TORONTO — Humber College in Toronto announced last week it will establish what it calls the first “ATSC 3.0 Living Lab” in Canada thanks to a total of $3 million in grants from the federally funded Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).
ATSC 3.0 is the next-generation IP-based global television broadcast standard set to replace the current North American standard, ATSC 1.0, explains Humber College’s press release.
(We first wrote about the ATSC 3.0 standard in February 2020.)
With the help of $2 million from NSERC over five years and $1 million from CFI, a new Humber Broadcast-Broadband Convergence (B2C) Lab will support multisectoral applied research opportunities using the ATSC 3.0 standard. Humber College is contributing $500,000 to the project.
“This new standard operates as a ‘one-to-many’ internet delivery system integrating with web portals and apps offering new forms of interactivity in a new hybrid TV environment. The ‘over the air’ television signal can be divided into multiple IP streams that can now carry a variety of television and non-television (data) services simultaneously to both businesses and consumers,” reads Humber’s press release.
The ATSC 3.0 standard “offers greater accessibility, higher audio and video image quality and more robust and extended reception on both fixed and mobile devices,” says the release.
The B2C Lab will be located in Humber’s Barrett Centre for Technology Innovation (pictured) at the college’s North Campus and will be operational in fall 2021.
The grant funding will also allow Humber to:
- Provide four industry workshops per year for each of the five years
- Embed curriculum related to ATSC 3.0 in each of its faculties
- Employ more than 150 students from across various programs over the five-year grant period
- Foster partnerships with the private sector to test their use cases for ATSC 3.0, leading to business and community innovation at the local, regional and national levels
“With ATSC 3.0, the way we experience television and receive streamed content including news, sports and emergency alerts or data in our connected vehicles could soon be revolutionized” said Orest Sushko, director of Humber College’s B2C Lab, in the press release.
“Humber’s new lab is uniquely positioned to develop novel ATSC 3.0 applications that also converge with other global IP data delivery networks including 5G. Working with a portfolio of partners across multiple industry sectors will enhance the experience for Humber students in pioneering innovation in broadcasting and datacasting solutions.”
Image borrowed from Humber College’s Twitter account.
