Rosenworcel: FCC, NAB to Create Public/Private ATSC 3.0 Initiative

LAS VEGAS -- The FCC will create a public-private partnership to generate a road map for the ATSC 3.0 transition, announced FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel at the NAB Show Monday.

Called the Future of TV Initiative, the body will consist of stakeholders from broadcasting, the consumer electronics industry, and public interest and consumer groups, said Rosenworcel and NAB CEO Curtis LeGeyt. The group is intended to consider the transition from the perspective of industry and consumers, Rosenworcel said. During her speech she also praised local broadcasting and said broadcasters should “lean into” their connection to local communities.

LeGeyt praised the move in a news conference after Rosenworcel spoke. “They heeded our call on this,” he said: The 3.0 transition “can’t work without being hand in hand” with other stakeholders.

Broadcasters at the event also praised Rosenworcel’s announcement. “Anything that moves the transition forward” is a good sign for broadcasting, said Hearst Television President Jordan Wertlieb. A dedicated body focused on 3.0 is a positive for the industry, said Fox Senior Vice President-FCC Legal and Business Affairs Joe Di Scipio. “I think it's great to have additional support” for the 3.0 transition, said Hannah Lepow, media adviser to Commissioner Geoffrey Starks.

The initiative will have three working groups, Rosenworcel said. The first will be focused on consumers, she said. “We can’t saddle consumers with unworkable sets or big investments,” the chairwoman said. The second working group will focus on the 3.0 transition itself, and the third will consider “rules for the road” for broadcasting once the transition is complete, Rosenworcel said. The FCC taking a leadership role on 3.0 will be a powerful signal to consumer electronics manufacturers and other industries that the transition to 3.0 is going to happen, said LeGeyt.

The Future of TV Initiative is a response to an NAB request for an FCC task force to focus on ATSC 3.0 in the same manner the agency handled the broadcast incentive auction, Rosenworcel said. Though the incentive auction task force was entirely made up of FCC officials, the initiative will have a mix of stakeholders, she said. Broadcast industry officials told us the group will technically be industry-led and hosted by NAB, but with the added heft of FCC participation, with the eventual goal of making policy recommendations to the agency similar to an FCC advisory council. It isn’t clear how public the Future of TV Initiative's proceedings will be.

The previous day, Commissioner Nathan Simington blasted Rosenworcel’s handling of 3.0 broadcast ownership regulation and the Standard/Tegna deal. Simington's media adviser, Adam Cassady, delivered the speech at the NAB Show, saying the commissioner had been unexpectedly unable to attend. Under the current FCC “broadcast transactions are possibly illegal, or at least, you know, likely to need further study,” said Cassady, in an apparent reference to the Standard/Tegna hearing designation order. “When we slow the dynamism of the broadcast market, we hurt those we nominally seek to help. Broadcasters are the clear economic underdogs in the modern unified media marketplace,” Cassady said.

During the speech, Cassady pretended to read mock draft news releases from the agency and Media Bureau suggesting broadcasting has no future and the agency should “permit this legacy industry to languish beneath the regulatory load we put on it” and “bury it in the grave next to local newspapers.” The largest broadcasters are insignificant in size compared with media companies such as Disney but are the focus of a disproportionate amount of negative attention from the FCC, Cassady said. “Broadcast assets have been devalued by several recent commission decisions in ways that really ought to force us to rewrite the takings clause of constitutional law treatises,” said Cassady.

In his news conference Monday, LeGeyt also condemned the FCC’s actions on Standard/Tegna and the quadrennial review. The FCC’s action on Standard/Tegna could have a severe chilling effect on investment in broadcasting, he said. By starting the 2022 quadrennial review without finishing the 2018 QR the agency is “kicking the can” down the road on deregulation, he said: “The idea that the agency can ignore a congressionally mandated review of these rules is unacceptable.”

Broadcasters arguing for deregulation before the FCC should focus more on the services and local news relaxed rules that 3.0 would let them provide instead of on the increasing competition they face from less regulated industries, said Hanna Lepow, media adviser to Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, on a panel Sunday. The fate of newspapers and the part FCC rules against cross ownership played in their decline is “front of mind” at the agency, Lepow said.

In her remarks Monday, Rosenworcel asked the other commissioners to vote on the currently circulating ATSC 3.0 report and order on the physical layer and substantially similar sunsets. Action on that item doesn’t appear “imminent” but will likely be approved in some form before the July sunset date, said NAB Associate General Counsel Patrick McFadden on a panel at the American Bar Association’s “Support Your Local Broadcaster” event Sunday.

There aren’t three votes on the item "or it would have been voted,” said McFadden. The July sunset date for the substantially similar requirement should have “a strong forcing function on the item” and it may not get voted until that date gets closer, he said. If the FCC doesn’t act, the requirement will sunset, but McFadden and other panelists said that’s unlikely. The physical layer requirement was to sunset in March but was stayed by the FCC. McFadden said the agency could potentially do the same with the substantially similar sunset date, but he doesn’t expect that to happen.

The FCC should do more to help broadcasters in the 3.0 transition, Cassady said Sunday. “We can turn broadcasting into a residue of the black-and-white past from black-and-white movies, or we can broadcast it in 4KHDR and see what happens,” he said.