Pearl TV Members ‘Meeting Our Mark’ on ATSC 3.0's 2020 Rollout, Says Schelle
Pearl TV has an ATSC 3.0 “rollout plan for 2020” that includes launching services in 61 markets by the end of next year, and has “shared that” with TV makers LG, Samsung and Sony, Managing Director Anne Schelle told the TV2020 conference at NAB Show New York Wednesday. “We are meeting our mark in terms of enabling these services on a market-to-market basis."
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There’s a chance that 3.0 receiver “dongles” will be sold on Amazon in 2020, “but we really care about the big manufacturers coming in,” said Schelle. Pearl will transmit a “simulcast stream that’s in the new Nextgen TV service standard,” she said. “When you buy a television set, what will happen when you turn to the OTA portion of the set, you will get the application and you’ll start watching that channel. It will be enhanced. You can do things that you can’t do on your 1.0.” Consumers “will also get all of their 1.0 at the same time,” she said.
CES 2020 will be the “launchpad” for 3.0 TVs in the U.S., said John Taylor, LG Electronics USA senior vice president-public affairs and communications, speaking as chair of CTA’s Video Division board, not on LG’s behalf. “We expect a variety of manufacturers to have a range of sets on the market.”
The board expects to see “real working sets” on the CES show floor in January for delivery in the industry’s customary “spring-summer time frame,” said Taylor. The Nextgen TV logo that CTA fashioned under the board’s supervision (see 1909260021) will “help consumers understand when they go out to purchase these sets what they are,” he said. “The messaging behind that is still being worked on in cooperation with broadcasters.”
When broadcasters move to 3.0, “we now have a much more sophisticated set of tools to address the complicated markets that we’re in within the core business,” said Spectrum Co President John Hane. “The ATSC 1.0 platform is not going to take us very much further in the core business. The market is evolving beyond it.”
Every service provider “that is large and sophisticated in this economy is constantly tweaking its offering with very fine gradations to see what the consumer and revenue responses are,” said Hane. Broadcasters using 1.0, by comparison, are “binary,” he said. “We have no tools to tweak anything to learn what works and what does not work. We’re really sort of flying blind with rough measurement, lousy indirect data.”
In exploring possible new 3.0 business opportunities, Spectrum Co is “looking at a lot,” including “adjacent opportunities in media distribution,” said Hane. “Some of the things that intrigue me are those services that require a fairly low data rate, but have much higher value on a per-bit basis.”
Pearl sees 3.0 as “a tremendously flexible platform,” said Schelle. “It’s a new OS for broadcasters and it does have the ability to enable content-security protection, which allows for different models that we can’t do today.” Broadcasters “don’t know where things are going to be necessarily in five years with our various distribution partnerships,” she said. “This platform allows us to, overnight, change that.”
Schelle pegs the cost for Pearl to launch 3.0 in 61 markets by the end of 2020 at a relatively modest $72 million, she said. “Back in 1995, when I was a founder of American Personal Communications and we built out the first digital wireless system in D.C., it was $150 million,” she said. “So we’re getting a big pipe going in 61 markets” for just “pennies on the dollar to get into a video-distribution IP business,” she said.
The $72 million is “a pretty real number,” said Schelle. “Broadcasters are utilizing existing infrastructure” to transition to 3.0, she said. “They have towers in the ground. With the repack, they were provided with upgradable transmitters that are easily upgraded to 3.0. So in terms of getting into the business and getting things started, it’s not a significant expend.”
Public Media Group, the venture that 31 public broadcasters and Osborn Engineering formed earlier this year with a $5 billion war chest from Blackstone and other investors, plans San Francisco as its first 3.0 market, said CEO Joe Chinnici. PMG’s business model is to build 3.0 infrastructure and lease it to TV stations that want to transition to 3.0 without building the infrastructure themselves, he said.
PMG is focusing first on “the real property infrastructure,” said Chinnici. “The second area is in the software infrastructure,” he said. To “execute” 3.0, “you need to be able to manage your content,” he said. “We’re spending a lot of time in the software-infrastructure layer.” PMG expects to begin its San Francisco buildout in Q1, he said. PMG told FCC Media Bureau staff Oct. 10 it thinks its efforts will help “facilitate nationwide market transitions” to 3.0, said a notice Tuesday in docket 16-142.