DASH and MMT and Their Applications in ATSC 3.0

[Abstract] Despite the success of MPEG⁃2 Transport Stream (TS) being used to deliver services in broadcast channels, the increase of on⁃demand viewing of multimedia content over IP with browser⁃centric media endpoints introduces a new requirement for more individualized and flexible access to content. This has resulted in alternatives to MPEG⁃2 TS. While the needs of interactive broadcast services (such as personalized advertisement or selection of audio stream with a language suitable for a specific user) grow there is an active standardization work under going for the next generation broadcasting systems. To best enable a complete system of hybrid broadcast and broadband services, Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) 3.0 has developed an enhanced broadcast transport method named Real⁃Time Object Delivery over Unidirectional Transport (ROUTE)/DASH for delivery of DASH⁃formatted content and non⁃real time (NRT) data. Additionally, for broadcasting, ATSC 3.0 has also adopted MPEG Media Transport (MMT) standard, which inherits major advantageous features of MPEG⁃2 TS and is very useful in real⁃time streaming delivery via a unidirectional delivery network.This paper mainly describes features and design considerations of ATSC 3.0, and discusses the applications of the transport protocols used for broadcasting, i.e., ROUTE/DASH and MMT, whose comparative introductions are also presented in details.

[Keywords] ATSC 3.0; ROUTE/DASH; MMT; Hybrid delivery; next⁃generation broadcasting system