(Image credit: ATSC)
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Source: www.tvtechnology.com, June 2020

Report from PT5 discusses its efforts to define use cases for consumers and fleet owners

WASHINGTON, D.C.—A new report from the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) says significant progress has been made in automotive applications for ATSC 3.0 and that efforts to schedule field trials with automakers for later in 2020 are under way.

The report, the product of ATSC Planning Team 5 (PT5) on Automotive Applications, discusses the challenges and opportunities made possible by using ATSC 3.0 to deliver audio, video and data to cars and vehicle fleets.

“Next-generation broadcasting powered by ATSC 3.0 paves the way for a broad range of automotive applications that will leverage the standard’s Internet Protocol backbone, robust mobile reception and one-to-many architecture for data and video services,” said ATSC President Madeleine Noland.

PLUS: Receiving ATSC 3.0

Made up of representatives from 44 companies, PT5 has been at work since December 2018 considering how ATSC 3.0 might be used to deliver media and data as part of business-to-business and business-to-consumer automotive applications, the report said.

The group has defined and examined several 3.0 automotive use cases, including infotainment, advanced emergency alerting, data delivery, network redundancy in areas like parking garages and rural areas, a replacement for GPS and as a source of precision timing, an inherent characteristic of the standard, it said.

The ATSC 3.0 standard also holds promise for intelligent transportation systems. In these applications, the standard could be used to deliver software and firmware updates for smart road equipment and sensors; maps, telematics and emergency information for freight; and emergency information for first-responder vehicles, it said.

The report also draws attention to efforts over the past year to raise the awareness of the standard among fleet owners and automotive OEMs, including a workshop in Detroit co-hosted by ATSC, Pearl TV and WXYZ, presentations to members of the Intelligent Transportation Systems of America and a University of Michigan seminar.

Dr. Jong Kim, senior vice president, LG Electronics, and president, Zenith R&D Lab, is chairman of PT5.

More information is available on the ATSC website.