A recent spate of broadcast mergers is “putting pressure” on the FCC’s proposal to eliminate the UHF discount, Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake said on Friday at the Practising Law Institute’s Institute on Telecommunications Policy & Regulation. The deals, which include Gray’s purchase of Schurz’s stations and the proposed Media General/Meredith and Nexstar/Media General combinations, are seen as part of a scale “arms race” between broadcasters and multichannel video programming distributors, Lake said.
Moving to the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard would provide enhanced emergency communications to the public and first responders, the need for which was underscored by the recent terrorist attacks on Paris, said numerous speakers at the NAB-sponsored Smart Spectrum Summit Wednesday. Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., and FirstNet CEO Michael Poth -- both former police officers -- said first responders need dependable, fast communications that include data and video.
ATSC President Mark Richer expects a decision on an audio codec for ATSC 3.0 “either very late this year or the very beginning of next year,” he told us Friday. Dec. 8 marks a year since ATSC released its call for proposals on ATSC 3.0 audio (see 1412090019). The decision will boil down to a choice between Dolby AC-4 and the MPEG-H consortium of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor, the two contestants that have entered the ATSC 3.0 audio derby.
The “vision” at nine-company broadcaster consortium Pearl TV of how the transition to ATSC 3.0 “might occur” foresees “no government-funded set-top box converter” program, as in the transition from analog TV to digital, Pat LaPlatney, senior vice president at Pearl member Raycom Media, told an NAB Show New York workshop Thursday.
Kicking off the TV incentive auction on its appointed March 29 start date is among FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's top-most priorities, said Gigi Sohn, his counselor, at a Practising Law Institute event Thursday. The idea that the current FCC is more divisive than previous ones is “a bunch of nonsense,” Sohn said, referring to a recent story (see 1510280062). “In the past, there were interparty battles,” Sohn said, saying past FCCs have been similarly contentious. For that Oct. 29 story, the agency was provided a chance to comment and declined.
There needs to be “a business entity” that drives the commercial adoption of ATSC 3.0, and “those pieces are being lined up,” Mark Aitken, Sinclair vice president-advanced technology, told us. “If you ask me, what’s going to drive this thing forward, it’s going to be the equivalent of something like the Wi-Fi Alliance,” Aitken said of the group formed by big tech companies in 1999 as the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (see 0209170020) and later renamed the Wi-Fi Alliance to promote and certify Wi-Fi products and services. “Think of this Wi-Fi Alliance being called something like the IP Broadcast Alliance,” Aitken said. “There was a standard in the analog days built around being able to convey pictures and sound over the air,” he said. “TV was the one thing.” But in ATSC 3.0, “we’ve got this broadcast platform, and it’s all IP-based,” Aitken said. “It’s a tremendous economic engine, but TV is only one of the services that it has to offer.” Aitken sees ATSC 3.0 as an opportunity to use existing TV services as an economic springboard “to get into new services that are possible because we have a wireless IP platform,” he said. “For me, that is the story. The story is IP broadcast.”
Sinclair subsidiary One Media got special temporary authority (STA) from the FCC to build and operate a “complete transmission facility” in Las Vegas that will beam “experimental” ATSC 3.0 content in Ultra HD to the floor of CES in January and the NAB Show in April, Mark Aitken, Sinclair vice president-advanced technology, told us Thursday. The transmission facility, which will come online just before Thanksgiving and will operate during CES on vacant Channel 39, is part of the “full-blown” ATSC 3.0 demonstration that Sinclair and its partners are planning for CES, as disclosed Wednesday by Sinclair CEO David Smith (see 1511040026).
High dynamic range “will ultimately be part of the ATSC 3.0 video specification, allowing broadcasters to compete effectively with other distributors of HDR content,” such as over-the-top (OTT) video providers and marketers of Ultra HD Blu-ray players and discs, said Alan Stein, Technicolor vice president-research and development, in an interview in the November issue of The Standard, ATSC’s monthly online newsletter. The S34-1 ad hoc group on video technology that Stein chairs reached consensus on the use of the H.265 video codec and its Main-10 profile, Stein said. “HDR solutions will need to be 10-bit and compatible with this specification." Stein agrees “there’s huge interest in broadcast HDR,” he said. But over-the-air HDR faces “some particular challenges” that are “quite different” from streaming HDR over the top or delivering HDR through physical media like Ultra HD Blu-ray, he said. Broadcast TV’s live production environment, regional opt-outs and interstitial advertising all “contribute to an environment that is quite different from offline-produced content,” he said. “That said, there is a real fear of fragmented HDR solutions entering the marketplace, which could confuse consumers and hurt adoption. It’s important that ATSC specify technologies that are adapted to our unique environment and can be deployed at scale across various devices when ATSC 3.0 launches.” So elusive was consensus within S34-1 on HDR that it’s possible the candidate standard draft for ATSC 3.0 video wouldn't have HDR included, Stein told the ATSC 3.0 Boot Camp conference in May (see 1505130058). ATSC President Mark Richer thinks his group is “still on track to have most ATSC 3.0 elements approved or balloted for Candidate Standards by year end,” Richer said in his “President’s Memo” column in The Standard. Coming soon to ATSC 3.0 “are middle and upper layer standards for video and audio coding, closed captioning, and more,” Richer said. “Although ballots for some areas like interactivity and transport are expected in early 2016, the majority of the overall ATSC 3.0 Candidate Standard will be in place for manufacturers to build equipment to support field testing as the standard moves to Proposed Standard status next year.”
Sinclair plans a “full-blown demonstration” of ATSC 3.0 at January CES and “even a larger demonstration” at the NAB Show in April, now that the core elements of ATSC 3.0's physical transmission layer have been elevated to candidate standard status (see 1509290029), CEO David Smith said on a Wednesday earnings call. That the ATSC reached that milestone “now clears the way” for the FCC “to consider and adopt new rules to allow television broadcasters to better compete with other forms of media, telecom and technology companies in providing consumers a more robust and efficient delivery pipeline,” Smith said Wednesday in a statement accompanying Sinclair’s release of its Q3 financial results.
Google and Microsoft countered the complaints of broadcasters and urged the FCC to set aside either one or two vacant TV band channels in every market nationwide for unlicensed use after the TV incentive auction. In June, the FCC proposed to reserve at least one blank TV channel in every market in the U.S. for white spaces devices and wireless mics after the incentive auction and repacking (see 1506160043).