Sinclair ‘Bullish’ on Ultra HD, but ‘Not to the Exclusion of Everything Else,’ Aitken Says

Sinclair is “bullish for Ultra HD to the point that it’s either a competitive advantage or a competitive balancing act,” Aitken told us. “You certainly have to have quality product in the television environment because that’s the business of today," he said. "If you’re going to draw in new advertisers, if you’re going to draw in new dollars, if you’re going to draw in new viewers, if you’re going to draw in all the requisite pieces that are the core of today’s business, then certainly quality plays a role, but not to the exclusion of everything else.”

Television is “a 24-hour-a-day machine that we’re operating,” Aitken said. “There are only peak times when you need a large number of your bits dedicated to a single service, in this case, ultra high definition. But when you’re not running ultra high definition, you have lots of bit capacity, and if those bits are every bit as good in the wireless world, then there certainly have to be economics associated with that that open up opportunities that are not open to us today.” Sinclair also “happens to believe there are opportunities in the automotive world, and we will explore that,” he said. Through the MOU with Samsung and Pearl TV, “we’ll explore a lot of things,” Aitken said. “My mother always said, two heads are better than one. In this case, three organizations are better than one.”

The ATSC 3.0 standards process is “moving as fast as one could imagine it could move,” said Aitken, a longtime advocate of seeing ATSC 3.0 commercialized sooner rather than later. Sinclair “made a fundamental decision about a year ago to bear down on the ATSC process,” he said. A year ago, “I made no secret of the fact that we were looking at bringing our ideas and our technologies to some other standardization organizations,” he said of the effort by Sinclair through its ONE Media venture to bring about the creation of a new TV standard by designing technology to allow broadcasters to send their signals over wireless networks (see 1405080082).

Sinclair “made no bones when we said that if this process can’t be brought on track, we’ll go someplace else,” such as the IEEE or Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers, Aitken said of the ATSC 3.0 standards-setting effort. “When we made that a publicly known fact, it was Pearl that was the first to respond and say, ‘Whoa! What’s going on? It can’t be that bad.’” Sinclair decided “at the end of the day” that it would “stay engaged with ATSC, we would begin to work with other broadcasters, we would lend them our knowledge and technical skills,” he said.

As for the MOU itself, Samsung, Pearl TV and Sinclair have committed to work together through the end of 2016 to “perform technical, field, and consumer testing and other collaboration” to support the speedy commercial implementation of ATSC 3.0, the companies said in a joint announcement. They’ll also “research ways to enhance reception and to deliver new, immersive services,” such as Ultra HD, high dynamic range, portable reception, interactivity, targeted advertising and 21:9 ultra-wide content, they said. The companies also will “focus on defining product concepts and technologies that enhance consumer interest and support infrastructure requirements,” they said. They’ll also “work to demonstrate to the public the opportunities and potential benefits” that ATSC 3.0 will afford, they said.

ATSC “is making great progress” on ATSC 3.0 and is “on track” to complete all the “candidate standard parts” by the end of 2015, John Godfrey, Samsung Electronics America senior vice president-public policy, told us Wednesday. Samsung and Sinclair collaborated closely on the “boot strap” technology that was the first ATSC 3.0 ingredient to be elevated to candidate standard (see 1505070022), Godfrey said. Godfrey also collaborated with Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle when she headed up the Open Mobile Video Coalition on mobile DTV, he said.“Given that the ATSC 3.0 standardization is moving along really well, we think it’s a natural, logical next step for industry players to begin looking beyond the standard to work on pre-commercial activities to make the standard a success.” Once a candidate standard is done, those who would implement the details will have a chance to build equipment and test the standard “in a real world environment,” ATSC 3.0's framers said in an early-March statement (see 1503030025). “That’s where all of the poking and prodding will be done with the elements of the system,” they said then. “It’s a trial of new technology, and a chance to see if anything was overlooked when developing the standard.”

Though Samsung, Pearl TV and Sinclair still “have a lot of planning to do,” the companies expect to begin ATSC 3.0 testing “as soon as possible, not waiting until after the candidate standard is done,” Godfrey said. “That means we’re going to have to be a little bit flexible. We’re going to be working with prototypes. Obviously we may have to change them to reflect changes that happen in the standard. But the engineers tell me that’s possible to do.”

The three partner companies “are really enthusiastic about ATSC 3.0,” Godfrey said. “We’re not the only ones that are, but I think you’ve got a pretty significant cross-section here, because Samsung’s the world’s largest consumer electronics company and Pearl and Sinclair represent a whole lot of the local broadcasting industry and a whole lot of the country. So we feel like it’s a pretty significant partnership to work with these folks.” Though the MOU has an 18-month term that expires at the end of 2016, “we can extend it or shorten it if we needed to, it’s pretty informal,” he said. “We’re planning on this being a significant, sustained effort. This is not just a one-time little project.” The three companies haven’t discussed a process for adding more companies to the MOU, “so if it comes up, we’ll need to address it then,” he said. The MOU is “an equal collaboration” among the three, he said.

Samsung “is optimistic that broadcasters will transmit Ultra HD 4K with ATSC 3.0,” Godfrey said. It also thinks some broadcasters will even “move beyond 4K to include high dynamic range and wide color gamut, because that produces just a dynamite picture quality, really a terrific experience for consumers,” he said. ATSC 3.0 is “a flexible toolkit and different broadcasters will use it in different ways,” he said. “But we think that certainly at least a significant portion of broadcasters are going to want to send the best-quality picture because that will attract consumers’ interest.”

The testing that flows from the MOU will be “the pre-market validation and development work that needs to be done in preparation for a commercial launch” of ATSC 3.0, Pearl TV's Schelle told us Wednesday. ATSC will be issuing “multiple ballots over the next six months” to elevate various component parts to candidate standard status, Schelle said. “It’s a short window, and we can easily start to develop what those applications and services will look like. We basically know what they are, and by the time the candidate standards are finalized on a ballot-by-ballot basis, we’ll be able to test those as we go along. So this enables us to rapidly implement, as opposed to waiting.”

There’s no regulatory component to the MOU, Schelle told us. “This has nothing to do with the transition or the auction,” she said. “Pearl has been on the record that we think it’s very important that the auction move forward on time and we support that.” Pearl wants ATSC 3.0 to be ready “for broadcasters to implement, post-auction,” she said.