ATSC 3.0 Task Force Report Expected 'Soon'
The NAB’s ATSC 3.0 task force, The Future of TV Initiative (see 2408300030), is expected to produce a final report “soon” members said, but broadcasters told us much of the impetus behind the effort has faded due to the coming leadership change at the FCC. Commissioner Brendan Carr, the agency's chairman-designate, is seen as more favorable to the 3.0 transition, broadcasters said. The task force first met in June 2023, and members said it would issue a final report in fall 2024. “It is a daunting effort to put that report together in a way that everyone can sign off on the language,” said Robert Folliard, a task force member and Gray Media senior vice president-government relations and distribution. “We expect the report to come out very soon,” an NAB spokesperson said.
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Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced the Future of TV Initiative at the NAB Show in 2023 as a NAB effort to smooth the way for the transition to 3.0 with input from stakeholders and the FCC. The task force's members are from public interest groups, MVPDs, the consumer electronics industry and low and full-power broadcasters. Broadcasters told us the effort was in part intended to keep the FCC’s attention on ATSC 3.0 issues with the goal of securing definitive ending dates for rules that currently require broadcasters to simulcast in 3.0 and 1.0 and keep the 3.0 broadcast “substantially similar" to the 1.0 programming stream. Those rules limit the spectrum capacity that can be devoted to 3.0 offerings, broadcasters have said (see 2404150031). Pearl TV, Public Knowledge and ACA Connects declined to comment.
With the coming Republican takeover at the FCC, keeping the agency mindful of 3.0 items is seen as less of a concern, broadcasters told us. In his portion of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan, Carr used 3.0 as an example of technological change the FCC should embrace, and in June he said he supports a definitive end date for mandatory simulcast of 1.0 and 3.0 signals (see 2406130045). The FCC’s other current Republican commissioner, Nathan Simington, lauded ATSC 3.0 in a statement Wednesday. “One-to-many over-the-air data distribution is several orders of magnitude more efficient than one-to-one transmission,” Simington said. “We just have to look to recent attempts to stream live events with millions of concurrent viewers on CDNs to understand that even our best-performing data networks need help smoothing peak loads. ATSC 3.0 can deliver just that, and so much more.” Nexstar CEO Perry Sook, who chairs the NAB board, said in November that pushing to complete the 3.0 transition is NAB’s number one priority with the incoming administration.
The group’s final report isn’t expected to break much new ground, task force members have told us. Entities on the task force haven’t shifted their positions much about the transition, and the report is expected to restate those positions largely, they said. That doesn’t mean the effort wasn't worthwhile, Folliard said. “Those meetings were incredibly valuable because it helped the broadcast industry to pressure test a lot of what we were thinking against folks in the public interest community, against folks in the cable and satellite community,” Folliard said. Before the Future of TV Initiative, broadcasters hadn’t considered how 3.0 would interact with DVRs and feedback from those meetings has led to that issue being addressed, he added. "We're all better off for it. We're probably a year ahead of schedule than where we would have otherwise been, because then those issues would have been surfacing now.”