Methodology reduces Digital TV signal transmission costs
This year, the TV Brasil from Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC), the country's open public television network, will adapt to a new transmission model that allows for high definition images and audio and greater interactivity with the public: the digital TV signal. In this process, EBC will rely on technology developed at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and licensed with support from Inova Unicamp Innovation Agency for the company Anywave Communication Technologies.
Through your sales representative, Phase, the binational company based in the United States and China, won the bidding to provide digital signal transmitters to EBC with the Unicamp algorithm. One of the advantages of the technology licensed without exclusivity to the company is the possibility of incorporating the function of compressing and decompressing data sent to satellites into signal transmitters. This way, broadcasters will be able to occupy less bandwidth without a drop in content quality, as explained by one of the technology's inventors, Cristiano Akamine, former Unicamp student and coordinator of the Digital TV Laboratory at Mackenzie Presbyterian University.
According to him, one of the problems for the popularization of the digital TV signal in Brazil is the cost of distribution to broadcasters. This is because it is necessary to use some MHz of bandwidth in the transponder of a satellite that will distribute the signal to all transmitters in the national territory. Because they are high definition signals, they take up more bandwidth and cost more. Faced with this problem, in his doctoral research at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the State University of Campinas (FEEC) under the guidance of professor Yuzo Iano, the inventor collaborated with a group with the methodology development signal remultiplexing:
“One way to reduce these costs is by compressing the data before sending it to the satellite. The satellite dishes that receive the signals will decompress the data before sending it to digital TV transmitters, in a similar way to what happens in computer files, with the ZIP and RAR formats. Our methodology does this, but exclusively for the transmission of digital TV signals in the model used in Brazil”, explains Akamine.
Despite being introduced in Brazil 15 years ago, digital TV still does not reach the entire country. According to data from the Ministry of Communications (MCom), released at the launch of the program Digitize Brazil Last year, more than 4 thousand Brazilian municipalities had not completed the migration to digital signal. Of these, 1.638 only maintain transmission via analog signal.
MCom's goal is to bring the digital TV signal to the entire Brazilian territory by December 2022. The program foresees the offer of kits adaptation to low-income families that do not have devices compatible with signal reception. But there is still a problem in adapting some broadcasters that use analogue transmission to adopt the digital signal. Unicamp's technology could be an appropriate solution when associated with transmitters provided by licensed companies.
Expansion of digital signal in the Brazilian market
The Brazilian Digital Terrestrial Television System is a modified version of the Japanese standard Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting – Terrestrial (ISDB-T). Named ISDB-TB, This system was also adopted by other countries in Latin America and Africa. The Brazilian market, however, has a particularity to which transmitter manufacturers had to adapt: the need to enable decompression to open the digital TV signal sent. This is what Sérgio Abramoff, regional director of Anywave Communication Technologies, which licensed the data decompression technology from Unicamp.
“We have already had to adapt the transmitter because of the standard used in Brazil, which is different from those used in the United States and China. But there is also a need for the acquired transmitters to decompress the data that some Brazilian broadcasters compress, as it is cheaper to use satellite, which is not common in other countries we serve”.
According to Abramoff, the licensed company has a strong presence in Research and Development (R&D) projects in the United States and China. But to solve the Brazilian market's demand, it was more advantageous to license Unicamp's technology. There are several ways to encode the signal to compress the data and, if the broadcaster used a data compression key, it is necessary to use the same key for decompression. The difference between the Unicamp algorithm and other methods is that it is a “universal key”, that is, it allows the signal to be opened regardless of the way the data was compressed.
“By choosing to license this patent from Unicamp, we are optimizing a technology that is already mature. It is an already tested algorithm, and it works well for all compression standards used in Brazil. This saved Anywave time and financial resources, as there was no need to develop its own algorithm to meet a demand on transmitters coming from some broadcasters that already compress data to minimize costs”, explains Abramoff.
The patent for the methodology has already been granted by the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) to Unicamp, with support from Inova Unicamp Innovation Agency, the body responsible for non-exclusive licensing of technology to interested companies. To learn about this Unicamp method and other solutions, access the Unicamp Technology Portfolio.
INVENTORS AWARD 2022
INVENTORS AWARDED IN THIS LICENSING:
Prof. Yuzo Iano (FEEC Unicamp), Fernando Silvestre da Silva, Ana Lúcia Mendes Cruz Silvestre da Silva and Cristiano Akamine were awarded in the Licensed Intellectual Property category at the Inventores 2022 Awards.
TRIBUTES PROGRAMMING
This article is part of the series of reports produced by Inova Unicamp on licensed technologies. They can be read by Inova website and also in format eBook (only in Dutch at the moment) na Inventors Award Magazine, scheduled for release in June. A webinar with content on intellectual property and technology transfer is also scheduled for June 08th, with Registration open to the general public.
Check out all the winners on Unicamp Inventors Award website.
The 2022 Inventors Award sponsors are: Pulse Hub, ClarkeModet, 3M, and Neger Telecom
