- Dolby Atmos audio will be streamed live for free for the first time
- A Mexican broadcaster will be the first to offer this technology
- It will use ATSC 1.0 rather than 3.0 / NextGen TV
Something exciting is happening in Mexico for home theater fans. Dolby Laboratories and broadcaster TV Azteca have joined forces to bring Dolby Atmos to free TV – not streaming – and they do it via the widely available ATSC 1.0 standard.
This is important because even though the current standard in the US and Mexico for 4K TV streaming is NextGen TV, aka ATSC 3.0, support for version 3.0 is still quite spotty.
ATSC 1.0 achieves 1080p HD visual resolution, but it’s been around since 1996, so it’s much more widely supported than the most recent version – and ATSC 3.0 devices are backwards compatible. This means that Dolby Atmos over ATSC 1.0 should be available to many people in the future, assuming it takes off.
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For now, this project is only happening in Mexico, but it opens up exciting possibilities elsewhere — and it suggests that there’s still plenty of life in the free-to-air model, even in the age of streaming subscriptions.
What does Dolby Atmos do over ATSC?
According to Pankaj Kedia, vice president of the Americas and commercial partnerships at Dolby Laboratories, Atmos will be particularly tempting for sporting events. “Imagine watching a game from your living room and hearing where every cheer in the stands is coming from, the sound of the ball and the voice of the commentator moving around you. That’s what Dolby Atmos is making possible today in Mexico.”
This is obviously nothing new for sports if you want a more premium cable or streaming service, but many people haven’t had access to it. Even if I’m not 100% sure I want the comment to “move” around me…
TV Azteca technical director Pedro Manuel Carmona Ortiz says the collaboration is a “technological milestone… We are working with Dolby to demonstrate that innovation in audio can transform free television.”
This innovation could also be used by broadcasters in other territories. ATSC 1.0 is widely used in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and its planned replacement with ATSC 3.0 has been repeatedly pushed back.
Current proposals in the United States suggest removing ATSC 1.0 from 2028 to 2030, but they rely on broadcasters doing so voluntarily. Earlier this year, American Public Television Stations (APTS) and PBS wrote to the FCC asking the regulator not to set a firm date to end ATSC 1.0 broadcasting; other broadcasters are urging the FCC to do just that to boost adoption of ATSC 3.0.
On top of that, ATSC 3.0 is still hit or miss, even on the best TVs. LG has actually stopped including ATSC 3.0, while Samsung has also stopped (having only included them in limited models in the past).
Improving a 30-year-old broadcast standard may seem strange when most of the hype over free TV has focused on streaming rather than broadcast TV thanks to the rapid growth of free TV services such as Roku, Google TV and, in the UK, Freely.
But internet speeds and service have never reached the reliability of live streams in many regions, so getting an immersive audio upgrade, regardless of your connection options, is a win for everyone.
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