In-band mobile digital TV transmission technology for advanced television systems committee

Mobile DTV is one of the exciting emerging technologies in the fast expanding digital television market. Mobile DTV has the opportunity to change the long-standing axiom of “one TV per household” to “ one TV per person.” Multiple mobile DTV standards have been developed around the world. For example, Korea launched two digital mobile DTV services in 2005, one for terrestrial (T-DMB) and the other for satellite (S-DMB) broadcasting. In Japan, ISDB-T was adopted in 2003 for both HDTV as well as in-band mobile DTV DVB-H, developed for European mobile DTV market, has been slowly deployed in select markets. While the rest of world has been busy exploiting markets for mobile DTV, North America, one of the biggest DTV markets in the world, has been relatively quiet. MediaFLO, which was mainly developed by Qualcomm, was launched in early 2007 and is still at its early stage. Recently, Advanced Television Systems Committee, which is responsible for the digital television transmission standard for North America, and for some other countries in the world, decide to join the bandwagon of the mobile DTV In this paper, we explain what approach ATSC decides to take for mobile DTV, and how this exciting approach could benefit the constituencies of the digital TV market, equipment manufacturers, broadcasters, and consumers.