Broadcasters Need to Move Fast on ATSC 3.0, Say O'Rielly, Hane

Broadcasters need to move as quickly as possible to transition to ATSC 3.0 or they're in danger of losing their spectrum and market share to other industries, said FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly and Spectrum Consortium President John Hane in separate speeches Thursday to the ATSC Next Gen TV Conference. Through 3.0, broadcasters need to maximize the use of their existing spectrum, or it will be given to another industry, Hane said. Under the current technology, broadcasters provide a valuable service but take up too much spectrum to provide it, leading regulators to periodically pursue “progressive reclamation” of it as with the incentive auction, Hane said.

The process of moving to the new standard “could take too long,” said O'Rielly, praising the progress broadcasters have made so far. Competing industries aren't going to wait for the 3.0 transition, they will “continue to eat market share” O'Rielly said. Broadcasters “sitting on the fence” about the transition should be worried that “the fence may no longer exist” if they wait too long, he said. O'Rielly said he's encouraged about the future of 3.0 after a recent visit to the Pearl TV Phoenix test bed, which he blogged about in a recent attack on critics of the FCC's conduct toward Sinclair Broadcast (see 1805180072).

O'Rielly cited the repacking as a possible impediment to wide adoption of the new standard, and to a lack of tower crews as an obstacle to the repacking. An insufficient number of tower crews is “a real problem,” O'Rielly said. Tower company Stainless recently highlighted the same issue (see 1805210061). O'Rielly said he'll speak to other commissioners about the issue and will take a “deep look” at the repacking timing issues. Other purchasers of 600 MHz spectrum should emulate T-Mobile and work to ease the repacking for broadcasters, he said.

Microsoft's push to have the TV white spaces set aside for unlicensed use is the latest example of entities moving to reclaim spectrum from broadcasters, Hane said. Arguments that the broadcasters don't use the white spaces or all of their spectrum have “a grain of truth,” he said, putting the blame on ownership and spectrum rules that prevented broadcasters from expanding like other industries. Since ATSC 3.0 allows broadcasters to use their spectrum many ways, it's a way to change that, Hane said. If broadcasters can move quickly and demonstrate they plan to use all of their spectrum intensely they can “prevent Microsoft from pinning us in,” Hane said.

If 3.0 is adopted widely and quickly, an “ecosystem” of other companies invested in the standard -- such as consumer electronics manufacturers and service providers -- will spring up, providing allies against future attempts to claw back broadcaster spectrum, Hane said. In the past when broadcasters opposed such grabs, they lost because they were alone as an industry, Hane said. The pressure to adopt the new standard is “existential,” he said.

The difficulties of the transition and the need to preserve the current TV business for the moment make a fast transition difficult, said other speakers at the conference. “The reality is we have this great 1.0 business currently running,” said Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle. Ironing out the particulars of the “co-hosting” simulcast agreements for the transition “gets really complicated,” said Nexstar Chief Technology Officer Brett Jenkins. Broadcasters are having difficulty quantifying the value of 3.0 transmissions, which makes market-wide negotiations coordinating simulcast obligations difficult, he said. The degree to which each broadcaster will invest in 3.0 is an individual decision, said Sinclair Deputy General Counsel David Gibber.

All broadcasters with protected contours are welcome to join the Spectrum Consortium, and an invitation for low-power TV is being considered, Hane said. For ATSC 3.0 to work, individual broadcasters must be “stitched together into a seamless national network, he said.

ATSC Conference Notebook

The “holy grail” of broadcasting in the late 1980s and early '90s was “digital transmission,” said Wiley Rein Chairman Emeritus Dick Wiley, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Grand Alliance (see 1805020032). “People in Europe and the Far East did not believe that that would come along until the next century,” said Wiley, who chaired the FCC’s Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service and in that role helped create the Grand Alliance of AT&T, General Instrument, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Philips, Thomson, Zenith and the David Sarnoff Research Center. “The Grand Alliance saw that differently” and was pivotal in bringing HDTV broadcasting to the U.S., he said. “As revolutionary as the Grand Alliance and ATSC 1.0 was and still is, we stand today on a threshold of an even greater” system in 3.0, he said. “So today we can celebrate and honor the past and the present and look forward with great anticipation to what lies ahead.”

TV purchases among graduating college students getting their first apartments "stopped" in the past 12 months, said Jeff Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California, Annenberg School, in a Thursday keynote. “Certainly there’s no question that the average American household is buying a 50-inch or bigger set,” said Cole when we questioned him, noting that his finding appeared to contradict data that NPD presented at this week’s Display Week conference that younger people are the fastest-growing customer segment in sales of 55-inch TVs (see 1805210057). “Those who are buying sets are buying bigger sets,” said Cole. For most of the recent college graduates “we track, while they’re single and living in apartments with other people,” watching TV “is a singular activity, it’s not a group activity, with the exception of a handful of events” like the Super Bowl, he said. “Our work’s pretty clear on that, so I’d have to look and see what the NPD’s saying specifically.” Cole doesn’t see lack of TV buying as a “permanent situation” among younger consumers, he said. “We think it’s while they have apartments before they’re in a couple and then with children.”