As service providers look at different alternatives for producing and interchanging NGA, a key factor is the use of open standards. Another important aspect when planning for the transition to NGA is the strategy for station infrastructure: to what extent will existing infrastructure be re-used, and how much is being renewed e.g., as part of a new UHD workflow.
Over the last few years, standards have been created for both the metadata to describe NGA experiences and the containers to transport the audio essence along with this metadata. In this article we will provide a summary of the challenges ahead, the status of the underlying open standards, and examples of concrete end-to-end live workflows based on Dolby technology that have been used in trials and events. These examples will illustrate that there are different ways to transition to NGA dependent upon the selected infrastructure strategy.
This article is co-written by a group of authors from Dolby, TVP, ATEME, SRF and France Télévisions. Please note that the list of Dolby authors was adjusted in late December and the article was edited to reflect this. No other changes were made.
Key words: NGA, Immersive audio, Personalization, ADM, S-ADM, AC-4, E-AC-3, Dynamic metadata.
Published by the European Broadcasting Union, Geneva, Switzerland. ISSN: 1609-1469. Editor-in-Chief: Patrick Wauthier. Responsibility for views expressed in this article rests solely with the author(s).
