Dish Network Joins as 'Surprising' Sinclair Partner in Dallas ATSC 3.0 SFN Trials

LAS VEGAS -- Pearl TV and Sinclair used the early hours of the NAB Show to tout expansions of the ATSC 3.0 trials they're running in their two test markets. The Pearl-led Phoenix “model market” project (see 1711140053) announced the addition of nine more collaborating companies, while Dish Network, with Sinclair's urging, joined the Sinclair-led consortium of Nexstar, Univision, American Tower and Cunningham Broadcasting -- newly named the Spectrum Co. -- that’s running 3.0 single-frequency-network (SFN) trials at three sites in the Dallas area (see 1801170053).

Mark Aitken, Sinclair vice president-advanced technology, teased during a 3.0 workshop Saturday about a Sunday-morning announcement involving a “surprising party” that “put on a signal in Dallas” Wednesday at “the beginnings of our SFN trials in Dallas. ... You may be surprised who the participant is."

That Dish “successfully trialed the transmission and reception” of 3.0 using its 700 MHz E Block spectrum at Spectrum Co.’s SFN site in Garland, Texas, marked the “convergence of wireless and broadcast technologies,” said Dish. Dish is “seeking innovative ways of bringing next generation technologies and services, like ATSC 3.0, to American consumers," said Tom Cullen, executive vice president-corporate development, in the statement. "This trial helps us not only pursue opportunities with 'Next Gen' TV technology, but also identify synergies with our IoT and future 5G plans, for example broadcasting data to connected cars."

Dish’s 700 MHz E Block spectrum “is uniquely positioned to provide coverage to 95 percent of the license areas in the U.S.,” said the company. Dish’s “uplink spectrum assets could be used to provide a unique, dedicated reverse link channel for broadcast data applications,” it said.

It's obvious that Dish and broadcasters often “sit on different sides of the table” on issues such as retransmission consent, and that's why Aitken told the workshop that Sinclair was working with a surprising partner in Dallas, he told us Sunday. Aitken approached Dish about the Dallas project because the satellite company has made no secret of its ambitions to launch “mobile video services” using its various spectrum holdings, and specifically because Dish publicly earmarked 700 MHz E Block spectrum for narrowband IoT, he said.

Discussions involving Dish in the Dallas trials began “in earnest” within the past year but have been “ongoing” since Aitken personally started "engaging" Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen five or six years ago in talks “about a series of ‘what ifs’" said Aitken. Sinclair is in talks with multiple potential partners on 3.0 and expects additional announcements to come now that 3.0 "deployments" have begun, he said.

The Dallas announcement makes Dish the first known MVPD to participate in a 3.0 trial, though Pearl Managing Director Anne Schelle said during the same Saturday 3.0 workshop that the Phoenix model market project includes the participation of a local cable operator and that the cable industry took a prominent role in the framing of 3.0.

Days after LG announced it would be the first TV maker to supply receivers for the Phoenix 3.0 model market project (see 1804050019), Pearl said Monday that Sony also will supply TVs, demodulators and “application development tools.” Pearl previously announced a collaboration with Sony to develop a “channel navigation tool” to be deployed and tested in Phoenix (see 1801050035).

Samsung, a partner with Pearl and Sinclair on a 3.0 memorandum of understanding three years ago (see 1506170046), also joins the project to supply TVs, and its success from helping to launch 3.0 in South Korea “will help Phoenix focus on evaluation of features such as HDR and immersive audio,” said Pearl. Channel Master, based in the Phoenix area, will supply a variety of reception antenna products, said Pearl.

Joining the project as “technology contributors” are Dolby Labs, TitanTV and UniSoft, said Pearl. BitRouter; Meintel, Sgrignoli; and Yotta Media Labs join as signaling and technical experts, said Pearl. Dolby will help with deployment in Phoenix of AC-4, the audio codec designated for 3.0 in North America, it said.

The Phoenix project went on the air with its first station at 12:01 a.m. local time Friday, Schelle told the workshop. “We’re real excited to get there. We did that to get to NAB. We really wanted to get to our testing. We’ve been in alpha testing in Phoenix for months.”

KFPH-CD Channel 35, a Univision-owned Class A station in the Phoenix market, was “the first stick to go up,” said Schelle. “It’s an open testbed, so we will be lighting another stick, and we’re talking to many more manufacturers. We don’t see this as being a project where we’re choosing one manufacturer over another. These companies happen to be a little ahead of the game and ready to go in terms of doing what we needed to do for our business-model testing.”

The first station went on the air with an experimental license that the FCC granted only in the past week and a half, said Schelle. “The only reason why it was an experimental license is they weren’t ready for us to go commercially," said Schelle of the commission. "There isn’t an application available to do that; otherwise that would have been our path, because that was our goal, was to go commercial.” The FCC can't license commercial 3.0 stations because it doesn't yet have a licensing system to do so, confirmed Barbara Kreisman, FCC Media Bureau Video Division chief, on an NAB Show panel Monday. The FCC instead has been issuing experimental licenses for 3.0 pilot projects, she said.

The “model for transitioning” to 3.0 is “going to be important because we’ll really need to be able to come up as an industry with ways to value the spectrum and be able to develop those business models,” said Schelle. “We think we’ll be able to have with this second stick a model that we can show the industry.” It’s important for the Phoenix testbed “to be open, so the industry can scale,” she said. “Collaboration is really going to be important, and that’s part of what we’re trying to accomplish in Phoenix.”

For the model market, “first and foremost we’re focusing on that baseline TV service,” said Schelle. “At the same time, the consumer matters. We could sit here and create all kinds of whiz-bang ideas, but if the consumer doesn’t want it, we’re not going to be able to sell it and the CE guys are not going to come out with product on consumer shelves.” That’s why the model market will implement consumer testing this summer, to “test out the features and functionalities” that resonate with consumers and build a “go-to-market strategy,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s balancing these stakeholder interests, but I put consumer at the center of that. That’s a part of what we’re trying to ensure in Phoenix.”

In the consumer trials, “we will be doing some picture and sound quality testing with viewers as well as the modernized guide implementation,” said Schelle. Consumers “do want value,” she said. “They do want their local news and live content. They love new quality. They love new things. Consumers are already conditioned right now to go buy the latest iPhone, buy the latest TV product. You’re already starting to see TVs turning over faster. What’s amazing to me is if you look at the latest numbers on connected devices, connected TVs, they are huge, and that wasn’t there seven years ago.”

Aitken used the workshop to lobby broadcasters to unite behind 3.0 as the common good. With the “ability to deliver data from any source virtually anywhere, if as broadcasters we come together and push forward on nationwide points for 3.0, there’s going to be just the beginning of new business opportunities,” he said.

With 3.0, “broadcasting is going to be cool again,” said Aitken. “That everybody in this room really is in a position to impact where we go as an industry. I beg you all, go back to your management, go back to the folks who make the decisions about how to make the money. The fact of the matter is, if we follow the money, then we will find that ATSC 3.0 becomes the new cash cow.” That means what broadcasters will find is that there’s “an entire universe of new business partners that are available to us,” he said.

NAB Show Notebook

It's a "disservice" to 3.0 to view it only as “a one-trick pony able to push a higher resolution” in 4K, Mike Bergman, CTA senior director-technology and standards, told us Saturday. Bandwidth constraints have many broadcasters looking toward using 1080p with HDR as an interim launch strategy, several said at last year’s ATSC conference (see 1705160044), and Sinclair recently said it believes better pictures aren't the “ultimate best use” of 3.0 technology (see 1802280016). “As we resolve the standards questions, and we are resolving them, 3.0 is going to be able to give broadcasters a variety of choices, and the sets will be able to display them. That said, there’s going to be competition from other technologies.” The 5G-Xcast project in Europe is using the “whole list” of Ultra HD features “as their starting point,” said Bergman. “So as consumers make their choices about what’s important to them, the market information will feed back and inform the broadcasters, whether they’re using ATSC 3.0 or 5G or something else.” Consumers “don’t have 3.0 on their radar, but what we are seeing is that people are using antennas, still, to pull down over-the-air broadcasts,” said Bergman. “That use has declined, but it has plateaued now simply at a lower number than before. When consumers are looking at this question of 3.0, they’re not looking at 3.0, they’re looking at antennas, and that type of antenna, that type of service, is going to become more capable.”

The high cost of HDR “mastering monitors is the bottleneck in the system” that’s impeding broad HDR consumer adoption, Tyler Pruitt, technical liaison at Portrait Displays, told a Future of Cinema Conference workshop Saturday. “The cheapest of all those monitors is $25,000,” he said. Less expensive monitors are crucially needed to “really bring HDR to the masses, and not just have it be something that Hollywood blockbusters and scripted television shows on streaming platforms are using,” he said. “The problem isn’t that the consumer displays aren’t being released” at mainstream pricing, said Pruitt, who told the audience he recently bought his mother a Dolby Vision TV for less than $500. “It’s actually just the mastering displays that’s holding everything up from having wide adoption of the content.” Pruitt hailed Sony for using last CES to showcase an 85-inch 8K HDR display with 10,000 nits of peak brightness. “To me, what this proved is, all the fear spread that 10,000 nits is going give you a sunburn” was unfounded, he said. “The imagery jumped off the screen at you.” Pruitt doesn’t think 10,000 nits “is anything to be afraid of, and we should embrace getting there as soon as possible,” he said.

The UHD Alliance is working with other groups in “finding a way” to promote to broadcasters HDR best practices “because we realized that there will be broadcasters, particularly in live, using HLG, and we have not had HLG in our ecosystem at all,” President Mike Fidler told us Saturday. HLG is the metadata-free hybrid log-gamma HDR platform that BBC and NHK invented for broadcast-centric applications and is supported in the 3.0 suite of standards along with perceptual quantization (see 1701190059). “What we have done is try and specify out a certain set of parameters as well as certain industry best practices that exist,” he said. “This is not something we’re developing initially. The Ultra HD Forum is part of it. ITU is part of it, and so we’re just setting that up as the initial part of trying to bring broadcasters into the mix.”

The Ultra HD Forum counts 51 “active” content services deploying Ultra HD commercially in some form around the globe, said President Thierry Fautier. In a “bit of a surprise,” the forum found that 27 percent of those services, an unexpectedly high number, are using HDR, said Fautier, vice president-video strategy at Harmonic. “It shows you that content providers, operators, are pushing very hard, HDR.” HDR10 “by far” is the platform most deployed, followed by HLG, Dolby Vision and HDR10+, he said. The largest-ever scale of live HDR broadcasts, and therefore the biggest HDR “push,” will happen in June and July when all 64 World Cup soccer matches are beamed live in HDR from Russia, said Fautier.

The 3.0 “test station” NAB's operating with CTA at WJW, Tribune Media's Fox TV affiliate in Cleveland (see 1711070038), is “up and running,” said Lynn Claudy, NAB senior vice president-technology, Sunday at the Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference. “From field testing, we know that the physical layer” of 3.0 “does perform well in the field,” said Claudy. “The large majority of failures from the anecdotal stories from people in the truck is that multipath, not a problem. This is all about signal level. If you don’t have enough signal level, you’re not going to get reception, and if you do have enough signal level you’re very likely to do very well.”

ATSC members this year are “less focused” on developing the 3.0 standards suite, and more on 3.0's “deployment and the future of the broadcasting business,” said ATSC President Mark Richer Monday at the ribbon-cutting of the “Road to ATSC 3.0" pavilion in the Las Vegas Convention Center’s Grand Lobby. More than 40 exhibitors are showing 3.0 products and services on the NAB Show floor, said Richer: “That’s how we know it’s real. That’s how we know it’s happening.” ATSC, CTA and NAB celebrated the release of the last of the suite of 3.0 standards on the opening morning of CES in January (see 1801090056).

The 3.0-enabled Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN) is “a strategic opportunity” for the broadcasting and consumer electronics industries, said AWARN Alliance Executive Director John Lawson Monday. His group is launching “a beta development project" for AWARN, "which we hope to be testing in Phoenix and Cleveland,” he said. “Not everyone gets it, but we hope this is the year that more broadcasters join the AWARN Alliance,” plus more CE companies, he said. "We see AWARN as a real winner for the whole ecosystem, and we hope the whole ecosystem gets behind us."

Every car on the road “eventually” will have an automotive voice assistant that renders "an intelligent, intuitive user experience, seamlessly integrated with the vehicle and its brain,” said Lior Ben-Gigi, Nuance Communications senior technical product manager-automotive, in a Monday connected-car workshop. Nuance speech recognition technology was embedded in an estimated 48 percent of the 93 million vehicles in use globally last year, said Ben-Gigi. For “more than several years,” Nuance has been working on developments involving “much more than speech” through a field of research it calls “conversational artificial intelligence,” he said. “We need to help people talk to the assistant in a natural way, very similar to how they talk to each other, to other passengers, and we want the assistant to respond in a very natural way,” he said. “We want the assistant to be aware of context -- what it knows about the user, what it knows about the car.” That’s “exactly what you’d expect from any person sitting next to you when you ask for help,” he said. Unlike virtually all the voice assistants on the market today, Nuance demonstrated at CES and has started to sell to automakers technology that enables people “to talk to the assistant just like they talk to each other,” he said. “When I have a friend or a family member next to me in the car, I don’t need to constantly repeat the name of that person every time to talk to him or to her.”

THX is showing an end-to-end “Spatial Audio workflow” at the show using MPEG-H for the delivery of “next-generation immersive audio experiences in collaboration with Qualcomm,” said THX. “With the proliferation of next-generation audio standards like MPEG-H,” and Ultra HD video available for broadcasting and video streaming, “there is a growing need to deliver high-fidelity, immersive entertainment experiences,” said THX. The Spatial Audio platform “provides consumers with immersive sound while watching movies, listening to music, or playing games on mobile devices, personal computers, and other consumer electronic devices,” it said. MPEG-H is the recommended audio codec for ATSC 3.0 in South Korea, while Dolby AC-4 is the designated system for 3.0 in the U.S. (see 1604210053).