NAB President Urges Shift to Next-Gen ATSC 3.0 in Opening Keynote

LAS VEGAS -- Broadcasters need to move to the next-generation ATSC 3.0 in order to succeed after the incentive auction, NAB President Gordon Smith said in his keynote at NAB Show Monday. Since a successful incentive auction will leave 80 percent of current full-power stations and only 60 percent of the current broadcast spectrum, TV broadcasters have to learn to “do more with less,” Smith said. A move to ATSC 3.0 would allow them to do so, he told us after the speech. “There’s no question broadcasting will survive after the auction," but moving to ATSC 3.0 "will allow it to thrive,” Smith told us.

A new next-generation standard is expected to be ready for FCC adoption by the fall, hopefully in time to be incorporated into the post-auction repack, said One Media Executive Vice President Jerry Fritz on a panel at the show. That time frame is “a tall order,” Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake said on a panel on low-power TV. “It’s one thing to have a standard, but you also need equipment that operates on the standard,” Lake said. ATSC 3.0's framers have said they're on schedule to complete a candidate standard by the end of 2015, and they repeated that again Sunday at the NAB Show (see 1504130030).

Adopting a next-generation standard would allow broadcasting to control its own future rather than have it “defined and imposed upon us by others,” Smith said. A next-generation standard would open up more revenue streams to broadcasters and allow them to make use of new tech such as 4K TV, datacasting and targeted advertising. “This is a crucial time for those in the industry to work together” to extend broadcasting to “emerging platforms,” he said. The industry hasn’t implemented a new standard yet because of the difficulty of the undertaking, Smith said. “It’s something the whole industry has to do together.”

It’s bad public policy for the FCC to require broadcasters to change their antennas and other infrastructure to accommodate the repacking and then ask them to do so again for ATSC 3.0, Fritz said. The Widelity Report analysis of repacking costs said 85 percent of the cost of alterations to stations from the repacking would be unaffected by a shift to a new standard. Only 15 percent of those costs would come from work that would need to be redone if the next-generation standard were adopted after the repacking is complete, he said. The Media Bureau supports a shift to a new standard, Lake said.

The FCC should stay out of “the price-setting business” and simplify the incentive auction, Smith said. “If the commission can stay out of the way, I believe we can have a very successful auction,” he said. He also cited increasing broadcaster interest in auction participation. NAB’s planned 2018 move to new headquarters closer to Congress will allow the trade association to lobby on new royalty rates, “common-sense ownership rules” and preventing pay TV from “dismantling” retransmission consent, he said.