‘Very Public,’ but Also Private, ATSC 3.0 Demos Planned for CES, Says Sinclair's Point Man

There will be “two sides” to the CES demonstration of ATSC 3.0, including “a very public side,” plus invitation-only briefings in a private Wynn hotel suite, Aitken said. “I’m not at liberty to tell you everything, because we’re under NDA with Samsung and with Pearl,” he said of Sinclair’s nondisclosure agreement with its ATSC 3.0 memorandum of understanding (MOU) partners (see 1506170046). “But I can tell you the public side of what we do at CES will be focused on the big screen,” he said. “So the idea, as we put it, of better pictures and sound will be brought alive on the floor of CES.”

The plan is to use ATSC 3.0's physical transmission layer -- recently elevated at ATSC to the status of candidate standard -- to beam Ultra HD content to the CES show floor with high dynamic range (HDR), wide color and high frame rates, Aitken said. He deferred to Samsung the question of what specific content will be used for the CES demonstration. “I’m afraid we don’t have anything to share yet about our CES plans,” John Godfrey, Samsung senior vice president-public policy, emailed us Thursday.

HDR will be a feature that’s “easily appreciated by consumers,” Aitken said. “If you put a big picture next to a better picture, the consumer notices that, and they’re drawn" to the better picture, he said. “So that’s the easy part of what will be done at CES.” Building the transmission facility under STA will give the MOU partners “an easily accessible place for CES and NAB and not be burdened with having to deal with some low-power broadcaster,” while still having the ability “to broadcast on a 24/7 basis, and show off ATSC 3.0,” Aitken said. He cautioned that “all this stuff is experimental,” as “nobody has an ATSC 3.0-compliant system” available yet because the candidate standard for ATSC 3.0's physical transmission layer “is not even two months old.” But Aitken said “all the folks involved” in developing ATSC 3.0 commercial systems “are on the right track,” as evidenced by a recent interoperability "plugfest" in Shanghai he called “the best in ATSC history.”

As for the private-room demonstrations at the Wynn, “I literally can’t tell you exactly what we’re going to do,” but the Wynn demos will showcase ATSC 3.0 features and capabilities that won’t be showcased in the public demos on the CES show floor, Aitken said. The private demos will be “more future-facing” than the public showcasing, he said. The focus in the private room will be on the “IP distribution side” of ATSC 3.0 that Sinclair as a company has long advocated as a means of bringing ATSC 3.0 to commercial reality sooner rather than later, and with a diversity of capabilities not previously available through traditional TV broadcasting, he said.

Aitken sees the working purpose of the private-room demos as showcasing “the art of the possible,” he said. “We will be demonstrating what today for people are just ideas, but on functional hardware platforms,” he said. As for whether the MOU partners at CES will demonstrate ATSC 3.0 broadcasting to mobile devices, Aitken said: “You will see ATSC 3.0 operating on traditional mobile and portable devices.”

At CES, and later at the NAB Show, Sinclair wants to spur industry discussion about “how do we drive a profitable business” in ATSC 3.0, Aitken said. “ATSC 3.0 is not a technology play,” he said. “ATSC 3.0 is a business play, and those of us who have been entrenched in this process have been entrenched in this process because we are driving for an economic opportunity of the future,” he said. “We hope that people will walk away from the private demo with an understanding that, ‘Oh crap! Now I understand how this thing can succeed.’ Because there are still plenty of people who think that without an FCC mandate, it’ll never work.” At Sinclair, “we happen to believe that capitalism is still part of the stations’ vibrancy, and when you’ve got capitalists driving economic opportunity, what comes out of that is a real business,” Aitken said.