The Brazilian terrestrial digital TV standards body, the Brazilian Terrestrial Digital TV System Forum (SBTVD Forum), has adopted several technologies of the North American standards body ATSC for its next-generation TDT standard.

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The ATSC praised the decision of the SBTVD Forum to recommend to the Brazilian government several technologies proposed by it for the standard of digital terrestrial television in brazil.

The ATSC 3.0 standard set is being implemented in South Korea and the U.S. and will also be adopted by Jamaica.

Brazil’s current digital terrestrial standard, SBTVD-T, is a variant of the Japanese ISDB-T standard and is widely adopted, with some variants, in South and Central America, with the exception of the DVB-T territories Colombia, Panama, Suriname, and French Guiana.

The recommendations of the SBTVD Forum come after calls for proposals and subsequent tests and evaluations carried out by the Forum after the start of the TV 3.0 Project in July 2020.

So far, the Forum has selected five technologies proposed by ATSC for the transmission and broadband components of the TV 3.0 system: ROUTE/DASH transport; MPEG-H audio; IMSC1 subtitles; HDR10 High Dynamic Range EOTF Video (with optional dynamic HDR metadata based on SMPTE ST 2094-10 and SMPTE ST 2094-40); and advanced EMERGENCY ALERTS ATSC 3.0.

ATSC has also proposed a number of other technologies for the broadband component of TV 3.0: H.265/HEVC video base layer encoding, optional high dynamic range EOTF HLG video, optional SL-HDR1 high dynamic range delivery, and optional AC-4 audio. – but no decisions have yet been taken in this regard.

Brazil plans to start implementing its 3.0 TV system in 2024. Testing and evaluations will continue in 2022-23 in the over-the-air physical layer and in parts of the (interactive) application coding elements of the system. ATSC‘s proposals for the ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer and ATSC 3.0 Interactive Content systems are among those that will be evaluated later.

“ATSC congratulates the SBTVD Forum for its very well-organized process of development of the 3.0 TV system in Brazil. Over the past decade, ATSC members have developed the ATSC 3.0 system and I am very proud that, after rigorous testing and evaluation in Brazil, many elements of the ATSC’s state-of-the-art terrestrial transmission system have been selected. The ATSC is ready to support the SBTVD Forum, as it applies these technologies to the unique needs of Brazil,” said ATSC President Madeleine Noland.

Noland highlighted the work of the ATSC IT-4 Brazil implementation team.

“IT-4 members have been diligently supporting ATSC technologies throughout the process and will continue their efforts in the next phases of the SBTVD evaluation process,” he said.

Skip Pizzi, President of the ATSC Implementation Team in Brazil, said, “The Implementation Team is a collaborative effort of 15 ATSC member companies and others, and we are very pleased with the decisions of the SBTVD Forum to adopt so many technologies proposed by the ATSC. We congratulate the Forum for its progress and look forward to our continued collaboration in the next phase of tv 3.0 development.”