Simington: Carr Chose Not to Aid ATSC 3.0 Transition

“Every day that they don't do that, it strikes me that that's a conscious choice not to take that step,” he said. “I don’t know what the challenge is. You don’t need a majority to do that.”

Simington left the FCC last week. The agency didn't comment.

Simington also said that as a commissioner, he had raised with Carr the matter of broadcasting’s economic peril. “I said we should expect to start seeing bankruptcies and dis-affiliations,” Simington said. “I didn't really get much of a response.” In April 2023, in a statement repeatedly quoted in broadcaster FCC filings, Carr said broadcasting had reached a “break-glass” moment, Simington pointed out. “It's time to deliver on that promise.”

Asked if he disagreed with other choices that Carr made, Simington seemed to soften his earlier comments. “I’m not here to criticize the job the chairman is doing,” he said. “All I’m saying is the ATSC 3.0 community is entitled to have its priorities.”

Broadcasters have long said that easing the application process for stations to host each other’s signals would make the transition process easier. NAB has been asking the FCC to act since at least 2021. Simington also said the agency should quickly set a date for an ATSC 1.0 sunset and should work to allow ATSC 3.0 datacasting to serve as a viable revenue stream for broadcasters. “I look at datacasting as, over the long term, becoming the classified ads that will underwrite FCC support for over-the-air journalism and emergency management in perpetuity.”

Broadcaster datacasting is suited to delivering identical software patches and updates to numerous devices simultaneously and would be perfect for providing cybersecurity updates to the growing number of connected IoT devices, Simington said. “We're going to have escalating patch traffic to uniform, headless and automatically managed devices, most of which will never see human input at the security level.”

The former commissioner said broadcasting is a “major load-bearing structure in American life,” but policymakers don’t adequately understand the technology behind it and its integration with emergency alerting. “The direction we should be taking is to make crystal clear that there is a public interest in free over-the-air TV, journalism, weather, emergency support, and therefore there's a public interest in minimum viability of the broadcasting economy, and finding a way to make that happen,” Simington said. “I'm no longer on the commission. I don't get a vote, but let's pressure the commission to make these changes.”

Conference Notebook

Broadcasters told the FCC that ATSC 3.0 would provide advanced emergency information but so far haven’t delivered it, said Digital Alert Systems’ Ed Czarnecki during a panel on emergency alerting. Making good on that offer could help persuade the FCC to approve NAB’s proposal to sunset ATSC 1.0 by 2030, he said. “Didn’t we already promise all this to the FCC?”

PBS New Mexico’s Jason Quinn said he has implemented advanced emergency alerting with detailed maps on his 3.0 station. Public broadcasters can make themselves “indispensable” by becoming an intrinsic part of the emergency alerting system, he said, adding that he's currently looking to offer emergency messages translated into Navajo and Vietnamese and to provide more geotargeted emergency information. “I need to figure out a way to both feed the 35 sites that we have and feed the Navajo Nation not only the important information, but in a way that their community will culturally take it in and trust it.”