No Need for ATSC 3.0 Tuner Mandate, Except for 'National Security,' Broadcasters Say

“We live in a market-driven world today,” Smith said Wednesday. “We’re sophisticated enough as marketers and delivery guys to figure out how to get the consumer to want our product,” without the need for a government-mandated ATSC 3.0 tuner requirement, he said. “I don’t think it’s that complicated.”

The Sinclair chief suggested “by way of example” of having “my anchor at my television station” holding up an ATSC 3.0 receiver device before the camera. Smith said he would then have the anchor say, “If you’d like to have me with you everywhere you go for the rest of your life, and know exactly what’s going on in your neighborhood, your schools, et cetera, et cetera, go get this device.” Smith thinks “the market will demand the availability of local television stations everywhere, all the time,” without the need for an ATSC 3.0 tuner mandate, he said. “We create that demand. We will do that.”

Smith, Sinclair's incoming executive chairman, effective Jan. 1, is “opposed to the notion that we should do things on a mandatory basis” on ATSC 3.0, he said. “If the government for some reason woke up one day and deemed it a national security issue” that every TV should have emergency-alerting reception capability, “that’s their business,” Smith said.

Raycom Media CEO Pat LaPlatney chimed in to say that for the South Korean launch of ATSC 3.0 services in 2017, set makers such as LG and Samsung are building “dual tuners” into their products to receive both ATSC 3.0 and the existing DTV service. “They can easily replicate that here,” LaPlatney said. He agreed with Smith that broadcasters are “good marketers, we don’t necessarily need a mandate." If, however, "for public safety reasons, there’s some interesting functionality in 3.0 that can wake up devices and other such, there’s an argument there” for a tuner mandate, he said. Smith agreed, quickly adding, though, that “it’s not our argument, it’s the government’s argument.”

Nexstar CEO Perry Sook thinks “the market moves faster than the government,” he said in reply to an audience questioner who expressed impatience with how long the ATSC 3.0 might take without a government tuner requirement. “What would you mandate?” Sook asked. “What if you mandated the wrong receiver standard or something like that?” The migration to ATSC 3.0 is “moving quickly,” said Sook. “The transition piece of it is nuance that’s hard.” Broadcasters “have a real opportunity to get moving on this, and there isn’t a quick, easy, flip-the-switch solution” to the ATSC 3.0 transition, he said. The move to color TV from black-and-white “end to end, took 21 years,” Sook said. “This isn’t going to take 21 years.”

With Smith leading the charge, he, Sook and LaPlatney formed a coalition during the hourlong panel discussion to advocate the rapid commercialization of ATSC 3.0. Fox TV Stations CEO Jack Abernethy, who espouses a more cautious approach to ATSC 3.0, joked that he was invited on the panel to play the role of the “uninformed cynic.”

Asked by the moderator to score his “enthusiasm” for ATSC 3.0 on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the highest, Abernethy said he gives ATSC 3.0 a 10 “from a technological standpoint.” The “capabilities” are “really terrific,” he said. But he would give it only a 5 “in terms of the business models,” he said. Nexstar’s Sook, on the other hand, gives ATSC 3.0 a 10 because “we’re all in,” he said. “It’s the next technological evolution of our business, and will provide, at the base, an enhanced viewing experience for our viewers and for our advertisers. It’s just a matter now of how fast we can roll things out.”

When it came turn for Smith to give his ranking, he asked, to audience laughter, “Is there any number higher than 10?” Smith thinks “it is essential for this industry to survive that we have 3.0 in the marketplace as fast as possible,” he said. “The opportunity is unlimited in terms of what we can do” with the technology, Smith said. Broadcasters “don’t have any choice” but to be in ATSC 3.0, he said. “If you want to compete in today’s world, which is a totally 100 percent mobile world, mobile platforms, mobile advertising, you have no choice but to be in this business. Otherwise, you should go home. The television set hanging on the wall in your house, it’s not irrelevant yet, but it’s becoming less relevant as we go forward.”

There “still is a skepticism about this that I had, but it’s waning,” Fox’s Abernethy said of ATSC 3.0. Abernethy views himself as a “buyer” of it, not a “seller,” he said. “I’m looking at this from a buying standpoint. I’m very suspicious of how big this could be. But as I look at it, even in the most conservative of plans, it makes sense to have bigger pipe to deliver our product to.” He’s still “a little skeptical about the size” of the market opportunity, including estimates from Pearl TV that ATSC 3.0 has the potential to become a $20 billion industry business, he said.

Smith thinks that “IP addresses” as a means of using ATSC 3.0 receivers for procuring reliable viewership data are “the ultimate holy grail for this industry,” he said, referencing the addressable ATSC 3.0 receiver designs Sinclair recently announced it’s working on (see 1611020025). “Broadcasters have no clue what goes on in the real world,” Smith said. “We have no legitimate, honest-to-god audience measurement data whatsoever. Does anybody here believe Nielsen’s ratings? Does anybody here believe Rentrak’s?” When an “IP-based platform is launched, every device in the marketplace, I now know who it is and where it is,” he said. “I can now sell a specific ad to that.” Abernethy jumped in to say that if broadcasters could use 3.0 to “create a measuring system that’s actually accurate, that would be more valuable” than all the other benefits.

NAB Show New York Notebook

NAB’s “hope” was that the FCC would issue its NPRM on ATSC 3.0 by the end of this year, but it’s looking like it will Q1, said Chief Technology Officer Sam Matheny. “I have to caveat everything, given the election that we had a couple of days ago, when we found out there will be a significant change in administrations,” he said. “But this is what we’re working on now. The FCC is actively working on it. They’ve also got something called an auction that’s also occupying a bit of their time."