Broadcast Industry Trying to Show TV Manufacturers ATSC 3.0 Transition Is a Go

Since ATSC 3.0 won't be backward-compatible with 1.0, a big broadcast industry challenge is showing a clear transition plan to get TV manufacturers interested in turning out 3.0 TV sets, Sasha Javid, Spectrum Co. chief operating officer, said at an FCBA event Monday. That was a big motivator of the NAB Show announcement that 3.0 services will roll out to the top 40 U.S. TV markets by the end of 2020 (see 1904080071), he said.

Javid said at least "a few" top 40 markets will see the rollout this calendar year, plus some Sinclair or Nexstar markets. Given that the broadcast industry has generally been fractured, the simulcast requirement and channel sharing is going to be a challenge, Javid said. But again, the industry also wants to show TV manufacturers "this is happening," he said.

NCTA Deputy General Counsel Diane Burstein said the cable industry, while not opposed to the transition, needs assurances about everything from no premature imposition of carriage before customers are ready, to high-definition 1.0 signals not being degraded by channel sharing as more stations share the same antenna. She said retransmission, and the concern 1.0 signals could be "held hostage" to carriage of 3.0 signals, is a major worry. It's not the must-carry stations that will be the big drivers to 3.0, she said. "It's very different" from the DTV transition, with no hard end date, and the five-year sunset provision for 1.0 signals seems arbitrary, she said.

Javid said the broadcast industry was more worried about the transition for its over-the-air customers since it has no reason to do anything that would jeopardize its huge viewership via cable. He said broadcasters are largely in alignment with cable on most transition issues.

With many broadcasters eyeing the transition as opening up spectrum capacity that could be used for a national data network, wireless lawyer Trey Hanbury of Hogan Lovells said broadcasters' biggest challenge is how quickly it can transition to allow for deploying a single national architecture standard for that network. He said some broadcasters see that data direction as imperative since relying on 3.0 just for its video capabilities isn't sufficient to keep the industry going in an era of over-the-top competition.

Javid said a big limit to 3.0's use as a broadband alternative is the lack of an uplink. But the Spectrum Co. coalition has been in talks with prospective partners potentially interested in the low-band spectrum, he said. He said some broadcasters and equipment manufacturers are jointly working on a hybrid approach to video transmission that combines synchronized over-the-air signals and broadband-delivered packets. He said that could be a means to dealing with increasing data traffic due to exploding amounts of video streaming.

The "ton" of M&A activity in the broadcast industry, at least in the short term, could slow 3.0 transition, but longer term it's a benefit because bigger broadcasters can transition more effectively, he said.

Alexander Sanjenis, acting media adviser to Chairman Ajit Pai, said multiple broadcasters at the NAB Show told Pai they were excited by 3.0. He also said the hyper-localized emergency alert capabilities with 3.0 could be a boon for consumers.

In response to NCTA's Burstein's pointing out how legacy MVPDs operate under numerous regulations, like must carry and leased access, that aren't required for streaming operators, Sanjenis said the chairman's office was "very aware" of that. If it tried to impose similar requirements on Netflix that cable operators face, "People would think we had lost our minds," he said, but added statutory requirements sometimes limit what regulatory burdens the agency can end. Hanbury said a Cable Act rewrite likely would only come in response to a "crisis point."