‘Still a Ways to Go’ Before ATSC 3.0 Reaches Mainstream: Pearl’s Schelle

Pearl TV is "focused" on building “scale” in ATSC 3.0 deployments and consumer adoption, Managing Director Anne Schelle said in an interview, commenting on recent remarks by Sinclair President-Technology Del Parks that the industry needs to begin planning for the shutdown of the “legacy” 1.0 service (see 2203310029). It’s “still the early days” of 3.0 service deployments, said Schelle.

Schelle remains “pleased with our progress” on 3.0, she said. She expects 150 models of 3.0-compliant TVs to be available to consumers this year, “but there’s still a ways to go” before the technology reaches the mainstream, “and we need to get into the high-volume, low-cost devices,” she said. “There’s a natural arc to scale. Smartphones took eight years to scale.”

That it takes a long time to scale is “an important part of the equation of conversion,” said Schelle. “We’re focused on creating the marketplace and the environment to allow for a full transition to happen” away from the legacy 1.0 service, she said. “When and how that happens is a discussion that will be happening over the next several years.”

There’s “a lot of work that needs to be done” first, in seeding consumer adoption of 3.0 sets, before considering sunsetting the 1.0 service, said Schelle. An estimated 20% of phones in use still are “feature phones,” she said. “We’re going to have that same experience with TVs in homes. That’s something we’ll be able to manage around as we continue to enhance and expand the deployment of NextGen, and then start to layer in allocating more spectrum to it over time.”

CTA projects the installed base of 3.0 TVs will number about 3.5 million sets by the end of 2022, but “we think it’s going to be a little higher than that,” said Schelle. “One key to this will be bringing on the big markets, obviously,” she said. “Typically it takes somewhere around five years for a consumer really to know about a new technology.”

Schelle admits “it’s kind of hard to tell” what proportions of consumers actually have 3.0 TVs in their homes and don’t know it, she said. Inquiries are increasing “exponentially” from consumers who bought new TVs last year and ask if 3.0 capability is in their sets, she said: “They’re starting to see the information around NextGen getting picked up in places like CNET.”

Pearl is working with some manufacturers on plans to alert consumers that the new TVs they bought might have 3.0 capability without their knowledge, said Schelle. One is an effort planned to ask consumers if they’re aware that if they bought a new antenna to pair with their new TV, it could expose them to “this new service” that they may know little about, she said. “We haven’t announced what that looks like, but it’s coming,” she said, possibly “later this summer.”

The NextGenTV logo program “needs to be marketed, and that’s what we’re doing, so that consumers are aware,” said Schelle, when asked if she’s satisfied with the level of the logo’s ubiquity. The logo program is “a good thing for broadcasters and it’s a good thing for TV manufacturers,” she said. “NextGen can be used by anybody to say they’re the next thing,” she said. But the NextGenTV logo “ensures that the consumer knows that they have the technology as part of their device that they purchased,” she said. “That’s important, because we’re offering brand new services and consumers might think they have it, but they don’t.”