Sinclair’s NAB Show Goal Is to ‘Accentuate’ ATSC 3.0 as ‘All-IP-Based’ Standard
In ATSC 3.0, Sinclair plans in a hospitality suite at the NAB Show to go “beyond what we demonstrated at CES” (see 1603220032) and showcase “some very new business opportunities” using the next-gen broadcasting standard, Mark Aitken, Sinclair vice president-advanced technology, told us. The demonstrations at NAB will be “tied to very real entities” -- companies that Sinclair is partnering with to showcase ATSC 3.0's capabilities -- the names of which most people “will know off the bat,” but won’t “typically” associate with TV broadcasting, Aitken said, not giving specifics.
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Sinclair hopes the participation of such partnering companies in the NAB demonstrations will “accentuate the fact that this is an all-IP-based broadcast standard,” Aitken said of ATSC 3.0. As such, “there are multiple businesses that can be built on top of broadcast-spectrum opportunities,” he said. That ATSC 3.0 is based on Internet protocol is “increasingly being grasped” within the broadcast industry, but it’s still “little understood about what a pivotal opportunity it is for broadcasters,” he said.
Aitken thinks “the business at large” for the TV broadcast industry “has always been about television,” he said. “But when you have an IP pipeline -- and that’s all it is, it happens to be a wireless IP pipeline -- there are multiple businesses that can be built on that capability,” he said.
With a platform like ATSC 3.0 that’s “agnostic to the service,” if one wants to use it to do television, “you can do television, and we will unquestionably have the most modern, the most capable, the most gorgeous, the mostest of the mostest television capability,” Aitken said. “But that’s only one of the things that we can do. We can offer music services. We can offer data distribution.” ATSC 3.0 is a platform that can be “perfectly aligned with multiple other OFDM-based waveforms,” such as LTE, Aitken said. That capability is “baked into the backbone” of ATSC 3.0, he said.
ATSC 3.0's framers realized early on “that we had an opportunity to build something more than a simple television standard,” Aitken said. “We built a flexible standard that provides opportunity for the future. TV, check it off. Music, check it off. Data transfer and offload, check it off. Anything that can be carried across the Internet, Wi-Fi, mobile broadband or any other IP platform can be carried across broadcast. We don’t know what all those opportunities are.” But at NAB, Sinclair will show a “handful of distinctly different opportunities built on the backbone of an all-IP wireless broadcast standard,” he said.
In the NAB demonstrations, there will be no trouble recognizing the company Sinclair is partnering with to showcase ATSC 3.0's “data distribution off-load side,” Aitken said. “We’re going to show an actual demonstration of this happening. People are going to go, ‘Oh my word, that’s about the Internet. That’s about a business that we’re not in that we could be in.’ And it’s easy to see how because it’s already baked into the standard.”