Sinclair Eyes Start of 'Legacy' ATSC 1.0 Shutdown in ‘Near Future’

With ATSC 3.0-compliant TV sets “beginning to make advances in the consumer marketplace,” the day should come “in the near future” when rising household penetration of 3.0 TVs “will enable us to be able to start phasing out 1.0,” Sinclair President-Technology Del Parks told the TV Tech Summit Thursday. “The question for us is, how soon can we turn off 1.0 and take advantage of all of the capabilities of ATSC 3.0?”

The “technical cooperation” among broadcasters in each market where 3.0 has been deployed is “unprecedented,” said Parks. “It’s necessary because we did not get any additional spectrum to transition our stations to 3.0 like we did initially to go to 1.0,” he said. “The constraint placed on us by the FCC auction of half the TV spectrum in favor of the telecom guys presents a real interesting problem for us.”

The question for Sinclair is, “at what point can we shut down the legacy ATSC 1.0 transmissions and turn up further ATSC 3.0 transmitters?” said Parks. “The industry needs to plan for that.”

Sinclair developed a broadcast app that resides on a 3.0 TV, and from that “we can see how many people are watching” 3.0 signals from a Sinclair station, including “when they watch and what they watch,” said Parks. “As you might imagine, right now the numbers are fairly small,” he said. He emphasized that a 1.0 shutoff likely will be several years away.

One “interesting trend” observed was that 3.0 viewing spiked every Sunday between September and the end of January in Sinclair markets where 3.0 is deployed and “people are using the broadcast app,” said Parks. “You can actually track that spike on Sunday afternoons. Of course, it’s football.” Sinclair is not tracking “personal data,” he said. “It really is just set data.”