Emergency alert system entities, EAS participants and law enforcement organizations divided over whether incidents involving danger to police should have their own EAS code, in comments in FCC docket 15-94 by Monday’s deadline. Most commenters -- including APCO, DOJ (see 1707310045) and the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council (NPSTC) -- support creating the alert code. Others believe existing codes can serve the same function, and adding another will further dilute effectiveness of the EAS system or increase expense. The proposed BLU event code is “another vanity Event Code intended to meet the needs of the one/few at the expense of further eroding the intrinsic value of mass alerting for more significant and substantive mass call-to-action notifications,” said broadcasting technical service provider McCarthy Radio Enterprises.
The FCC should require broadcasters using ATSC 3.0 to offer a free stream of the new standard at the same format and quality as their DTV signal, said the MVPD-backed American Television Alliance in a Friday letter in docket 16-142. “It is not too much to ask that broadcasters be required to serve all viewers within their local markets before remaining portions of their spectrum may be repurposed for any potential ancillary or supplementary service offerings,” they said. Broadcasters had opposed proposals in the 3.0 proceeding to mandate specific formats and signal quality for their transmissions (see 1705100072). Under the ATVA proposal, broadcasters would be free to transmit additional streams in other formats or use their remaining spectrum for other purposes, the letter said: It “should go without saying that the benefits of any technological advancements in broadcasting should flow towards ‘the public’ first.”
Microsoft’s vacant channel proposal would make it harder for the public to get updates during emergencies, said former Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate in an opinion piece in The Hill Wednesday. The proposal also would make it difficult for broadcasters to roll out ATSC 3.0 (see 1707170053), which is expected to greatly enhance the dissemination of information during emergencies, Fugate said. Susan Crawford, former special assistant to then-President Barack Obama for science, technology and innovation policy, wrote in Wired to criticize the proposal. NAB distributed both of the criticisms to reporters. Microsoft didn't comment.
FCC reimbursement fund administrator EY had to press broadcasters for additional information on their repacking reimbursement requests because many are upgrading to ATSC 3.0-compatible equipment and didn’t submit actual price estimates, said FCC Incentive Auction Task Force Chair Jean Kiddoo and industry officials in interviews.
Dolby CEO Kevin Yeaman said the company is in a “good position” with ATSC 3.0 and Digital Video Broadcasting specifications, on the company's AC-4 compression. He sees AC-4 being “broadly adopted” across a broad range of devices, with a "gradual rollout." AC-4 won’t be a “major factor in the foreseeable future,” Yeaman said, but he noted early adoption among TV makers and broadcast trials. Ultimately, the industry will migrate to AC-4 from AC-3 because of “higher efficiency” and other value propositions, he said. Meantime, Dolby Vision Blu-ray titles from Lionsgate, Universal and Sony have begun shipping, and Disney made its first Vision-Atmos title Guardians of the Galaxy 2 available for streaming, the CEO said on a fiscal Q3 webcast after regular U.S. markets closed Tuesday.
Broadcasters are willing to allow the transition to ATSC 3.0 to cause service losses, but in every other context treat broadcast service losses as unacceptable, the American Cable Association told the FCC in a letter posted Thursday in docket 16-142. “The Commission should prevent service loss caused by the ATSC 3.0 transition for the same reasons that broadcasters say the Commission should prevent service loss in other contexts,” ACA said, pointing to NAB arguments in proceedings on the post-incentive auction repacking and vacant channels that disruptions to service will hurt localism. Not simulcasting during the 3.0 transition will create similar disruptions, but broadcasters have asked the FCC not to require simulcasting, ACA said. Without a simulcast in 1.0, broadcast customers without 3.0 compatible equipment will be unable to receive a broadcast signal, and MVPDs that retransmit a broadcaster’s signal would also be affected, ACA said. “If ‘too bad’ is an unacceptable response to potential service losses caused by the repack or white spaces, it is surely an unacceptable response to potential service losses caused by a broadcaster’s voluntary transition to a new transmission standard.” Broadcasters "have asked the FCC for permission to voluntarily upgrade their facilities, at their own expense, to improve their service and offer viewers a better experience,” an NAB spokesman emailed. “ACA continues to try to sidetrack this innovative proposal to stifle competition.”
Sinclair and Nexstar agreed to share spectrum during the ATSC 3.0 transition in the 43 markets where they both own stations, they said in a news release Thursday. The coordination deal involves “a plan to spearhead the transition” in the 54 markets where only one of the companies has a station. Under the agreement, the broadcasters would share their spectrum within their markets, “with some spectrum remaining as 1.0 and other spectrum migrated to ATSC 3.0,” the two TV station owners said. “Specific market roll out schedules and sharing arrangements are in development in anticipation of the FCC approval of the new ATSC 3.0 standard by the fourth quarter.”
ATSC 3.0 includes “the accessibility tools” necessary to comply with FCC rules for closed captioning, said NAB and CTA in a meeting with aides to Chairman Ajit Pai and staff from the Media Bureau, Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau and the Office of General Counsel Thursday, an ex parte filing said. It said the 3.0 petition was intended to show that the agency has “previously approved technologies closely related to the Next Gen TV standard for closed captions in the past,” not “elide the requirements of Section 79.1 with respect to the types of programming that must be captioned.” ATSC 3.0 devices “will fully meet their accessibility obligations,” CTA and NAB said Monday in docket 16-142. The A/343 document, approved as a final ATSC 3.0 standard in December, defines the required technology for closed caption and subtitle tracks over multiple transports.
A proposal to reserve vacant channels in the TV band for unlicensed use would make it hard for broadcasting to transition to ATSC 3.0, broadcasters and broadcast attorneys told us. Many of the new capabilities expected out of the new TV standard would require broadcasters to upgrade their facilities to use single frequency networks, a change that would become extremely difficult if vacant channels are reserved for unlicensed use, they said.
There are opportunities and challenges with new features in Ultra HD TVs that are similar to those in the transition from NTSC to ATSC TV 20 years ago, but 4K resolution isn’t the right message to convince consumers to upgrade, CE Week in New York heard Thursday. TV marketers promised consumers 4K was going to be “amazing,” said Joel Silver, president of the Imaging Science Foundation, but “if you looked at 4K from a normal viewing distance, it looked the same as 2K,” he said. Silver cited the various sources from Ultra HD Blu-ray to premium streaming channels, along with HDR and wide color gamut, and said: “We’ve got amazing things happening, and no one knows how good we are." After “crying wolf” for so many generations of TVs and telling consumers they’re going to love the next big thing, “this time we’re actually telling the truth,” he said. Tim Alessi, senior director-product marketing for LG home entertainment products, addressed the challenge of getting consumers interested in TVs when they’re increasingly watching TV content on mobile devices: “The TV is still a family communal activity. People aren’t gathering around their iPad to watch the Super Bowl." Value Electronics President Robert Zohn told us that for consumers, “it’s all about the content.” They can have music on the go, and they’ll get the premium experience when they’re home, he said.