New DTV standard could emerge in three years, says Aitken

A new standard for the digital over- the-air transmission of television signals in the United States will emerge within three years, says Mark Aitken, VP of Advanced Technology of the Sinclair Broadcast Group and the chairman of the ATSC TSG/S4 specialist group responsible for Mobile DTV standardization.

For an industry that completed the transition of full-power stations to DTV in mid-2009, Aitken’s view might seem extreme. But the completion of the June 2009 transition, while fresh, doesn’t involve new technology. “The major elements of that standard — VSB, for instance — are 20 years old. Today, we are living a vision of what was possible 20 years ago,” says Aitken. Aitken envisions the deployment of a “heteronet,” or heterogeneous network in which digital television broadcasting is overlaid onto the wireless infrastructure to leverage the strength of television — one-to-many transmission of spectrum-hungry video — and that of the wireless Internet and cell networks, namely interactivity.