Think about how we consume television now. In our house, cable is simply the pipe that delivers high-speed internet, and content arrives via a combination of over-the-air antenna and a handful of streaming services. We rely on smart devices to locate and play what we watch because we no longer know when it airs. Into this world of distributed, multisourced content our nextgeneration television delivery system is being born, a world where broadcast runs the risk of becoming an afterthought, at least until the internet service goes down.
Both the promise and challenge of ATSC 3.0 is to merge broadcasting into this internet- centric media landscape and, in the process, deliver high-quality content with properly delivered mixes to every device. Accomplishing this requires changing virtually every technology currently in use that delivers television to the home and brings with it new structure and expanded metadata.
Information about the audio elements of ATSC 3.0 can be found in three documents that make up the finalized ATSC A/342 standard. Part one covers the elements common to all Next Generation Audio systems, part two specifies AC-4, and MPEG-H is detailed in part three. These documents contain virtually all the currently available information regarding what audio engineers will be dealing with in ATSC 3.0. In this column, we'll look at the structure of the common elements as they relate to AC-4, some of the new metadata parameters, and briefly touch on a few things that remain unanswered.
Fig. 1: In the Next-Generation Audio world, the ATSC A/342 standard treats audio as data.
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Think about how we consume television now. In our house, cable is simply the pipe that delivers high-speed internet, and content arrives via a combination of over-the-air antenna and a handful of streaming services. We rely on smart devices to locate and play what we watch because we no longer know when it airs. Into this world of distributed, multisourced content our nextgeneration television delivery system is being born, a world where broadcast runs the risk of becoming an afterthought, at least until the internet service goes down.
