WASHINGTON—The future of high resolution is now for Korea, as the country’s broadcasters recently launched a terrestrial UHD television service, the first nation to do so. To congratulate the country on its accomplishment, NAB CEO Gordon Smith, EVP/CTO Sam Matheny, SVP Technology Lynn Claudy and VP of Technology, Education and Outreach Skip Pizzi made the trip to Seoul for the two-day Global UHD Conference that commemorated the launch.
In addition to the UHD terrestrial service, Korea has begun regular broadcasts of the ATSC 3.0 standard. As the U.S. is currently working on ATSC 3.0 itself, Pizzi said that it was beneficial to see the next generation standard in action. Currently multiple Korean broadcasters are delivering ATSC 3.0 services and off-the-shelf consumer displays are able to receive the signal off the air. The NAB quartet took some time on their trip to visit with broadcasters who are in the process of converting to and testing UHD over ATSC 3.0.
Korea previously announced that it plans to broadcast the 2018 Winter Olympic in Pyeongchang in 4K over ATSC 3.0. “We saw a lot of detail on implementation (both on the conference’s exhibit floor and at broadcast facilities we toured), and got a visceral sense of the enormous range of possibilities that ATSC 3.0 offers by observing the wide variety of modes that Korean broadcasters are currently testing in the lab and field,” Pizzi told TV Technology.
Additional information gleaned from the trip was the plan for Korean broadcasters to soon begin creating national and regional single frequency networks (SFNs); the eventual shutdown of HD over ATSC 1.0 services; and the possibility of migrating from T-DMB for mobile TV to ATSC 3.0 services.
Korea will not be resting on its laurels, however. According to Pizzi, once Korea is fully up and running as a terrestrial UHD nation it will begin moving forward on providing 5G TV services.
For more on this subject, visit our ATSC 3.0 silo.
