According to Samsung (Seoul, South Korea), Advanced-VSB (A-VSB) is a proposed open standard that enables broadcasters to transmit a mobile digital TV signal on the same frequency as they use for standard television broadcasting. The technology requires a relatively small investment by broadcasters, Samsung said, and could be available in mobile products as soon as 2008.

John Godfrey, vice president of government and public affairs at Samsung Information Systems America, a U.S. subsidiary of Samsung, said an A-VSB signal can be received in adverse conditions, such as cars traveling at a high rate of speed. To that end, the A-VSB trial being conducted here is being demonstrated on buses, he said. KVMY, a Las Vegas television station owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, is the broadcaster participating in the trial, Godfrey said.

A-VSB is an enhancement to the existing VSB digital television standard approved by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), Godfrey said. The enhancement enables mobile devices with an A-VSB tuner to receive the mobile TV signal, but does not interfere with the reception by standards digital TVs, he said.

The technology can be commercially available quickly, Godfrey said, because of a relatively low investment required on the part of broadcasters that is likely to be "in the tens of thousands" of dollars. Broadcasters do need to add a small amount of equipment to their existing towers in order to deploy mobile TV via A-VSB, Godfrey said, but do not need to invest in new towers or in new spectrum.

He said, the cost is likely to come down even more as an open market evolves around the devices, which he called "re-multiplexers," needed to deploy the technology. Eventually, it is possible that the technology could be deployed by broadcasters with a software enhancement to existing equipment, he said.

In addition to enabling mobile TV, A-VSB enables broadcasters to include multiple "turbo coded" streams along with their main stream, allowing signals to be strengthened and more clear, according to Samsung. The technology also eases synchronization of broadcast signal timing of different towers in a single frequency network, according to the company, which can improve broadcast quality with higher uniform signal strength throughout a service area.

Samsung said A-VSB technology is now being standardized in ATSC, and that an ATSC-supervised lab test was conducted last November.

The company said broadcasters can implement A-VSB technology with no impact on legacy digital TV receivers. Existing legacy receivers will ignore the added information in the signal while continuing to receive the main TV stream, according to Samsung.

Watch video from the Samsung CES press conference: