ATSC 3.0 physical layer recommended for Brazil's TV 3.0 project

ATSC 3.0 Transmission Technology Unanimously Recommended As Final Ingredient For Brazil’s TV 3.0 Project

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), the Broadcast Standards Association, today announced that Brazil’s Fórum do Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital Terrestre (Fórum SBTVD) has recommended to the Brazilian government the selection of the ATSC 3.0 “physical layer” as the over-the-air transmission system for the country’s upgrade to next-generation broadcast terrestrial “TV 3.0” services. The long-awaited recommendation follows extensive testing in Brazil to meet the market demands for the country of more than 200 million people, and reaffirms the previous selection of several other ATSC technologies for the TV 3.0 system.

ATSC 3.0 suite of standards – the world’s first IP-based system that marries broadband and broadcast – is already on air in South Korea, Jamaica, and the U.S., and is coming soon to Trinidad and Tobago. Other countries are also studying the ATSC 3.0 system because of its Internet Protocol backbone, spectrum efficiency, and other advanced features.

On July 22, Brazil’s SBTVD Forum published its final Phase 3 recommendations, and forwarded them to Brazil’s Ministry of Communications, which will consider the recommendations for adoption as the country’s TV 3.0 system, including the ATSC 3.0 transmission technology.

“We are deeply gratified by the SBTVD Forum’s recommendation of the ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer for over-the-air broadcasting,” said ATSC President Madeleine Noland. “ATSC is also excited about the opportunity to work with the Forum and Brazilian stakeholders in fully documenting, developing and deploying TV 3.0 in Brazil. We have valued the opportunity to share experiences and exchange ideas with our colleagues in Brazil throughout this four-year selection process. We have learned a great deal and are looking forward to continued collaboration. And we are gearing up to showcase ATSC 3.0 at the annual SET Expo broadcast trade show in São Paulo beginning August 20,” Noland said.

“The recommendations of technologies for TV 3.0 are the result of four years of exemplary work by the SBTVD Forum in soliciting, evaluating, and carefully selecting components for TV 3.0,” added Skip Pizzi, Chair of ATSC’s Brazil Implementation Team. “We’re proud to see so many elements of ATSC 3.0—in the physical, transport, and content layers—chosen to become part of Brazil’s next-gen broadcast TV standard, and we anticipate that the TV 3.0 decisions might ultimately have regional impact beyond Brazil.”

The SBTVD Forum is a non-profit organization of private and public companies, including broadcasters, manufacturers, software developers and academia, that advises and makes recommendations to the Brazilian Ministry of Communications on digital TV technology and policy matters. Brazil’s “TV 3.0 Project,” which is the Forum’s title for the country’s next generation of digital TV, includes both over-the-air broadcast and over-the-top broadband components, including some optional technologies among the latter. The recommendations made or reaffirmed on July 22 are the result of a Call for Proposals and subsequent testing and evaluations conducted by the Forum since the start of the TV 3.0 Project in July 2020.

The last phase of this process took place from December 2023 until May 2024, as the SBTVD Forum conducted field tests with two candidate technologies for the physical layer. After a thorough evaluation, which considered all data collected since the beginning of the project in 2020, the Technical, Market and Intellectual Property Modules of the SBTVD Forum unanimously decided to recommend the ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer to the Ministry of Communications as the final technology component selection for the TV 3.0 system.

The recommendation on the ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer transmission method is in addition to five other key technologies proposed by ATSC and previously selected by the SBTVD Forum as recommendations for mandatory inclusion in both the broadcast and broadband components of the “TV 3.0” system:

• ROUTE/DASH Transport
• MPEG-H Audio
• IMSC1 Captions
• HDR10 High Dynamic Range Video (with optional dynamic HDR metadata based on SMPTE ST 2094-10 and SMPTE ST 2094-40)
• ATSC 3.0 Advanced Emergency Information

Additional technologies proposed by ATSC were previously selected for only the TV 3.0 broadband component:

• H.265/HEVC Video Base Layer Encoding
• HLG High Dynamic Range Video (optional)
• SL-HDR1 High Dynamic Range Video (optional)
• AC-4 Audio (optional)

A pronouncement from the Brazilian government on the SBTVD Forum’s TV 3.0 recommendations is expected soon. Meanwhile, ATSC has pledged its support to the SBTVD Forum for its ongoing development of TV 3.0 specifications, recommended practices and conformance documentation. Brazil’s deployment of TV 3.0 is expected to begin in 2025.