LAS VEGAS — The company that owns Dielectric and has played a significant role in the voluntary deployment of ATSC 3.0, empowering NEXTGEN TV and the nascent broadcast internet business, is offering to all across the broadcast industry an open-sourced version of its Broadcast App as “a common baseline for hybrid TV.”
Sinclair Broadcast Group made the announcement ahead of the 2022 NAB Show, presently underway at the Las Vegas Convention Center and at various satellite locales across the Las Vegas Strip.
Sinclair notes that merging over-the-air and Internet-delivered programming is a capability built in to the NextGen Broadcast standard. Enabling that feature is the Broadcast App.
“Viewers today are agnostic on how they receive TV programs so long as the quality is equivalent between providers,” Sinclair explains. “Understanding that broadcast and broadband services can be merged to provide the best of over-the-air and Internet-delivered content is a key factor in the new delivery ecosystem. That interactive technology allows viewers to choose content regardless of how it gets to their screens.”
The Sinclair Broadcast App has been under development for several years and is being refined for both fixed and mobile services. The App maximizes screen space for programming and ancillary services like weather, alternate programming and advertising. Providing similar viewer interactive options to those found on other programming websites, the Broadcast App permits the viewer to control which services to watch no matter the source, Sinclair says.
“To afford maximum flexibility and permit its rapid evolution, the Sinclair Broadcast App is being offered for free via an MIT Open-Source license to all programmers in the ecosystem,” Sinclair notes. “Broadcasters will be able to deploy the open-source broadcast app on a standalone basis or, to maximize potential, extend the capabilities with a connected platform. This platform can be developed by the broadcaster or in partnership with Sinclair.
The link to the code repository for the open-source Broadcast App is here: https://github.com/openBA-NextGenTV