India has over 1 billion mobile subscribers, over 200 million homes with TV.
The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and Sinclair Inc have recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for "collaboration of technology and standards development in wireless broadcast services over next generation telecom and broadcast networks."
Sinclair, a diversified media company and a leading provider of local broadcast television, in a statement said, "Research efforts will focus on enhancements to the international ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) 3.0 wireless broadcast standard for a variety of mobile, television and other fixed applications that can benefit India and the world."
The new capabilities of ATSC 3.0, they said, will advance "Broadcast-to-Everything (B2X) use cases to provide dynamic traffic management and fast interworking with 5G networks, efficient spectrum utilization, low-latency datacasting, edge content distribution and improved battery life for smartphones, featurephones, wearables and IoT devices."
How Will IIT Bombay Contribute?
IIT Bombay will also contribute directly to the B2X release standardization work under way as a member of ATSC, Sinclair said.
"B2X will help relieve network congestion, provide a high quality of service for concurrent and popular content, and promote sustainability. B2X further improves upon Direct-to-Mobile (D2M), extending broadcast into the IMT-2030 (6G) ecosystem," they added.
India has over 1 billion mobile subscribers, over 200 million homes with TV, high per-capita mobile data consumption and proliferation of news, sports and other TV and radio channels.
In the long term, Sinclair says, "B2X will drive progress in emergency and disaster management, remote education and skilling, advanced agricultural techniques, augmentation of satellite positioning and timing, vehicular communications and open AI-based applications for broadcasting and datacasting."
'Excited To Partner'
Professor Shireesh Kedare, Director of IIT Bombay, said, "We are excited to partner with Sinclair in wireless telecom transformation and promote academic excellence, joint projects, and joint intellectual property development including Make in India initiatives to drive B2X adoption in India. It touches IIT Bombay's mission to address the needs of society and country at large and develop technologies and products that improve the quality of life for both urban and rural population."
Chris Ripley, President and CEO, Sinclair, Inc, said, "We consider the collaboration work with IIT Bombay to be of the utmost importance in establishing ATSC 3.0-based B2X as the preferred technology for broadcasting and multicasting for diverse applications, not just in India, but ultimately across the globe. Sinclair is proud to have IIT Bombay reinforce our foundational role in advancing next generation broadcast."
Mark Aitken, Senior Vice President, Sinclair, Inc. and the guiding architect of the ATSC 3.0 standard, said "ATSC 3.0's high bandwidth efficiency, and time and frequency interleaving features make it undisputedly the best mobile broadcast standard. ATSC 3.0 also stands alone with its bootstrap "blanking" feature that facilitates the introduction of B2X release enhancements without disrupting the operation of earlier releases."
Madeleine Noland, President of ATSC, said, "Telecom networks focus on unicast (one-to-one) communications, while B2X adds ATSC 3.0's high performance broadcast (one-to-many) distribution aligned with mobile specifications. ATSC applauds Sinclair's and IIT Bombay's participation in B2X standards and technology development, which has the potential to revolutionize data distribution efficiency across multiple networks. IIT Bombay joins other world class academic and research institutions as ATSC's newest member."
Shashi Shekhar Vempati, former CEO Prasar Bharati, and member of the ATSC Business Advisory Council, said, "The recent decision by Brazil to adopt the ATSC 3.0 standard for broadcast services, based on extensive testing of multiple systems, paves the way for B2X to further advance the standard's broadcast resilience for the greater public good. This collaboration furthers the developmental goals of a Viksit Bharat (Developed Bharat) as envisioned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi."