An international perspective from India

5G Broadcast vs. ATSC 3.0

DTT to Mobile (DTT2M) devices

Vinosh Babu James
Director, Technical Standards, Qualcomm Intl. Inc., and Convener, 5G India Forum (5GIF)
September 1, 2023

After I posted about the Nakolos article on their 5G Broadcast trial at the MotoGP, a few industry colleagues called to ask me what is this "beauty contest" I mention in there. I explained my perspective to them, and they were amazed to see how deep the rot in the system is. I decided to write this article to preserve the essence of those conversations.

As a recap, we Indians receive TV 'content' through a variety of means that include,

1. Direct-to-home (DTH)

2. Cable TV

3. IP Tv

4. OTT

5. Terrestrial TV

Among these the terrestrial TV industry is the oldest and was flourishing in India, long before the mobile broadband industry was even born. Even when our parents were struggling to get a wireline phone to our homes (in 70s and 80s), we had a TV that received content from the single Indian broadcaster - Doordarshan (DD), until the cable TV took over viewership in the early 90s. During their days of glory, when DD was the only means of information and entertainment in India, it used to address close to about 70 million households. And with the opening up of the Indian economy in 1991, private broadcasters entered the market through satellite TV networks, distributed locally by cable television players and addressed more than 400 million households, by offering over 500 channels.

Around the year 2008 the mobile industry started to grow rapidly (3G adoption) and a certain transformation started happening with OTT consumption in India. DD also planned for modernization using the European DVB-T2 technology. But with private content players already having entrenched the TV content marketspace through satellite and cable, Indian consumers had no interest in DD's digital TV content. Today there is only a small rural population that relies on the ‘free’ content from DD (DD National, DD News and DD Kisan), and the bulk of the paying urban population has migrated to digital content available through a variety of access networks. The popularity of OTT fast tracked this by making digital content available on mobile handsets (read, smart phones). Consequently the investments DD made into DVB-T2 did not yield desired outcomes (and had to be subsequently shut down for lack of viewership).

The corresponding mobile industry grew independently, mainly with private investment in this sector. The access to (cheap) IP data, advancements, and the corresponding faster refresh cycles in smartphones, innovation around the Android and iOS ecosystems, innovation in the media industry and disruption with data distribution platforms ensured that consumers had access to quality content in a reliable manner. As of today, there are about 1.2 billion mobile phone users in India, with 600 million of them accessing services using a smart phone.

The expectations from global broadcaster (aka, requirements from a standards perspective) are to,

1. Deliver digital terrestrial TV to mobile (DTT2M) devices,

2. By reusing the existing broadcast transmit infrastructure,

3. By reusing the UHF spectrum assigned to broadcasters,

4. To support public service broadcast (free-to-air content) from Doordarshan to citizens,

5. Without subjecting to technical barriers of adoption.

It is becoming clear that if broadcasters do not modernize and will not use the UHF spectrum to get to mobiles, it will obviously be assigned to mobile cellular operation in the long-term. So, there is consensus on the need and urgency to address this opportunity. The conflict arouses when broadcasters wanted their broadcast technology built for roof-top antenna reception and receivers that are not optimized for power and battery consumption to be force fitted into mobile devices through shortcuts (read, mandates), without understanding the unique needs of the mobile industry.  

Note 1: The term Direct to Mobile (D2M) to me is a misnomer. This has been happening for years now. Indian consumers were receiving FM radio, a broadcast solution in their mobile phones which is a D2M solution. OTT data is delivered in the mobiles via the cellular networks, which is another D2M solution. Someone at some point played a mischief by calling their preferred solution as D2M with the aim of creating confusion.

Over the last two decades, the broadcast industry and broadband industry grew independently and asymmetrically. While the broadband industry evolved from 2G, 3G into 4G and now 5G, the broadcast industry grew into delivering digital content recently. While there were regional efforts into their evolution, e.g., USA did ATSC 1.0 and subsequently ATSC 3.0, Europe did DVB-T and subsequently DVB-T2, etc., such evolution happened in a siloed manner. This evolution still targeted the TV ecosystem and not necessarily custom built for mobiles. The market was addressing an opportunity of about 30 million new devices (read TVs, Set-top-boxes etc.) per year in India, each with a refresh cycle around 10+ years. The broadband industry on the other end was growing to address 1.2B devices per year, with a refresh cycle of around 3.5 years. So, the main question people need to ask is the following question: should this DTT2M opportunity be considered as,

1. A broadcast service by the broadcasters being delivered to the smart phones using a broadcast technology? or

2. A mobile service by the broadcasters being delivered to the smart phones using a mobile technology

Both these arguments are valid - after all, both these arguments and the supporting technologies were developed by great minds working on the respective fields over time.

I am interested with the economics point of view. To support this statement let us do a brief back-of-the-envelope calculation. MIB recently announced that they are going to modernize the terrestrial broadcast platform in 19-cities (typically urban, where the viewership of DD content is rapidly falling). In these 19 cities, there are about 22 high-power high-tower (HPHT) or in brief TV towers. Since mobility of devices is an additional need, these 19-cities will need another 90 low-power low-tower or in brief operator-like towers. On the other hand, these 19-cities have about 150+ million population, with about 70+ million smartphones. Now the two arguments get reduced to one question: what is the least resistance path for the DTT2M success; making changes to the 110+ towers so that it includes a mobile technology or making changes to the 70+ million smartphones to include a broadcast technology? This is indeed the elephant in the room and without addressing it, there is no path to success.

Note 2: Based on the consultation paper from TRAI on DTT from 2016, a total of 630 transmitters will be needed for the whole of India. Of these, 400 are HPHT and 230 are LPLT. These 630 transmitters will address the 1.2+ billion opportunity. So eventually the question gets reposted as between 630 transmitters and 1.2 billion smart phones, which element necessitates the change to make it the minimum resistance path?

India, like several other developing markets is also constrained by the fact that we are in an open market. The consumer is king, and he decides buying a device of his choice - typically influenced by the affordability. These aspects make the economics of the problem even more interesting.

Now moving into discussing technology, the contenders are the following:

1. The technology called ATSC 3.0 developed by the ATSC consortium, and

2. The technology called 5G Broadcast, based on mobile technology building blocks and developed by the 3GPP.

ATSC has a long history of addressing TV industry in the north American market. ATSC 3.0 technology is available since 2016, and ATSC 3.0 based deployments are available in the USA and South Korea (both operator-controlled markets - meaning operators control the mobile phone distribution channel), targeting digital TVs. The US broadband market is dominantly served by Apple and South Korea by Samsung. In the over 8 years since availability of this technology, this technology was never targeted for mobile phones in these markets because of the underlying economics. But for some unknown reason that technology is promoted as the candidate in India (a leading low-cost open market). For ATSC 3.0 to offer the DTT2M opportunity certain changes are needed in the network and devices:

1. The mobile handset will need an extra silicon (chipset), or the existing chipsets need to be modified to accommodate the new technology, both of which constitute a high barrier for handset OEM,

2. The operator network needs to be modified with an ATSC 3.0 radio connected to the operator (LPLT) infrastructure (this is yet to be standardized in 3GPP).

4G LTE was a commercial success and India now has about a billion LTE capable phones. 3GPP treated terrestrial broadcast as a vertical opportunity and developed this solution in a manner that DTT2M solutions can be offered in smartphones by reusing many of the existing technology building blocks, thereby lowering the barrier for adoption. The anticipated changes to offer the DTT2M opportunity are as follows:

1. The mobile handset designed for bi-directional traffic (both uplink and downlink) will need firmware level changes to support the downlink-only (broadcast) mode of operation, and will need to support the corresponding frequency bands,

2. The operator network will have to enable the broadcast functionality at the services layer, without impacting the RAN.

The people planning and given responsibility for modernizing within MIB seem to be behaving like conservative parents, IMO. They seem to be of the view that,

1. We are broadcasters, and we need to focus on the delivering of citizen centric services (read, DD National, DD News and DD Kisan),

2. A smartphone is just another receiver device, and we can issue a mandate that henceforth smartphones sold in India will have to have the support for TV reception,

3. Jargons like cost-benefit analysis, or ecosystem involvement are modern day concepts, and we are not supposed to get bogged down by it.

In summary, they seem to be determined that their role is to pick the best-in-class technology (picking a favorite through a non-transparent beauty contest) for terrestrial broadcast (i.e., of the 630 towers), and not worry about the delivery mechanism or its successful adoption into smartphones (i.e., 1.2 billion smart phones). While I sympathize with their constrained world view, this is a colossal national waste - specifically after this approach was seen to backfire with the Indian DVB-T2 deployments, attributed to the lack of devices ecosystem.

Their approach of mandating something on smartphones is very interesting to me. Not because this challenges the status quo, but because this has happened at least once before. I am referring to NavIC (Indian GPS) support in smartphones. Even after almost a decade of NavIC introduction, this is not the popular mode in smartphones - not because there is no willingness from the industry, but because there is no magic wand to make it available in open-market devices without pinching the consumers.

ATSC 3.0 is a broadcast technology evolution, developed by terrestrial broadcasters for the terrestrial TV market. And the 5GB technology is just the application of a general-purpose technology from 3GPP to the terrestrial TV opportunity. It is a no-brainer that a custom-built technology like ATSC 3.0 will have better performance for reception on a TV. But that is not how the business viability is to be measured for offering DTT2M services. The support is to be built in standards and then in products for convergence at the mobile network core, followed by the willingness/commitment/ability to develop an ecosystem of open-market devices. The success will eventually be decided based on which technology has a lower barrier for adoption into mobile formfactor devices (read smartphones and tablets). The mobile ecosystem is robust enough to determine the natural outcome.

Note 3: the last question asked to me was the following; if you were in their shoes, how would you have handled it? As I mentioned earlier, the success of this technology adoption will be decided by the ability to get the service into mobile formfactor devices. So, the answer to this is very simple – I would have done a cost-benefit analysis on the introduction of a new technology. I would have involved the handset OEMs into the discussion, created a trial plan and asked the contenting technology proponents to deploy a trial network (in one or more of the 100+ transmitter points available) and demonstrate DTT2M service delivery using mobile form factor devices. The OEM’s can then be asked to provide their assessment on potential barriers to the adoption of these technology into smartphones. It would be giving a clearer picture on the business viability of offering DTT2M services, and which technology is better suited for that purpose. This mandate MIB considers it will impose on the mobile ecosystem is not going to get them anywhere, IMO 😊

#5gb Ministry Of Information & Broadcasting Prasar Bharati Doordarshan Kendra Telecom Regulatory Authority of India(TRAI) Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology Department of Telecommunications ( DOT )

Global note: Thanks for reading my article. These are intended to be used as educational tools covering technology aspects in cellular telecommunications. I will cover topics of standardization happening at global bodies, and relate their reference to India. Views expressed in here are that of my own!