Launching in conjunction with the Exhibit Floor at NAB 2011, www.openmobiledtv.org is a community based website and information portal that has been created to share information on content creation for Mobile DTV. The effort has been spearheaded by students and staff at Toronto’s Ryerson University and is built upon information and experiences the group is learning as they develop content for ATSC mobile devices.
The group was initially spearheaded by Brad Fortner of Ryerson’s Rogers Communications Centre who recruited four other Ryersonians to the project. The group is comprised of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as Ryerson staff. Two students, Tyler Pham and Gregory Kon , undergraduate students in Ryerson’s Computer Science School, took on much of the lead programming content and the “diagnosing” of how ATSC M/H transports content through an IP network. Others in the group James May, a graduate student in Communications and Culture and Ryerson staff member Many Ayromlou also joined the core group.
Initially dubbed the ATSC M/H content group at Ryerson, the group was formed based on the Ryersons experiences at NAB one year earlier. “We came to NAB in 2010 expecting to find clear methodologies in place to create interactive content for the medium,” Brad Fortner explained. “Instead we found that in practice Mobile DTV was pretty much limited to broadcasting the same standard TV content as its ATSC parent channel. The ATSC standard on which Mobile DTV is built had not been full ratified and it limited available devices to just video and sound.“
For the team the undertaking has been a “learn by doing” experience. The team kept bouncing between the ATSC Mobile DTV standard, how it works technically and content creation using the Open Mobile Alliance Rich Media Environment (OMA-RME) standard. What the group quickly discovered was that Mobile DTV lacks resources and information on how to actually create content for the medium. They concluded that this seriously handicaps the OMA-RME environment for App developers, the Maker community and digital natives. That lack of generic published information on content creation has led to the establishment of www.openmobiledtv.org.
The team went on to discover that a number of other components one would expect to be in place were not readily available. OMA-RME, which is the built on SVG Tiny 1.2, lacks a “free” fully compliant browser. The only systems available that claimed to author for the OMA standard were closed conditional access systems that were designed for mobile telephones. They cost in the tens of thousands of dollars to purchase and license on an annual basis. In addition DTV Mobile ESG and muxing hardware is designed around the broadcast transmission environment and by nature is expensive to implement. The industry lacks books and tutorials on how to apply OMA-RME in Mobile DTV and that lack of generic published information on content creation has led to the establishment of www.openmobiledtv.org.
The Ryerson group believes that by involving today’s app developers, the Maker community, digital natives and students in Colleges and Universities breakthrough applications for Mobile DTV will emerge. Free TV and hyper-local interactive content appear to be the early strengths of the Mobile DTV medium. Digital natives love free content and App developers use readily available free open source and low cost commodity hardware.
For every digital medium to date key applications and uses evolved from unexpected areas. “Who would have thought that the Visicalc spreadsheet would be the breakthrough application for home computers in the 1980’s?” Fortner asks. “Who would have thought that search engines would team with targeted advertising and who would have thought blogging limited to 140 characters would be come the worldwide phenomenon that it is today with Twitter. It’s those kinds of examples of “out of the box thinking” that Mobile DTV content will ultimately need to sustain itself. So we have to let the community in.”
Another area www.openmobiledtv.org will focus on is the development of an inexpensive transmitter system. “Beyond the obvious need for more information on how to create content for OMA-RME in Mobile DTV, the medium also lacks a low cost entry point in the form of a test transmission environment for non-broadcasters,” Fortner went on to say. “There are a number of bits and pieces out there to make it possible but muxing ATSC Mobile DTV data and the required ESG (signaling components) into the transport stream remain challenges.” Fortner concluded.
Open Mobile DTV 