It's getting a little crowded on that dial: KCET and KLCS are planning to share channel space [to free up airwaves for wireless broadband]. The two public TV stations announced Wednesday that they had begun a partnership to split a single over-the-air broadcast television channel, even as their business and programming operations will remain separate.
Viewers will most likely not notice any difference, because advanced technologies have allowed broadcasters to compress more data into their available channel space than in the past. The remaining bandwidth would be available for a spectrum auction that the Federal Communications Commission plans to hold in 2015. That could mean big money for the stations.
The FCC is facing opposition to the auction plan from the National Association of Broadcasters, which has filed a lawsuit against it in Washington, D.C., complaining that many TV stations would end up with reduced coverage areas during the repackaging, or as a result of being assigned to new broadcast channels.
KLCS was running four standard-definition channels; KCET had one 720p HD channel and three standard-definition channels. By using the latest MPEG-2 encoding technology with statistical multiplexing, the bandwidth can be assigned to the program stream needing it most. Extra bandwidth is often needed during transitions from scene to scene, but if the programming on the eight subchannels is different they shouldn't have a problem giving up bandwidth to the program needing it the most.
KCET currently transmits on UHF Channel 28 with an ERP of 220 kW. KLCS transmits on UHF Channel 41 and has an ERP of 1,000 kW. The station's announcement didn't say which one will give up their channel.
KCET's channel 28 is seems most likely to continue operating, as it has an extensive network of repeaters. But that could also make it the most valuable asset to auction off.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 14 2014, @06:24AM
Call letters: K == west of the Mississippi (typically)
CET == Childrens' Educational Television (even before PBS/Public Broadcasting System)
LCS == Los Angeles County Schools
KCET was once the major PBS affiliate in SoCal.
A few years back, not agreeing with cost structures and other network politics, they gave up that affiliation and went independent.
KOCE in Orange County assumed their former status.
KLCS and KCET have serious overlap in their programming content.
Having all of these channels was only an advantage to folks who watched things in real time and had scheduling conflicts.
IIRC, all of these have their transmitters on the same giant mountain and have basically the same service area.
Anyone with a video recorder probably wouldn't notice if 1 of them went dark (excepting broadcasts of school board meetings).
N.B. I stopped consuming TeeVee before any of the changes happened.
I only got wind of these dramatics via the 'Net.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by takyon on Sunday September 14 2014, @06:27AM
Thanks. Mod parent informative.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by mendax on Sunday September 14 2014, @07:52AM
It's been a while since I lived in the LA area but I am familiar with the public TV situation there. The Los Angeles area has four public television stations. Three of them are mentioned above. The fourth is KVCR, channel 24 out of San Bernardino. In the analog days, most people could not receive all four stations clearly. But digital television changed all that. My parents' analog TV (with digital set top box) in their upstairs guest room gets all of them and they're crystal clear. Losing one station won't be missed by many.
Incidentally, KLCS I think belongs to the Los Angeles Unified School District, the school district for the city, not the county. That's a good thing because, at least when I lived there, they never held those annoying pledge breaks beg-athons.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Sunday September 14 2014, @08:53AM
Actually, most areas of greater Los Angeles can get KPBS (from San Diego), too, if (like KVCR) their antenna is aimed in the right direction.
That has changed in the past couple years. I don't know if they're doing it as much as other PBS stations, but they do weeks of pledge drives, now. I guess the city cut their funding. But as it does not even carry the full PBS schedule (missing Frontline, American Experience, Secrets of the Dead, and more), who's really going to donate to them, when KOCE is practically next-door?
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 3, Informative) by evilviper on Sunday September 14 2014, @06:24AM
"An association of European telecom operators has requested that the European Commission examine the UHF spectrum above 470 MHz with an eye toward re-allocating large swaths of it for telecom (i.e., cellular) operations."
“To close the gap with North America and Asia, we believe it is essential that member states have flexibility to move sooner, preferably between 2018 and 2020 and potentially earlier, to respond to the sustained growth in mobile data traffic and the dramatic change in the way citizens across Europe are watching news and entertainment content, relying more and more on the Internet to access programming.”
http://www.tvtechnology.com/regulatory/0113/gsma-calls-on-the-european-commission-to-adopt-vision-for--uhf-spectrum/272146 [tvtechnology.com]
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 14 2014, @07:43AM
So this is pretty cool and I am wondering why it wasn't done sooner. Just to summarzie, the traditional way HDTV subchannels have worked was to divide up the 20mbps of bandwidth in fixed percentage - so for example channel 41.1 might be 1080i and get 10mbps while 41.2, 41.3 and 41.4 are all just 480p (or 480i) and each gets 3.3Mbps. Those allocations would never change, regardless of the content.
These guys are dynamically allocating 20mbps as needed. That says to me that they are doing an mpeg2 encode of all channels in real-time. I have my doubts as to that being good enough for 8 channels but the dynamic allocation itself is pretty cool.
It would be nice if HDTV broadcast standards in the US got revved to support h.265, we are stuck at mpeg2 while europe has both mpeg2 and h.264.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by evilviper on Sunday September 14 2014, @08:40AM
Another broadcaster in the area, KSCI, has been transmitting 9-10 SD 480i channels on their transmitter for quite a few years now, at very good quality.
KLCS' previous testing did show good results in even more extreme configurations:
http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/channel-sharing-found-feasible-limited/269662 [tvtechnology.com]
Newer audio and video codecs don't exist to improve high quality content at high bit-rates. The earliest codecs (MPEG-1 Layer II audio and MPEG-2 video) did that so well, that there's no need for new ones, just incremental improvements in the encoders. Instead, newer codecs were all developed for very low bit-rate applications, where you don't care that the output isn't identical to the input, but instead just care that the artifacts aren't obvious and distracting, while you can crank the bit-rate way, way down.
MPEG-2 gets extremely good compression, and gets close to the theoretical limits of (imperceptible) lossy compression. All the advanced techniques they threw into H.264, with the dramatic increase in computational complexity, and yet at broadcast TV bit-rates only delivers "10 to15 percent greater efficiency". [tvtechnology.com] IMHO, that's not nearly enough benefit to justify throwing out billions of dollars worth of consumer electronics, like we did for the digital switch-over. Instead, I expect ATSC will be with us in its current form for half a century, like NTSC was before it.
Only those who have a cut of the H.264 licensing pie really want us to switch. Meanwhile patents on MPEG-2 are expiring left and right, and will be basically out of patent protection in a couple years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-2#Patents_.28U.S._only.29 [wikipedia.org]
Hell, if you want to going for something that can be more efficient, why not Google's VP9, getting all the advantages, and still being royalty free? US TVs are easily a big enough market to drive economies of scale for VP9 decoder chips, so there's little benefit to going for a more traditional standard, with massive patent royalties due for the next 20 years.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 14 2014, @09:32AM
Another broadcaster in the area, KSCI, has been transmitting 9-10 SD 480i channels on their transmitter for quite a few years now, at very good quality.
480i is a lot easier when you don't have to share your 20mbps with a 1080i stream.
yet at broadcast TV bit-rates only delivers "10 to15 percent greater efficiency".
h.264 is not h.265 It would be stupid to switch to h.264 since h.265 is already defined. Which is why I did not suggest that.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Sunday September 14 2014, @10:08AM
Neither broadcaster currently has a 1080i stream.
H.265 won't do any better, for all the reasons I explained. And you didn't give any reason not to go with VP9.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Sunday September 14 2014, @11:23AM
Instead, newer codecs were all developed for very low bit-rate applications, where you don't care that the output isn't identical to the input, but instead just care that the artifacts aren't obvious and distracting, while you can crank the bit-rate way, way down
I'm being nitpicky, but that's maybe a tiny-wee-bit misleading; MPEG2 is a lossy codec where the "output isn't identical to the input" as well, it's just that the newer codecs tend to deliver better _subjective_ quality at extremely low bit rates, and the sad fact is that most broadcast video is compressing to the lowest bit rate it can, despite some truly shocking video artefacts. (Like I said - nitpicky, I know what you meant, but it could be read wrongly).
VP9 (or maybe VP8) might be the future if it stays royalty free, although with the patent landscape being what it is I wouldn't necessarily want to bet the farm on that, and flexible/resizable macroblocks and a not-quite-so-insane VLC scheme extension onto MPEG2 would get you a long way toward the advantages of newer codecs - it'd be interesting to see how an out of patent and extended MPEG2 compares there.