ATSC Weighing ‘Virtual Options’ or Postponement for Annual Meeting in May
ATSC is “hatching a plan” to give members a “soapbox for the momentum that’s building into April” for the U.S. deployment of 3.0 products and services in 2020, President Madeleine Noland told us Thursday. “We’re in conversations with other organizations that might want to partner with us on that.”
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An ATSC booth planned for the NAB Show floor would have been the soapbox if COVID-19 hadn’t forced the cancellation of the April 18-22 event at the Las Vegas Convention Center (see 2003110036), said Noland. “We certainly support NAB’s choice” to scrub the Las Vegas show, she said. “As sad as it was, we would have done the same thing.” NAB CEO Gordon Smith, in an interview to be posted here Friday, told us on C-SPAN that the show closure was a tough decision and that 3.0 has use in emergency situations.
Noland’s understanding is that NAB is discussing “potential Plan B's,” she said. There’s industry backing for convening virtually “some semblance of what would have been the show in April, at some point, somehow,” she said. “If that happens, ATSC is ready to participate. We’d be excited to hear any kind of announcement, and would jump in for that.”
NAB has “nothing to share on our ‘Plan B’ plans at the moment,” emailed spokesperson Dennis Wharton. It expects “an announcement will be coming fairly soon following extensive dialog with our NAB Show community,” he said. Smith had told us his association was looking at adding virtual options and cited the group's October event in New York.
A “ton of momentum” behind 3.0 is “going on in the industry, though we can’t meet face to face right now,” said Noland. In hatching its own soapbox plan separate from NAB activities, it wants to “find ways to get the word out about all the cool stuff that is going on in our respective home offices,” even if “we can’t get together,” she said.
The goal is for ATSC’s initiative to be “synergistic” with NAB’s and “not be competitive in any way,” said Noland. She hopes for an ATSC announcement soon, she said. “We’re going to be working closely with NAB to ensure that nothing we do will undermine the things that they’re trying to do.”
The fate of ATSC’s annual conference May 20-21 in Washington is up in the air, said Noland. “We are actively monitoring the situation,” and “exploring alternatives” to holding an in-person event, she said. “Our hope is we’ll have most of that work done to the extent that we need to in order to make an announcement.” Her “guess” is that an announcement “will be soon,” and “potentially within the coming days, depending on whether we can nail down a couple of final things,” she said.
“Virtual options” for holding the conference “are things we’re exploring in depth,” said Noland. ATSC also is studying the "possibility of postponement," she said. "We’re looking at all the different options, so that when we do make an announcement, we’ll have an entirely clear plan what we intend to do if we don’t convene face to face.”
ATSC members are “well-versed” in teleconferencing, said Noland. “The majority of our meetings do take place via teleconference anyway.” ATSC committees “convene face-to-face every other month,” she said. Regularly scheduled face-to-face conferences planned for next week were “converted to remote meetings,” she said.
But “I miss all those people,” said Noland. “It’s fun to get together, and there’s all sorts of intangible benefits to being in the same room at the same time, not to mention just personally catching up with each other.” No one prefers to be convening telephonically, “but obviously we don’t have much choice right now,” she said.
Noland’s hope is that the deployment of 3.0 goods and services in the top 40 markets by the end of 2020 can happen as planned, “if things don’t dramatically worsen” with the coronavirus, she said. “A lot of the work that’s going into this has to do with legal agreements,” and much of that can take place telephonically, she said. “I can’t believe that this isn’t going to impact things at all.” Whether COVID-19 will have a “major impact or slow things down a little bit, it’s hard to say,” she said.
There are “industries out there that know how to cope with adversity, and the broadcast industry is one of them,” said Noland. “These folks know how to get it together in a crisis. ... They just know a thing or two about how to be resilient.”