On Saturday 15 April, 6 of 10 BEIT sessions are about ATSC 3.0. It’s where the smartest TV engineers in the industry will gather. Nearly all the on-site sessions are in or near meeting rooms W219-W221. Check the NAB Show web site HERE for session details.

The Opening Session begins in room W219-W221 at 10 AM with keynote speaker SMPTE President Renard T. Jenkins and comments from Jungsu Song, VP & CEO of the Korea Radio Promotion Association (RAPA), Lynn Claudy, SVP Technology at NAB and Sam Matheny, EVP and CTO at NAB. Three “Next Gen TV Adoption” presentations moderated by Rick Ackermans, Director of RF and Transmissions Engineering at CBS Television will follow the keynote in the same room.

The “Next Gen TV Adoption” session will begin with “ATSC 3.0 and Public Broadcasting: A Case for Flash Cut,” presented by Fred Engel, CTO at PBS North Carolina, Don Smith, Director of New Technologies, Compliance and Planning also at PBS North Carolina, and Bill Hayes, DoE at Iowa PBS.

It will be followed at approximately 11:50 by “Lessons Learned from the First Next Gen Datacasting Services,” presented by John McCoskey, COO at SpectraRep. At 12:10, "ATSC 3.0 Hybrid Delivery and Virtual Channels" is scheduled to be presented by Peter Gogas, Director of Engineering at Gray Television.

At 1:30, TelevisaUnivision’s Joe Seccia will moderate sessions on “OTT / Connected TV.” Papers included in the sessions he will moderate are presentations on "Traffic Peak Management in Efficiently Designed Telco-CDN" by Gwendal Simon, Distinguished Software Architect at Synamedia. It will be followed by a presentation on “Perceptually-Aware Live VBR Encoding Scheme for Adaptive AVC Streaming,” by Christian Timmerer, Assoc.-Prof. & Chief Innovation Officer, Head of Research and Standardization at University of Klagenfurt & Bitmovin. It will be followed at approximately 2:10 with a “Ultra-low Latency OTT Delivery: The Killer Technology for Betting, Social Networking and Metaverse.” presentation by Khaled Jerbi, Advanced Research Engineer at Ateme SA.

At 3 PM, sessions in the category of “National Security Applications of ATSC 3.0,” will be moderated by Robert Weller, Vice President, Spectrum Policy at NAB. The first presentation will be "Case Study of Developing an Emission Time Stabilization Proof-of-Concept Prototype for ATSC 3.0-based Broadcast Positioning System (BPS)" by Alex Babakhanov, Director of Sales and Marketing at Avateq Corporation, Mark Corl, SVP Emergent Technology Development at Triveni Digital, Inc., and Tariq Mondal, Vice President, Advanced Technology at NAB.

It will be followed by “Delivering Traceable Reference Time to ATSC 3.0-based Broadcast Positioning System (BPS)” presented by Patrick Diamond of Diamond Consulting, and Tariq Mondal and Robert Weller of NAB. The last of Saturday’s “National Security Applications of ATSC 3.0” sessions will begin at approximately 3:40 PM with “How ATSC 3.0 Improves Public Safety and Community Security by Providing Advanced Emergency Information Services” presented by Niem Dang, Lead Solution Architect with Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Sunday and Beyond

NAB Show exhibits open Sunday at 10 AM. The first Sunday BEITC sessions also start at 10 AM with “Video Coding Techniques” sessions moderated by Rick Ackermans, Director of RF and Transmission Engineer at CBS-/Paramount. Included in these sessions are presentations on “The Success of Interactive Media Demands that we Rethink how we Develop and Measure the Effectiveness of Compression Standards” by Sean Gardner with AMD.

Gardner’s presentation will be followed by "Improving Content-Aware Encoding by Adaptation to 'True Resolution' of the Content" presented by Yuriy Reznik, VP Research & Brightcove Fellow at Brightcove, Inc. At approximately 10:40, “Configuring Versatile Video Coding: Technical Guidelines for Broadcast and Streaming Applications" will be presented by Lukasz Litwic, Research Leader at Ericsson.

“Innovation in Radio” sessions begin at 11:30 AM and will be moderated by Roswell Clark, Sr Dir of Radio Engineering at Cox Media Group. The first session is “High-power Digital FM Field Test Project,” presented by David Layer, VP Advanced Engineering at NAB. It will be followed by “HD Radio Advanced FM Service Modes: WTLP Field Test Results” presented by David Kolesar, Senior Broadcast Engineer at Hubbard Radio and Paul Peyla with Xperi Inc. Also, Liam Power, Systems Engineer with ONE media will present a “Radio Over ATSC 3.0 Proof of Concept” session.

Sunday at 1:30 in rooms W216-W218, sessions on “Media and Cloud 1” moderated by Sun Sachs, SVP Product Design, and Engineering at Townsquare Media will begin. First up is a “Case Study: How BBC Studios Leveraged the Cloud for SRT Distribution of Her Majesty the Queen’s Funeral,” presented by Paul Calleja with Global M and Dan Maloney with Matrox Video. It will be followed by “Software-only Facilities Running on an Asynchronous Framework: A Better Approach for Live Cloud Productions,” presented by Richard Cartwright with Matrox Video. “Media and Cloud 1” will conclude with “8 Factors for a Successful Studio Cloud Migration,” presented by John Davis with Wheatstone.

Also at 1:30 in adjacent rooms W219-W221, “Media Workflow” sessions begin, moderated by Winston Caldwell, VP Advanced Engineering, Fox Corp. The first presentation is “Cloud ingest processing and distribution of spots and syndicated content for the Sinclair station group,” by Mike Palmer, Sr. Dir. Media Management at Sinclair Broadcast. It will be followed by “Elastic Frame Protocol: An Open-source Alternative to MPEG-2 TS” presented by Mikael Wanggren, Innovation Product Owner, Agile Content.

Sunday at 3 PM in rooms W219-W221, “Broadcast Facility Design” sessions moderated by Brady Dreasler, Director of NextGen Technologies at Gray Television will begin. A “Unified System Design” session will be presented by Lukas Lodhner, Senior Engineering Leader at NTC, a Deloitte Business. It will be followed by “An Open Platform for Media Over IP Network Load Testing with Off-the-Shelf Hardware” paper presented by Thomas Kernen, Senior Staff Architect, NVIDIA, Pavlo Kondratenko and Ievgen Kostiukevych both with the European Broadcasting Union, and Willem Vermost, Head of Media Production Facilities with Vlaamse Radio en Televisie (VRT).

Next door at 3 PM in adjacent rooms W216-W218 sessions include a CTO Roundtable moderated by Sam Matheny EVP & CTO at NAB, with speakers Chris Pulis, CTO at Globecast Americas, and Mickaël Raulet, CTO at Ateme. The roundtable will be followed by a session on “Opportunities for Convergence among DTT Standards.”

Monday BEITC session topics include “RF Technology and Spectrum Issues” at 11:30A moderated by Joe Seccia, a “Fireside Chat with Verizon” and a Radio Panel at 1:30 as well as three “AI and Data Analytics in Media” sessions moderated by Sun Sachs with Townsquare Media at 3 PM. Tuesday session topics include “Radio Technology” at 10 AM, “Cybersecurity and Trusted Content” at 1:30, and Sustainability and 5G at 3.

2023 BEITC is going to be informative. I hope there will be sufficient time available to explore the exhibits.

The Broadcast Bridge will be at the NAB Show in the West Hall at W2976. Please come and see us, get a copy of our free book on 'Scalable Dynamic Software For Broadcasters' and share your thoughts on what we do and what you would like to see from us in the coming year.