NAB's ATSC 3.0 Multicast Petition Making Slow FCC Progress

NAB's November FCC petition for clarification of ATSC 3.0 multicast rules is seen as making slow progress (see 2105280035), broadcast industry officials told us. A workaround developed by broadcasters and the Media Bureau requires some 3.0 stations to request special temporary authority every six months, and the bureau has granted 34 STA requests, said Media Bureau Legal Adviser Evan Morris on an FCBA webinar Tuesday.

The petition seeks to clear up the “substantially similar” programming requirement and would ease the switch for markets going to 3.0, broadcasters said. NAB wants clarifying language on which station the FCC will hold responsible for violations of rules when broadcasters are hosting each other’s channels on multicast streams during the 3.0 changeover.

The responsibility for a given piece of content adhering to FCC requirements should stay with the station that originated it, even if it's hosted by another broadcaster, said Fox Vice President-Legal and Business Affairs Ann Bobeck at the FCBA event. An FCC official said Wednesday the item is being reviewed. Industry officials are hopeful it could come within the year.

Morris said as long as the arrangements between outlets don’t change, they can apply for a simple extension of their existing STA, but new arrangements would require new STA requests. Morris said the bureau has granted more than 150 3.0 license applications.

The station that ends up being the host for 3.0 streams in a transitioning market could face costs ranging from several hundred thousand dollars to the low millions to make the switch, said Meredith General Counsel-Local Video Joshua Pila during the webinar. Pila said he’s unaware of money changing hands between stations when they work together here, and Meredith has discussed the possibility of using loans or something similar if a station needed for a market shift couldn’t afford the transition. It's usually more efficient to switch an entire market to 3.0 at once, he said: “The general state is, people bear their own expenses.”

The expense is a reason it can be difficult for public stations to participate in the 3.0 transition, said Gray Miller’s Margaret Miller. Public TV stations have limited, slow-moving budgets, and, along with the capital expenses, often can’t handle the bureaucratic requirements. “They don’t have the staff; there’s not likely to be somebody dedicated to just ATSC 3.0.”

Broadcasters should look ahead to attracting consumers to 3.0, said Kerry Oslund, E.W. Scripps vice president-strategy and business development. “We are now moving past the point of this being an exercise in engineering cooperation. We need to get folks excited.” Oslund said 2022 is when the industry could start counting on early adopters to influence less 3.0-adventurous mainstream consumers. Broadcasters need to “delight” consumers, Oslund said, like the “fandom” for Tesla’s electric cars.

Oslund projects 2024 as an “inflection point” where more 3.0 TVs could be sold than 1.0 sets. It's costly for manufacturers to build both 3.0-compatible and noncompatible televisions, but making a set 3.0-compatible adds little to the cost of producing an individual unit, said Pearl TV Technology Lead David Folsom. That’s likely to mean production of 3.0-compatible devices will ramp up more quickly, he said.

Broadcasters won’t be ready to phase out 1.0 in 2024 but could start looking at the considerations involved, Oslund said. That would likely involve a need for regulatory changes -- to allow for “reverse lighthouses” offering 1.0 for consumers that remain, or making use of the TV white spaces, he said.