‘Rationale’ Strong For Unified Global DTV Standard, Lake Says
There’s very strong “rationale” for seeking global harmonization of a next-generation DTV standard, but it risks delays in implementing ATSC 3.0 or an alternative system, FCC Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake said in an interview Thursday during the Advanced Television Systems Committee annual meeting. That’s another reason he thinks it’s “unrealistic” for the FCC to slow the fast-tracked preparations for an incentive spectrum auction to wait for deployment of ATSC 3.0, as broadcasters have urged, Lake told us, much as he said in his ATSC keynote (CD May 10 p7).
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"My own sense is that the rationale for trying to coordinate internationally is very strong,” but it “may affect timing somewhat because you've got another set of players to coordinate with” through the worldwide Future of Broadcast TV initiative, Lake said. Benefits abound in seeking a unified global standard, Lake said. “You'd get the economies of scale. Right now, there are five or six digital standards around the world. It means you don’t have scale in manufacturing. There’s lots of reasons why at least a family of standards that would be compatible around the world makes sense. And I think it’s wonderful that people are trying to do that."
For “all the right reasons,” reaching agreement on a unified global DTV standard “would be a good thing to try,” but it would be wrong to describe that as a “prevailing opinion” inside the bureau or at the FCC as a whole, Lake said. “The commission really hasn’t had anything presented to it yet, and we're about to get two new commissioners, so I can’t really give you a commission view."
ATSC officials have said they expect ATSC 3.0 to be ready as a “candidate standard” by year-end 2015. Lake’s “sense” is that once ATSC 3.0 gains that stature, it will be ready to undergo final testing as a prelude to a formal vote adopting it as an official ATSC standard, he said. “It will only be at that point that we would take it up as a rulemaking and decide whether to bless it,” he said of FCC action on ATSC 3.0. “We won’t be ignorant at that point. We'll follow the process along the way. But it won’t be ready for commission action until it’s actually adopted by the ATSC."
Asked whether he thinks an ATSC 3.0 rulemaking can begin within calendar 2016, Lake said that depends on how quickly ATSC acts to adopt the standard. Even if the commission were to start an expedited rulemaking “to bless this wonderful new standard, you couldn’t have implementation until there were stations ready to broadcast and people ready to sell the licenses for it,” Lake said.
Meanwhile, Lake’s ATSC keynote, in which he politely rejected broadcasters’ calls for the FCC to delay the incentive auction to wait for ATSC 3.0 deployment, drew predictable reactions from broadcast and consumer electronics executives. At the conference, Jim Kutzner, PBS senior director-advanced technology, prefaced the ATSC 3.0 progress report he gave by thanking Lake for his “honesty.” But Kutzner, who chairs the ATSC working group that’s developing ATSC 3.0, confessed he didn’t like everything he heard Lake say about not delaying the incentive auction. However, CEA President Gary Shapiro, who didn’t attend the ATSC meeting but on several recent occasions has accused broadcasters of trying to “slow-walk” the auction (CD April 23 p6), hailed Lake’s remarks. On Lake’s stated support for the commission’s fast-tracking auction rules preparations this year and holding the auction in 2014 amid the threat of possible spectrum shortages in 2015, “I appreciate the sense of urgency this FCC has as evidenced by Mr. Lake’s comments,” Shapiro told us Friday by email.