Delivery of ATSC 3.0 Services With MPEG Media Transport Standard Considering Redistribution in MPEG-2 TS Format

Abstract

MPEG-2 transport stream (TS), standardized by the ISO/IEC as part of the well-known MPEG-2 standards family, is the most widely deployed standard for multimedia services in traditional broadcast industry, such as ATSC and DVB-T. MPEG standards have been designed to specify essential features for multimedia broadcast applications, such as the structure of multimedia content composed of multiple audio-visual streams and temporal relationships among those streams. One of the new MPEG standards that was recently developed and published, namely MPEG media transport (MMT), has catered for the emerging convergence of digital broadcasting and the Internet. MMT inherits major advantageous features of MPEG-2 TS and adds advanced and innovative features to support broadcast services in the new converged environment. IP-based broadcast standards, e.g., ATSC 3.0, has gained significant attention by the broadcast industries as IP-based broadcast provides more flexible and enriched multimedia broadcast services to users. The ATSC 3.0 has adopted MMT as its one of media delivery technology to strengthen hybrid delivery of multimedia services which could be consumed on multiple devices simultaneously. This paper discusses the use of MMT in ATSC 3.0 service delivery. Important features of MMT will be described together with their restrictions and extensions that are needed to enable efficient delivery of ATSC 3.0 services.