighthouse model.

Fox is using Synamedia's ATSC 3.0 Broadcast Solution, featuring its virtual Digital Content Manager (virtualized DCM) which provides MPEG-2, H.264 and HEVC encoding, transcoding, statistical multiplexing, splicing, advertisement insertion capabilities and other capabilities from ingest to playout.

"The rollout at our Orlando lighthouse station has gone very well, in large part thanks to Synamedia's proactive help and support," said Jeff Roberts, VP Engineering for WOFL and WRBW, FOX Television Stations. "We are quite happy with selecting Synamedia for this project."

Fox is also using Synamedia's Media Edge Gateway ATSC 3.0 Receiver which delivers professional, broadcast quality signal reception for monitoring and acceptance testing of ATSC 3.0 signals. 

The end-to-end workflow is complemented with Triveni Digital providing their GuideBuilder XM Transport Encoder for ROUTE/MMTP encapsulation, signaling and EPG generation. The Broadcast Gateway is utilized for final transmission signal preparation.

Synamedia and Triveni Digital are managing incoming streams at the lighthouse station to help ensure that the delivery of high quality content, such as a live sports event in 4K, will not disrupt the overall market's bandwidth usage. Synamedia's 24/7/365 support will monitor the overall workflows from its Technical Assistance Center (TAC) in Atlanta.

"This is an exciting time for our industry as the possibilities of ATSC 3.0 and NextGen TV are becoming a reality," said Julien Signès, general manager and senior vice president Video Network, Synamedia. "Synamedia brings a unique approach to advanced video capabilities through our VIVID Compression platform, particularly with our state-of-the-art statistical multiplexing solution, the result of more than 20 years of research. With such levels of precision, broadcasters can be assured that the right amount of bandwidth is assigned, frame by frame, to deliver equal and great quality at every point in the viewing experience. Fox would accept nothing less, and we're thrilled to support their efforts to bring it to market."

George Winslow

George Winslow is the senior content producer for TV Tech. He has written about the television, media and technology industries for nearly 30 years for such publications as Broadcasting & Cable, Multichannel News and TV Tech. Over the years, he has edited a number of magazines, including Multichannel News International and World Screen, and moderated panels at such major industry events as NAB and MIP TV. He has published two books and dozens of encyclopedia articles on such subjects as the media, New York City history and economics.