Big TV groups remain interested in buying other ones, but opportunities are rare and purchases of individual stations in full-power TV and radio are at a crawl, said analysts, broadcasters and brokers in recent interviews. “All the low-hanging fruit has been picked,” said S&P Global analyst Volker Moerbitz. With the industry consolidated and ownership rules unlikely to loosen, that likely won’t change soon, said BIA Advisory Services Chief Economist Mark Fratrik: “It’s a natural evolution.”
The FCC “missed” by not defining streaming services as MVPDs and should correct that, said Hearst TV President Jordan Wertlieb at TV2025 on a virtual panel Thursday with Fox TV Stations CEO Jack Abernethy and Gray Television President Pat LaPlatney. “If we want to be intellectually honest, anyone distributing our signal is an MVPD,” Wertlieb said. The executives discussed their own streaming offerings but said broadcasting still delivers a larger audience than the alternatives. The “biggest indication” of broadcasting’s primacy is the NFL’s commitment to be on Fox into the 2030s, said Abernethy. Skyrocketing political advertising dollars demonstrate the same thing, he said. ATSC 3.0 will eventually allow stations to take full advantage of digital ads, Wertlieb said. Targetable ads will allow broadcasters to charge more, LaPlatney said. Abernethy and Wertlieb believe the most successful streaming operations will be those that focus on a niche, such as Fox’s upcoming weather channel. Hearst’s offering focuses on hyperlocal content for each station’s specific city, Wertlieb said. E.W. Scripps announced a foray into exports Thursday (see 2109230077). Asked about the future of retrans and declining cable subscribership, Wertlieb said the definition of retrans needs to be broadened, and LaPlatney said current rates don’t accurately reflect the audience broadcasters deliver. There might be ways stations could work with MVPDs to address or slow their subscribership declines, said Abernethy. “I do see those two ecosystems working together down the road,” said Wertlieb, saying broadcasters are working closely with MVPDs on ATSC 3.0. The execs expect auto ads to rebound sometime in 2022. Gambling ads are on rising but depend on jurisdiction, said Wertlieb. Betting is “a great category” for stations because it can’t be nationally advertised, Abernethy said.
Measuring TV viewers is expected to get more competitive following Nielsen’s accreditation troubles, and advertising targeting is considered the best way to monetize ATSC 3.0, said panelists at the virtual TV2025 Conference Wednesday. “I could see a time in the future where we start to rethink the value of third-party measurement,” said Publicis Media Senior Vice President-Global Research, Data Sciences Eric Cavanaugh.
The 2021 NAB Show is shifting to a virtual event, and won't convene in-person at the Las Vegas Convention Center Oct. 9-13, the association announced Wednesday. The 2022 NAB Show, set for April 23-27, is still planned to be in-person, NAB said. See our earlier news bulletin here.
The FCC lacks authority to require audio description of content on the internet and broadcasters need the eight- and 12-hour grace periods allowed to caption video clips delivered via IP, said representatives of the top four networks, NAB and Meredith on a call Wednesday with staff from the Consumer and Governmental Affairs and Media bureaus. “Uploading IP-captioned clips is more than a simple copy-and-paste exercise, and involves work-flow processes that can sometimes present challenges,” per a filing posted in docket 21-140 Friday. “Technical challenges” remain for carrying audio description on secondary audio feeds, but those could be addressed by ATSC 3.0, the filing said. “That remains uncertain at the moment.”
Pearl TV stations have “started to look" at doing over-the-air ATSC 3.0 transmissions in 4K, Managing Director Anne Schelle told the ATSC NextGen Broadcast Conference Thursday. “We had an almost opportunity -- I can’t really talk about it -- where a network was looking at it, but for rights issues and others, we didn’t do it,” she said. She foresees stations in 2022 will begin doing events-based broadcasts in 4K for live sports, she said. “Some of the stations are talking about production in 4K” for some of the “shoulder content they’re producing around sports,” she said.
There’s an "imbalance” in the FCC’s handling of annual regulatory fees, said FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr during an in-person Q&A at Thursday’s 2021 NextGen Broadcast Conference. Also at the conference, FCC and broadcast industry officials discussed use cases for 3.0 and emergency alerting. “We need to take a much stronger position when it comes to accountability” for “big tech” on benefiting from FCC activities, Carr said.
The Patent and Trademark Office accepted CTA’s statement of use on the NextGenTV logo as a certification mark for ATSC 3.0-compliant TVs, clearing its final hurdle toward a trademark registration certificate, said an agency notice Tuesday. The certificate “will issue in due course barring any extraordinary circumstances,” said PTO. CTA’s July 1 statement of use said the logo was first deployed commercially “at least as early” as March 2020 (see 2107260021).
The FCC should reconsider its relaxed rules for ATSC 3.0 distributed transmission systems and instead adopt an expedited waiver process, said Microsoft in reply comments Friday in docket 20-74 (see 2108040076). NAB and America’s Public Television Stations didn’t push back on Microsoft’s arguments that an expansion of DTS would hurt unlicensed use of the TV bands, but they “embrace that outcome as a victory in eliminating a perceived ‘constrain[t]’ on their business objectives,” Microsoft said. “Their response is that they are happy with the apparently unintended outcome of expanded coverage and that any harm to unlicensed operations is unimportant,” Microsoft said. NAB and APTS’ response “confirms that the Commission erred” in the original order, Microsoft said. “The soundest approach to permit the further expansion of a broadcast station’s DTS signal beyond its maximum facility is through a targeted expedited-waiver process.” The FCC’s original decision “failed to account for the vast harms imposed on TV White Spaces and the public interest,” said the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, Public Knowledge and Tribal Digital Village in joint reply comments in docket 20-74. “The ability of several rural, Tribal, and other hard-to-serve communities nationwide to procure broadband networks depends on the Commission getting this policy right."
CEO Chris Ripley criticized the market’s valuation of Sinclair and touted its planned direct-to-consumer sports offering, but said little about ATSC 3.0 progress, on a Q2 call Wednesday. When Sinclair's assets beyond stations and regional sports networks are considered, the stock should be worth double the current price, said Ripley. “It is becoming painfully obvious the market doesn’t understand Sinclair.” Shares closed 4.1% higher Wednesday at $29.43. The additional assets include a stake in gambling company Bally’s and Sinclair’s licensed spectrum, which Ripley valued at $1.7 billion based on the prices from the broadcast incentive auction. Sinclair’s DTC sports service is to launch in the first half of 2022 and gives the company the opportunity to create a “metaverse” around sports, Ripley said. Sinclair is well-positioned for the service because it owns a panoply of sports rights and its many channels give it access to a large potential subscriber base, he said. The rise of DTC sports offerings and consolidation among the RSNs have “just massive industrial logic,” Ripley said. Sinclair is pursuing financing for the project. It expects any “cannibalization” of MVPD subs from the DTC offering will be “low,” said the CEO. The service is expected to appeal to “a younger cohort,” he said. It would allow targeted advertising and other revenue opportunities around sports gambling, Ripley said. If 5% of RSN customers also subscribe to the app, that's 4.4 million households -- a "very achievable” number, he said. Sinclair launched 3.0 through July in 17 cities, including Baltimore, Grand Rapids and Little Rock, said the company. Total ad revenue for Q2 was $491 million, up 109% from a year earlier, due to the general recovery of the ad market from the pandemic and the resumption of professional sports, said Chief Financial Officer Lucy Rutishauser.