NextGenTV Advancing but Will 'Take Some Time,' Streaming Media Connect Told

Some 42 markets have access to ATSC 3.0 broadcasts, under 10% of the viewing public in the U.S., and just 3 million 3.0-capable TVs were shipped in the U.S. last year, said Digital Tech Consulting President Myra Moore, moderator on a Streaming Media Connect panel last week.

Asked how long it would take for wide distribution of 3.0 TVs, Matt Durgin, LG senior director-North America smart TV partnership, said industry players want scale as quickly as possible “to pay for the effort we’re all taking on, but this is one of these technologies that has a rollout period.” The development work is happening, Durgin said, noting broadcast stations and towers are going up, additional markets are being addressed and leading TV makers Hisense, LG, Samsung and Sony have adopted the technology. “That period is going to take some time,” he said: “It’s not going to be a snap of the fingers and everything’s going to be on overnight.”

During the transition, TV and set-top box makers, broadcasters and content companies have to work together to ensure a “satisfying consumer experience,” Durgin said. His role at LG is to “look for the synergies between a streaming environment that has evolved over the last 15 years ... and the NextGenTV environment." In the next "half decade or decade, we’re going to be working together to continue that evolution to provide even more consumer value.” He said NextGenTV will be in over 100 markets by year-end, covering 80% of the U.S. population.

Durgin positioned NextGenTV as “another way to get content to the consumer” along with applications, connected TV makers’ free, ad-supported streaming TV (Fast) channels, and 3.0 broadcasts. He noted LG Channels, the company’s Fast channels section, is also the home to NextGen broadcast channels that are “working inside the same environment.” Commenting on the confusion that can mean for customers, Durgin said, “Now you have broadcasters that are streaming Fast channels that are broadcasting ATSC 3.0 channels, and they have apps with subscription services or other methods for getting content to consumers. All of those methods for content to get to those consumers have to be seamless,” he said.

Search, recommendations, deep linking and cross-linking will be part of smart TV’s future, Durgin said. Consumers will benefit from being able to consume 3.0 content in more areas of the house “with better picture quality” while being able to easily switch among a show’s seasons or to related content that’s on a subscription streaming service, he said.

Moore noted not all consumers will be motivated to buy a new TV to get 3.0 capability. Evoca TV CEO Todd Achilles said his company, which delivers a hybrid over-the-air signal transmission with content from 3.0’s internet pipeline, uses a proprietary set-top box to deliver local- and sports-led content to its customers in Mountain West states that have traditionally been in “TV deserts.”

“Hardware is hard,” Achilles said, noting that it takes time to do, “but we didn’t know where the TV adoption was going to be.” Evoca had to create a “closed-loop system” on its own set-top box, he said, likening it to a satellite or cable provider with its own boxes. That allows Evoca to push out the number of channels it wants over the air or to integrate different services. “How we make these routing decisions between content that we’ve put over the air, we’ve put over the internet connection, the failover between those," he said: "All of these hard details about creating a good user experience -- we just felt like we had to do it on our own box.”

As a broadcaster, Evoca can do things on a market-by-market basis, Achilles said. It offers education channels, some earmarked for community events. It offers the Evergreen Channel, which highlights artists from the Pacific Northwest, to customers in Idaho but not in Colorado or Arizona. It shows learning content and sports from Colorado State University “that never get picked up at the national level linearly.” The games could be found on the web through digging, “but we pull them forward and make them accessible,” he said. One of Evoca’s offerings is the only Basque-language channel in the U.S., geared to a customer segment in Idaho that’s the largest Basque-speaking population outside of Spain, he said.

LG’s Durgin said broadcaster options are one of the most exciting aspects of NextGenTV. Broadcasters can choose to focus on high-quality audio or video or different languages. The options will allow them to differentiate to fit their customer base, he said. Durgin referenced “infinite possibilities” made available by the hybrid capability of NextGenTV. Broadcasters can use it for personalization, to drive viewers to additional content, for local weather forecasts and emergency alerts. “There are a ton of things that are going through the minds of broadcasters right now,” he said.

ATSC 3.0 is “good at getting data down to the TV through this pipe that we have available to us, but at some point, for the consumer to have that interactive experience, there’s got to be two-way communication,” Durgin said. The consumer has to be able to click to request more information and “connect with you as a broadcaster,” he said. Wi-Fi connected TVs opened that door to consumers, he said.

It’s important for LG to have a direct relationship with broadcasters to determine how broadcasters will deal with requests coming from a NextGenTV, Durgin said. “You have a group of broadcasters who are relying on a robust, smart TV user base in order to bring their over-the-air experiences in the most robust way possible.” That means tapping into smart TVs’ capabilities, he said, and understanding how user requests will be handled on the TV. Working directly with broadcasters is “the only way we’re going to create fast, seamless, valuable experiences that are going to get this snowball into an avalanche.”

Asked whether 5G could be a substitute for ATSC 3.0, Achilles said, “It’s nowhere close.” The broadcast standard is much more “spectrally efficient.” Outside the home, 5G is a great way to deliver bits, “but that mobility layer in wireless air interfaces takes 25-30% of the total system capacity,” he said. ATSC 3.0 doesn’t have the mobility layer: “You have the whole bandwidth focused on delivering bits to the home. It’s orders of magnitude more efficient.”

The production process is different for fulfilling the interactivity possibilities with NextGenTV, said Susi Elkins, director-broadcasting, WKAR Public Media, which has been working with Michigan State University's lab space to create NextGenTV applications that could be used in other parts of the country. The lab has been using internet and broadcast technologies for learning and public safety use, creating redundancies in the two technologies to support each other. "A lot of people say, 'Is it going to be 5G or is it going to be ATSC or something else?'" Elkins said: "I think it’s going to be all of those things."