NAB Wants ATSC 3.0 Timeline and Tuner Mandate

Broadcasters need the FCC to establish a transition timeline to make certain all the stations in a market switch together and provide regulatory certainty for TV makers, NAB said. “Few, if any, broadcasters will be willing to be the first to turn off their ATSC 1.0 signal and put themselves at a disadvantage relative to other broadcasters,” the petition said. “This cycle of hesitation -- where manufacturers delay due to market uncertainty, and broadcasters delay due to concerns over audience retention -- will ultimately slow the broader adoption of ATSC 3.0 and prevent consumers from receiving its full benefits.” A coordinated timeline would also prevent consumers from having to guess when they will need new devices and lead to mass production of 3.0 devices and thus lower prices, NAB said. “Without this shift, broadcasters are forced to split their finite spectrum between the two standards, limiting the bandwidth available for ATSC 3.0’s most advanced capabilities and harming consumers in the process.”

NAB’s modeling “confirms that supply-chain resources and technical crews for ATSC 3.0 service implementation exist to meet demand for an early 2028 transition deadline for stations in the top 55 markets,” said the petition, which also allowed for waivers or an opt-out process from the phase one transition date for smaller stations and noncommercial educational stations. Low-power TV stations and translators would not be required to transition to 3.0 under NAB’s plan.

Broadcast industry officials have said they expect FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to be receptive to the petition. He has made comments supporting a 3.0 transition in the past (see 2405140047) and included a nod to 3.0 in his chapter of the Project 2025 plan. NAB President Curtis LeGeyt met with Carr on Friday to discuss the proposal, according to an ex parte filing. The petition also quotes a 2024 Carr statement saying that broadcasting had reached a “break the glass” moment and resurrects the term “broadcast internet,” a rebrand for ATSC 3.0 datacasting that Carr advocated for as a commissioner in 2020 (see 2006090060). NAB pointed to the advanced emergency information capabilities of 3.0 and its potential to serve as a backup to the global positioning system (see 2304170012) as among the reasons the FCC should speed the transition.

NAB’s petition amounts to “forcing NEXTGEN TV onto every consumer and manufacturer,” Consumer Technology Association (CTA) CEO Gary Shapiro said in a statement. “This is a product that costs more and consumers have not embraced." Requiring a nationwide shift to 3.0 will impose increased costs "at a time when the TV set has proved to be the rare deflationary product,” he added.

Distributor, consumer and public interest groups that participated in NAB’s task force on the 3.0 transition, the Future of TV Initiative (see 2501170077), raised concerns during that effort that such a shift would be costly for multichannel video programming distributors (MVPD) and leave some consumers without access to broadcasting. “While I appreciate the need for broadcasters to improve their technology, I think there are significant issues with ATSC 3.0 right now,” said Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer. He was critical of broadcaster plans to use digital rights management to encrypt their content. “I believe that broadcast should fundamentally be a free and open service, and using proprietary encryption works against that, driving up equipment costs and limiting fair uses like home recording.”

The ATSC 3.0 docket (16-142) contains hundreds of comments from individual people opposed to digital rights management in 3.0, possibly in connection with campaigns started by YouTube personalities (see 2307110073). NAB said viewers will retain the right to record broadcasts and use features such as ad-skipping and rewind.

The FCC “should obviously” update its TV tuner requirements to match the transition, NAB said. CTA has long opposed the imposition of a 3.0 tuner requirement for devices. Both NAB and CTA jointly opposed ATSC 3.0 tuner mandates in 2017, calling them counterproductive. In the latest petition, NAB asked the FCC to require 3.0 tuners in new TVs “as soon as practical but no later than” the February 2028 phase one transition date. “While broadcasters would encourage the Commission to update the tuner rule to include ATSC 3.0 reception well in advance of the start of the ATSC 1.0 sunset, we also understand that the consumer electronics industry needs time to build the capability throughout its supply chains,” NAB said. About 14 million TVs with 3.0 capability have already been sold in the U.S., it said.

If ATSC 3.0 “had real value, they wouldn’t need government mandates to sustain it,” Shapiro said. “This administration has made cutting red tape a priority, yet here in 2025, broadcasters are pushing for new regulation to benefit themselves at the expense of competition and consumer choice.”

The FCC should also require “that television receivers make broadcast services available to a consumer in the same or fewer steps needed to access any other video content on the same device,” NAB said. Remote controls that have buttons to access streaming services should also have buttons to access broadcasting, and user interfaces should display broadcasting on the first page of content sources, it said. “We are concerned that certain incentives may lead manufacturers to privilege largely unregulated paid services over the only free, over-the-air broadcast services that are required to serve the public interest.”

NAB also said that some technical rules related to MVPD carriage and must-carry may need to be revised to account for the new standard. MVPD participants in the Future of TV Initiative raised concerns that the 3.0 transition would impose costs on MVPDs, require new equipment, and strain their capacity for data. Those costs don’t “represent a significant impediment to continued carriage” after a 3.0 transition, NAB said. “Establishing a clear timeline for the transition to ATSC 3.0 would allow MVPDs to plan, budget, and manage the associated costs of ATSC 3.0 equipment.” ACA Connects and NCTA didn’t comment.

The FCC should also end the requirement now that 3.0 and 1.0 broadcasts be substantially similar and ease the regulatory process for broadcasters seeking to host each other's signals when shifting to 3.0, NAB said. The substantially similar requirement is already set to expire on July 17, 2027, but the FCC shouldn’t wait that long “to sunset a requirement that has outlived its usefulness and now only serves to hinder the transition.”