Learn how you can implement more reliable and economical PSIP EPG data for your ATSC digital transport streams. You’ll see a live demo and learn about:
-The difference between static and dynamic PSIP
-The advantages of generating program guide info and injecting it in the same hardware
-How to do PSIP for less http://www.d2dtechnologies.com/
Webinar Transcript:
Practical PSIP for Everyday Stations
Steve:
Hello, everyone. Glad you could join us today. If you want to take advantage of Dynamic PSIP at your station and save money, edit as well, you’re in the right place.
Steve:
Today, you’ll find out about the difference between Static and Dynamic PSIP, the advantage of using the same hardware to both generate and inject Dynamic PSIP and some novel ways to do PSIP.
Steve:
We also have a short demo, so you can see just how easy it is to add PSIP to your station. We’re also going to finish with a question and answer session. So, if you have any questions along the way, go ahead and enter into the chatbox, and we’ll answer those at the end.
Steve:
I’m Steve, I’m the President of D2D Technologies, I have with us here today, Jess, and also have Fallon with us as well. She’ll be working things behind the scenes.
Steve:
Hey Jess, how are you doing?
Jess:
Great, Steve, happy to be here. Happy to talk PSIP.
Jess:
How are you doing?
Steve:
Good, doing great.
Jess:
Great.
Steve:
So, PSIP is a very important part of your station, and probably a lot of you are already familiar with PSIP, but there may be some which not too familiar with how and what makes up PSIP.
Steve:
So, I’ll just do a quick overview about PSIP. I think it started here.
Steve:
So, there’s two main types of PSIP. There’s Static PSIP and Dynamic PSIP. Static PSIP, as the name implies, is a PSIP which doesn’t change, such as your major number, your minor number, your channel name. And the tables which make that up, or your virtual channel table, which is the most important one for Static PSIP, that is where you define your major number, your minor number, your channel name, is all that is defined within the virtual channel table.
Steve:
There’s also the rating region table, the RRT, which that’s where you get all your parental guide information, whether it’s PG 13, whatever. What other things may be for the parental guide ratings.
Steve:
And also included with the Static PSIP is your system timetable. Now one thing I did want to talk about the system timetable, because we do get calls about this occasionally, is the system timetable actually uses UTC time, the Universal Time Code, or actually Coordinated Time Code. And why that’s important to address it a little bit is, so it does, that’s the basically very similar to GMT, it’s basically. Everything’s based of, what the time is over in England. And so that’s comes in handy, because when you’re broadcasting, your signal may actually be picked up in more than one time zone. So you can’t put the time zone within the time, which is being transmitted. So, what that means is, it’s the receiver, is where you actually add your timezone offset. So, in case if you have a customer is calling and say, “Hey, the time’s off, it’s not showing the correct time on my TV.” It’s most likely not your PSIP. The first thing you want to do is, have them checked to make sure they have the proper time zone set in the receiver. And that’ll usually clear up the issue.
Steve:
The other type of PSIP is Dynamic PSIP, which is basically your channel guide information and tables, which make up that or the master guide table. And that’s the table which tells the receiver, where to find all the guide information. And the guide information is made up of the event information table. And that’s the table, which tells you the “what” and the “when”.
Steve:
So, maybe, as we were just looking on the PSIP right now and showing you, right now, is Judge Brown is showing. So that’s what the EIT, which we’ll show you is, what’s playing, the program title and when it’s playing.
Steve:
And then, also along with that, is the extended text table. And what that will give you, is more detailed information about that episode. Like say, it was Oprah, it would may tell you, who’s going to be on Oprah that day, so I’m just giving you more in-depth information. So, that’s basically what makes up your PSIP, both Static and Dynamic.
Steve:
And so Jess, why is PSIP important?
Jess:
Well, Steve, you got to have a channel guide. It’s like, if you have a store, you need to have a sign out front, right? So people know what you’re selling, they know what they’re going to get.
Jess:
And so what PSIP does is, it brands your channel. And it’s important because, if you’re flipping through the channels, you might be in a commercial, but everybody always wants to know what’s on. Plus, viewers are very much used to being able to turn on a TV, thanks to cable and whatnot and knowing what’s on immediately. People want to know right away what’s on the air, and you could easily catch a lot of viewers, just by displaying your PSIP correctly. So they might be flipping through the channels, and there’ll be able to say, “Okay, I like the show.” Or they can look ahead even, because it allows you to look ahead in the guide. So, for instance, you can see what’s coming on in an hour. So for instance, you’re looking for the St. Louis Blues versus the LA Kings game. You can display that on the screen, and it’ll tell you when it’s coming on and when it’s coming up, and he can go actually all the way up to two weeks.
Jess:
So, it’s important to brand your channel properly. If you’re going to spend all that money to put the channel on the air, you might as well brand it correctly. So, PSIP is really important.
Steve:
That’s great. Yeah, sounds like, great use for a Dynamic PSIP.
Steve:
Is there any uses for Static PSIP?
Jess:
Well, absolutely because, even a Static PSIP, your short name. So, for instance, you want people even to know if they’re watching the right show or rather the right channel. So, let me share my screen here really quick, where’d you go, oops.
Jess:
If you want people to be able to know what channel they’re looking at, and in actuality, you should have your channel branded as far as the short name and Static PSIP is also your channel number, your short name.
Jess:
So for instance, if your virtual channel is 26, but you might be receiving it at 13 or whatever, what Static PSIP-
Steve:
That’s all I could feel like a translator or something?
Steve:
Yeah, you may want to-
Jess:
Exactly. So for instance in here, if you see, you’ll notice I pulled in program one, well, when people are flipping through channels, they don’t really care if it’s program one or program two, but I was able to rebrand our channels D2D TV and Just TV, just for this demo purpose.
Jess:
So, the Static PSIP up is really important. People have to know what channel you’re watching, and the FCC might like to know as well. So, it’s a good idea to have your short name in there and then also brand your channel to the proper virtual channel, because otherwise people are never ever going to find you.
Steve:
Right? Yes. And it’s really comes down to … with translators where, you’re broadcasting, maybe the original is channel 12, on one side of the mountain, you have a translator broadcasting into the other side of the mountain and now it’s channel 14. So, you’ve got to go and modify your Static PSIP to change your major number or your minor number as well.
Steve:
Another area where that comes in handy is, we do a lot with what’s SRT, where we have a secure reliable transport, for sending transport streams over the public internet. So we have people such as one of our customers, the Global Bible Network, where they have one location, they send the channel out to 20 different stations across the country. And each station, you have to change the Static PSIP, to reflect what the major, minor number and channel name is at that location.
Steve:
So, Static PSIP, it is very important as well.
Jess:
Yep, yes.
Steve:
Okay. So, we’ve talked a little bit about Static and Dynamic PSIP and what the difference is and what are some of the good uses for it.
Steve:
Another important thing to talk about with PSIP, there’s many ways to generate the PSIP and inject the PSIP.
Steve:
I’m going to talk a little about the advantage of doing the generation and injecting it, within the same hardware. So what are some of the advantages of that Jessica?
Jess:
Well, back in the day, PSIP was mostly done in through the encoder. It was done, as the transport stream is getting created, which, that was a great way to do it, but there’re some disadvantages. Number one, you need a $40,000 encoder to do it, or some other piece of gear.
Jess:
Number two, if your encoder goes down, well, everything goes off the air. So, the way that we do it is a little different. We actually do it inline downstream. So, by doing that, it actually is very beneficial for a number of reasons.
Jess:
Number one, it is, you can literally use just about any encoder, any ASI. In fact, you don’t even need an encoder. If you’re pulling this in from a remote location far away, all we need is the ASI or the SRT and then we just come into our box.
Jess:
The box calls out, the flux calls out to the FTP server. It pulls in the tables and then it adds it, maxes it in to the ASI, that’s already coming through, and it goes out to exciter.
Jess:
It’s simple, it’s easy. It’s very effective. It’s very cost-effective and it works nice because you can use some more cost-effective encoders, nothing wrong with the real expensive ones but, the nice thing is if you’re pulling a feed off of a satellite or SRT, you don’t need to break it into baseband or have another very expensive piece of gear to insert the PSIP. You could just throw our box down, ASI in and out and off it goes.
Jess:
So, there’s a number of advantages. And the other advantage too, if I can point out, if for some reason you go black, your encoder dies. At least you still have the channel branding on the air. So, you don’t really lose your spot. Like people aren’t going to scan their TV and lose you, your PSIP is going to stay there, even if you might temporarily be off the air with your video and audio.
Steve:
Yeah. That’s a good point, Jessica. And also, when you’re generated externally, not only do you need an encoder multiplexer to inject that stream, which adds cost to your encoder or generate a multiplexer you can’t use. Certain encoders just don’t have that feature, so you have to get more expensive encoders and increases your price, but you also had this other external piece of equipment, which is a lot of cases, is Windows-based. So you have to do your Windows updates and reset it occasionally.
Steve:
So, it’s just not as robust as a dedicated hardware for generating and inserting your PSIP.
Jess:
That’s a good point, Windows updates.
Steve:
Yes, everybody loves a Windows updates.
Jess:
Yeah. Your PSIP stops, because Windows wants to update, so you can have that. So, it’s nice to have one piece of hardware, that just injects it into the stream.
Steve:
Right. So, it really gives you a lot of reliability, reduce costs and helps keep your station branding on the air in the event that something were to happen to your encoder.
Jess:
Yep.
Steve:
So, those are some of the more common ways of doing PSIP and injecting PSIP, but at D2D, we also enjoy providing customers with novel solutions.
Steve:
They come with those with some of those crazy ideas like, “How can we do this?” And we really kind of, they get in there, it’s like, “Hey what’s we can create this custom code for you?”
Steve:
And we did have the situation in Mexico, if you have some info on that Jessica, what was the issue there from the South?
Jess:
Well, so, they were transmitting their stations all over Mexico. And in most cases, they wanted to add some Dynamic PSIP to the signal. But the problem is, some of the locations where on top of a mountain, where there was no internet, there was no chance of internet. There was no way to get internet there. So they couldn’t have any way to pull the tables down. They obviously didn’t want to send a guy down there to go and load the PSIP in manually. So we figured out a way..
Steve:
I think they are doing local origination as well weren’t they at the sites?
Jess:
Yeah. Well, that’s just the other thing, too.
Jess:
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. They wanted to be able to break the channel down and break it into baseband, add some local content, as well as add some local branding. I think they ran it through a Tektronix, so they could analyze the video, and then they wanted to re-encode it and put it back on the air.
Jess:
So, all of that was great, except they didn’t have internet access to insert the PSIP. So, we came out with our propel, which was just basically a way to send the PSIP guide tables over satellite, and then be able to inject them after the fact, into the stream, right before the exciter, without having to have an internet out there. And that way, they could generate all their PSIP data at the very head end and then send it over satellite. And then at each single translator, be able to insert their PSIP. Other programming was primarily the same. So, other than the branding that they did locally, they were able to do this with, it was a great solution without having to provide internet.
Steve:
Sure. Yeah, because one of the big issues, once we find out they’re doing the local origination is normally, you do it over satellite, but once you convert the baseband to your local insertion and re-encode it, well, you’ve lost all your PSIP information from the satellite uplink.
Steve:
So, the solution we came up with is, we still use just one PSIP generator at the uplink, which would send it out over satellite to all the locations. And then at each location, we had one of our D2Flex products, which has two ASI inputs and two ASI outputs. And what we would do, is we would take the satellite feed in on ASI one, and we had stripped off all the guide data and send it out the ASI output to the downstream decoder, encoder. So they could do all their local origination content.
Steve:
Then the output of the encoder we’d taken to our ASI two input, we would then take all the UPG data we’d taken off the satellite feed. Now, put it into the over their feed, which would then go out or ASI two output to the exciters. That way, we could basically use our box to take the PSIP off the satellite feed and then inject it into over the air feed. So, that way they can still keep all their PSIP, without having to worry about trying to somehow get internet access to these very remote sites.
Jess:
Great solution. Absolutely fantastic.
Steve:
Yeah. So that’s why we really enjoy doing that, those special projects for different customers.
Jess:
Yeah, they’re fun.
Steve:
Yeah. So, now that we’ve been talking been about PSIP, it just is going to do a little demo for you real quick, because it’s just show you just how easy it is to add Dynamic PSIP to your station.
Jess:
Yep. Give me a quick second to exit out of this huge screen.
Jess:
Hold on a sec.
Jess:
We’re just talking before about multiple screens and how I don’t do multiple screens. So basically, what I have here is, let me pull this back up, and we’ll share the screen and then, come on.
Jess:
Here we are.
Jess:
Okay, so I just have one of our Flex products here. I’m basically pulling in ASI, just a couple channels. They’re just elementary stream. So, they’re just wanted the program to… I showed you this a bit earlier, but I went ahead and rebranded them just D2D TV and Just TV. And for PSIP sake, you have to be major and minor channel-specific. So, the files that are coming in, that we actually went to the FTP and got looked like this.
Jess:
You don’t really need to know that, except for the fact that it’s just basically a tablet of limited Excel file. And then they come in, through an FTP site every day. So, at about midnight, we go up and we grabbed the file and we inserted into our box here. We rebranded 26, one and 26, two. And just basically coming ASI out of the box and for the sake of the zoom call into a transport stream analyzer.
Jess:
So, currently right now, you’ll see how we’ve added the tables into here. And as Steve mentioned, here’s the EIT tables, under the table, out of the channel, I branded D2D TV. We’ve got some events here, basically it’s event number 14, here’s a title. It’s a Judge Joe Brown and saying it’s in English and it goes forward like that.
Jess:
So, basically, it’s as easy as plugging in a box inline ASI in, ASI out, as simple as taking any one of those ASI programs that you like and just, you dragging it on over and renaming it. And then once you rename it, you go into the settings here, and it’s as simple as adding your transport stream ID. Hopefully, the FCC will give you one, automated PSIP and then here you can see we’re using our friends at TV Media and Display Systems International, and we’re pulling their PSIP down here for the purpose of the demo. And that’s it.
Jess:
That’s all you really got to do. If you get hung up, you call me, and we get it working for you.
Steve:
That’s a very straightforward. So, you just put in your credentials there. Set a few settings for each channel and you’re on the air with your channel guide information, and that’s really exciting, Jessica.
Jess:
Easy, quick and you can do it remotely too.
Steve:
Okay. So, we’ve tried to pack as much information here, and everyone has a busy schedule.
Steve:
So, we’re going to open the floor now that anybody has any questions. If you want to just go and enter them into the chatbox here and we’re going to answer those.
Jess:
Let’s take a look and see what we got.
Jess:
All right. I got one, Steve, someone asking how much bandwidth should I allocate for, I guess, Dynamic PSIP?
Steve:
Sure, it can be very a bit, depending on how far out you want to go, because you can go anywhere from 12 hours to two weeks and how many channels you have, but you’re just doing at a minimum, just a few channels over the air, doing 12 hours.
Steve:
You’re only talking tens of kilobits, very low bandwidth. Start going out to the full two weeks, maybe getting up to a hundred, 200 kilobits. And then at the far end, if you’re a cable station, you have many channels those cable has. You can actually get into megabits worth of data, but for typical over the air, you’re talking tens of kilobits, a hundred at the most, in most applications.
Jess:
So, like a good rule of thumb, is if you leave like say 150, 200K and old packets in your stream, that’s funny, right?
Steve:
Yeah, that’d be plenty.
Jess:
Okay, cool.
Steve:
Yep. Yeah, for over the air, why don’t you get the cable with so many channels? It gets more, but for over the air station, a 150 should be plenty.
Jess:
Right. Yeah, great question.
Jess:
Let’s see what else we got.
Jess:
Ken, do we have to do ASI or can they come in SRT or IP?
Steve:
It can, either one that doesn’t make like a difference once you get the transport stream, what other mode it comes in with ASI, IP. We inject the tables, and then they can go out ASI or IP.
Steve:
So, the PSIP itself, that is agnostic to whether it’s ASI or IP.
Jess:
So, the cool thing about us is, you could be at your station in Birmingham and SRT your signal all the way out to Seattle. Now, Seattle, obviously it’s going to be a different time zone, probably different programming. You could just SRT and then add a box in Seattle. And that would change all your programming, including your static and your Dynamic PSIP.
Steve:
Correct. Yes, we’ll do that.
Jess:
Yeah, that’s a good idea.
Steve:
Once we received a signal, we can do all the modifying to it as needed, before it’s sent on to the transmitter or wherever downstream it needs to go.
Jess:
Nice. Yeah, that’s great.
Jess:
Let’s see if we got anything else.
Jess:
What vendors do you support for Automatic PSIP?
Steve:
Yes. We currently support three vendors for automated PSIP. We support Titan TV, Display Systems International and Grace Notes. So, if you are partnered with any of those vendors, all you got to do is go into our user interface, enter your credentials, and we’ll start pulling that schedule.
Jess:
Great. So, three vendors.
Jess:
Another one just popped in on top of that question, “Can I do it my own?”
Steve:
Oh, sure. We actually do have the ability where you can do a manual PSIP. It can be a little laborious because it’s basically, it’s a spreadsheet.
Steve:
If you do have a station which really doesn’t change a whole lot from week to week, it’s not too bad, because you have two options. You can do it for each event. You can either put a day, month, year for when it’s going to occur, or you can put a day of the week index.
Jess:
Right.
Steve:
For example, a Sunday would be zero, Monday be one. So, if your schedule doesn’t really change from week to week, you could create just one weekly schedule and just keep repeating it over and over. So, that’s it. But if you do have a schedule, which varies quite a bit, yes, it’s really nice to have an automated system. So you don’t have to be constantly check update in those Excel sheets all the time.
Jess:
So, what about ProTrack?
Jess:
Are you familiar with ProTrack?
Steve:
I’m not sure, I’m not familiar with Protrack, but that’s one we’ll definitely look into after this. We’ll see and we’ll get in touch with them. And so you can get them to start supporting us as well or us supporting them.
Jess:
As long as it’s basically like a tablet limited Excel file, right?
Jess:
It’s a text file, but it’s created in Excel and then you just save it as tablet limited. It’s pretty much that’s it, right?
Jess:
So, it’s so…
Steve:
So we did, there’s actually a standard for doing it, which is, it’s very complicated with all these XML files and all. You have to have a bunch of different files, and for just basic over the air sketches like this, it’s just crazy complex. It’s like, you don’t really need all this. So, we actually have our own protocol. We came up with a very simple, 10 to limited text file and we’ve just partnered with the different major providers, and they’ve been willing to, because it’s so straight forward that it’s very easy for them to put their schedule in that format. And then we just pull it down and inject it into the stream.
Jess:
Yeah, I think Protrack is a lot of like traffic. Like they do primarily traffic and scheduling software, so it might be a little bit different, but definitely we’re looking into.
Jess:
That’s a great question.
Steve:
Sure, we’ll definitely, once you get the call and do a little research on try and contact them to, through to us, it’s something we can work out there to support them.
Jess:
It’s the first time I’ve heard of that Protrack.
Jess:
I’m familiar with it from a previous life. And it was primarily, I think it was a lot of commercial and scheduling software, but it would be great if it could pull in the show somehow and work with that.
Jess:
Is PSIP a requirement? Does the FCC make you do it?
Steve:
It depends on what type of station you are. If you’re a full-power station, it is definitely required at least for the first 12 hours.
Steve:
So you just have to have 12 hours ahead. And it’s only the EIT which are required. The ETPs are optional. I believe that’s the same for class A as well. I’m not sure and then for low power, it’s not required at all. You don’t have to do any PSIP, but we highly recommend that you do it because it really adds a lot of value to your channel for people, to be able to find you and then as their channel surfing, go, “Hey, I’m going to watch this show.” Instead of saying, “I don’t know what this is, it just pass on by.”
Jess:
Right. Yeah, like I said, if you’re going to spend all that money, you might as well just put a couple more in and then be able to put a sign out front, right? It’s basically what it is.
Jess:
We mentioned SRT, will it work with Multicast?
Steve:
Yes. Yeah, that say it doesn’t really, so how the transport stream gets in and out of the box. Really doesn’t make a difference as far as doing you’re putting the PSIP on there.
Jess:
We don’t care.
Steve:
We don’t really care how it gets in and out. Once we have it, we put the PSIP in and send it back out, either way. We can go out ASI or IP or both, if you want on
Jess:
Great question.
Jess:
Yeah, that’s a good question. Like you come in, some channels with IP, some channels with ASI, some other channels with SRT, max them altogether and then build PSIP just for that particular bouquet.
Jess:
So, that was a great question.
Jess:
Let’s see, anyone else? Looking.
Steve:
I don’t see this one.
Jess:
What’s the difference between PSIP and EPG?
Steve:
Well, it’s somewhat intertwined. It’s the PSIP, it’s made up as I was talking earlier about the two different types of PSIP.
Steve:
So EPG, is more, is the Dynamic type of PSIP. It’s your EITs and ETPs, is the Dynamic part of PSIP. And then the Static part of PSIP is your channel name, channel number, those tables.
Jess:
So, I guess if we break them down into the acronym, EPG is Electronic Program Guide and PSIP is Program System and Information Protocol.
Steve:
Right.
Jess:
So, PSIP is a protocol for the EPG, if that makes any sense.
Steve:
Right. Yeah. So, it’s almost like an umbrella.
Steve:
So, overall it’s all called PSIP. Ant then within PSIP, there’s your Static PSIP, your Dynamic PSIP and the EPG, is specifically the Dynamic PSIP, which is your chronic program guide.
Jess:
Okay, that makes sense.
Jess:
Good question.
Jess:
Anybody else?
Jess:
Mueller, Mueller.
Steve:
Any more than we had on here.
Steve:
See if I give another minute, see for me also, has anything else to ask.
Jess:
Yeah. If not, while we’re waiting, if you want to set up a meeting or a demo, by all means, you clearly have our website address, our contacts are in there. Feel free to give me a ring or Steve, and we’ll be happy to give you a live demo or send you out a box and get you started by all means.
Steve:
Okay, yeah.
Steve:
So, I don’t see any more questions coming in. I apologize if I missed any, but yes, we are definitely available for any questions.
Steve:
So today, we’re happy to have you join us. You learned about the difference between Static and Dynamic PSIP. Some of the advantages of using the same hardware to both generate, inject Dynamic PSIP and some novel ways to do PSIP and also had a short demos and we just show how easy it is to set up PSIP at your station.
Steve:
So, I hope everyone is able to learn something today and please contact us with any more questions, or I’ll let you see the demo unit to try out and have a great day.
Jess:
Piece of cake.
Jess:
Thanks guys.
