Avis Budget ‘More Than Willing' to Invest to Get ATSC 3.0 Into Cars, Says CIO
Avis Budget is contributing “both our fleet and our addressable audience” to test mobile ATSC 3.0 reception through the Pearl TV-led model-market project in Phoenix, said Chief Information Officer Arthur Orduna on a 3.0 panel at the TV of Tomorrow conference Thursday in Manhattan. Orduna has a history with cable, having worked for the Canoe advertising venture owned by major U.S. operators, and also for ADT.
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The car-rental company has “connected” about 100,000 of its 800,000-vehicle global fleet “completely telematically,” including all of the Zipcar fleet it owns, said Orduna. With the average customer renting for four days and spending about $450, the company is focused on “how to expand and enhance the customer journey and the user experience,” he said. “That’s what led us to take a look at ATSC 3.0.”
Pearl is a “big believer” in 3.0's “delivery to automotive, largely because of the economics of our pipe,” said Managing Director Anne Schelle. On “cost per bit” for delivering content to the car, 3.0. “bar none, is far superior to 5G and 4G for certain use cases,” she said.
In South Korea, where 3.0 was launched in time for this year's Winter Olympics in PyeongChang and is “doing really, really well, they’re on their third iteration of chipset, and they’re also going right into cars,” said Schelle. “You’re going to see Korean car manufacturers with ATSC 3.0, which is great for us, because we don’t have to work that tech out.”
Avis Budget is “more than willing to make the investments” to get 3.0 into cars, said Orduna. “We obviously follow with great interest” what the Korean automakers are doing with 3.0 “because we buy a lot of cars from Korean manufacturers,” he said.
“As opposed" to competitors "waiting for the lessons to be learned, I want to be out there on the cutting edge, and in some cases the bleeding edge, and actually start learning those lessons from the perspective of our customers,” said Orduna. Though it’s “definitely the early days from a scalability perspective," the time "is now" to start "learning those lessons,” he said.
Schelle was involved in the commercial launch of early “cellular systems,” and “that stuff did not work,” she said. By comparison, “this works,” she said of 3.0. “We’ve got 4K HDR on the air” in Phoenix, “and it’s a beautiful picture,” she said. “The basics are there, and the basics are important because -- guess what? -- consumers love the basics. That’s what’s coming out of our research.” She defined those basics as Ultra HD-quality video with immersive audio. Pearl’s “consumer lab” research in Phoenix found consumers would be willing to pay up to $300 more for a 3.0-capable TV if it had those features, she said. Pearl will release additional research findings at CES, Schelle told us.
Dolby Labs has a “team” working on commercialization of the new AC-4-based audio features for 3.0, “which came up really, really high with consumers” in Pearl’s Phoenix lab testing, said Schelle. “These are features that are not currently available on any platform, and so we’re honing in on those.” Dolby didn’t comment.