Using ISAN in ATSC

The ATSC standards are a set of standards developed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee for digital televisiontransmission over terrestrial, cable, and satellite networks.  ATSC is widely used in Northern America (USA, Canada) for digital television transmission.

ATSC recommends the use of ISAN and specifies its use in ATSC A/57B Content Identification and labeling for ATSC in order to uniquely identify audiovisual content in the ATSC transport.

For communication of ATSC-specific metadata between facility devices, and in particular to an ATSC PSIP11 generator, ISAN can be conveyed as a PMCP XML message according to ATSC A/76. An example of an encoding is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<PmcpMessagexmlns="http://www.atsc.org/pmcp/2004/2.0" id="4294967295" origin="Traffic"

originType="Traffic" dateTime="2003-12-17T09:30:47-05:00">

<Showaction="update">

<ContentId>

<Isanroot="2B1A-FF17-3E20" episodeOrPart="6541" check1="7" version="48CD-78B1"  check2="B"/>

</ContentId>

<ShowData>

<Namelang="eng" action="update">ILove Lucy</Name>

</ShowData>

</Show>

</PmcpMessage>

For more information, please see ATSC A/76. And, watch for a related command and control message system from SMPTE S22.

To Affix ISAN with ATSC refer also to MPEG as DVB uses MPEG streams.