Developments on ATSC 3.0 'Advancing Very Quickly,' Sinclair CEO Says
Developments on ATSC 3.0 are “advancing very quickly now,” Sinclair CEO David Smith said in Q&A on his company’s Wednesday earnings call. “I would expect that we’ll be on the Hill sometime in the next few months” and at the FCC, “probably getting ready to make an application on behalf of the industry to advance to the next television standard in this country,” said Smith of Sinclair's planned congressional and commission outreach on ATSC 3.0.
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Sinclair expects the full ATSC membership to vote “momentarily” to elevate the bootstrap signal ingredients of ATSC 3.0's physical layer to the status of a final standard, said Smith, whose company has been a strong advocate of seeing ATSC 3.0 commercialized sooner rather than later. The bootstrap technology is based heavily on Sinclair intellectual property, Sinclair has said. TG3, ATSC’s technology group responsible for developing ATSC 3.0, has voted to approve the ballot to elevate the bootstrap signal portion (specification A/321) of the ATSC 3.0's physical layer to the status of proposed standard, ATSC reported in early February. After the proposed standard ballot has passed TG3 and comments are resolved, the full ATSC membership will consider a ballot to approve A/321 as a final standard, ATSC has said.
ATSC President Mark Richer expects the A/321 ballot to go out to the full ATSC membership "in the next day or so," Richer told us Wednesday. Once the ballot is out, and assuming the membership approves it, a final standard on A/321 would be "about four weeks away," he said. A/321 would be the first ATSC 3.0 ingredient to reach final standard status, he said.
Sinclair is preparing to do a “full-blown demonstration” of an ATSC 3.0 single-frequency network between Washington and Baltimore, Smith said. That will “demonstrate what the future world will look like in the context of single-frequency networks and the ability to do directed advertising into zones, handing off city-to-city kinds of stuff,” he said.
Sinclair also expects “a full-blown demonstration of any number of capabilities” of ATSC 3.0 to be held at the NAB Show in April, Smith said. Sinclair also soon will be “hosting” an upcoming ATSC 3.0 “plug and play” for all manufacturers of ATSC 3.0 devices and equipment, he said of the event ATSC customarily calls a "plugfest." There’s “nothing more complicated than the people who manufacture devices and equipment,” he said. In a typical ATSC 3.0 plugfest, such as the one that ATSC held last fall in Shanghai (see 1511050048), all “get in a room and they start comparing notes and making sure their equipment all interfaces and does everything it’s supposed to do,” he said. Richer confirmed that Sinclair will host the next ATSC 3.0 plugfest, which is scheduled for the week of March 21 at a hotel in Hunt Valley, Maryland, near Sinclair headquarters.
The Internet protocol “opportunity” of ATSC 3.0 “is fairly straightforward -- we own it, so it’s ours,” Smith said in answering an analyst’s question about how Sinclair plans to "monetize" ATSC 3.0 and the potential windfall for the company if ATSC 3.0 commercially is widely adopted. “It’s possible that it becomes the global standard” for next-generation TV, Smith said of ATSC 3.0. “So how do you ascribe value to that, we’re not even going to try. You should assume that anybody who wants to watch television, whether it’s on virtual-reality devices, cars, machines, phones, [tablets], TV sets or whatever, it’s going to have our technology on it. So that’s just the reality of what's going to happen.”