That the Association of Federal Communications Consulting Engineers (AFCCE) recently backed speedy FCC approval of the ATSC 3.0 transmission system is further evidence the next-generation broadcast standard will “move through this regulatory process at a fairly quick pace,” said Sinclair CEO David Smith on a Wednesday earnings call. AFCCE “finds no technical reason” to delay authorization of the ATSC 3.0 transmission standard and so urges the FCC “to take the requisite actions necessary for expedited consideration,” it told the commission in July 19 comments. Smith also thinks ATSC 3.0 “over time” will be adopted as “a global standard,” following its endorsement by South Korea, he said. “The long-term consequences of that as a function of our intellectual property is going to be very interesting to watch,” he said.
The FCC might have opted not to change the rules for retransmission consent negotiations, but it could be signaling more willingness to intercede when those talks are going awry, some cable industry officials and allies tell us, pointing to Sinclair’s $9.49 million settlement (see 1607290067) last week over an array of good-faith negotiating and licensing rule violations. But other multichannel video programming distributor allies -- plus broadcasters -- see that idea as wishful thinking. The agency has broad statutory authority to investigate and impose penalties, but the question of whether the Sinclair consent decree is a turn in FCC enforcement policy remains to be seen, one lawyer who represents cable interests told us.
Sinclair Broadcast agreed to a $9.49 million settlement with the FCC over violations of the good faith negotiation and licensing rules, said a consent decree released Friday. The consent decree included the dismissal of all pending claims against Sinclair in the Media Bureau, and the FCC now will issue license renewals for 90 TV stations, Sinclair said in a news release. “This Consent Decree and the dismissals of other pending matters, brings closure to all of these issues and allows Sinclair to focus on the future,” Sinclair said in the release. According to the consent decree, the Media Bureau found that Sinclair represented numerous stations it had sharing agreements with in retrans negotiations, after the FCC had implemented rules against joint negotiation, the consent decree said. It also resolves complaints filed against Sinclair for violations of the news distortion policy and local television ownership rule, the consent decree said. Sinclair also agreed to create a compliance plan for self-reporting rule violations, the consent decree said. "2017 will begin a new era for broadcasting, with the post-auction repack and the initial rollout of Next Generation TV (or ATSC 3.0), and clearing this backlog sets the stage for that," Rebecca Hanson, Sinclair's senior vice president-strategy and policy, said in the release.
ATSC’s Technology Group 3 agreed Thursday to extend the candidate standard period on the ATSC 3.0 video document (A/341) by two months to Sept. 30, as expected (see 1606160052), the group said Monday in the July/August issue of its newsletter, The Standard. ATSC 3.0's framers pushed last month for the extension to give themselves more time to pick a winning high-dynamic-range technology for 3.0 video. A/341 was one of seven candidate standards for which TG3 extended the expiration dates to Sept. 30. But each of those candidate standards is “moving apace within the TG3 process” toward elevation as proposed standards, ATSC said. In two days of HDR demos and comparative tests hosted last month by CBS in New York, six HDR proponents vying to be chosen for A/341 (see 1605200031) “were given an opportunity to demonstrate their technology in any way they wished, using any of the available equipment and content,” said Madeleine Noland, the LG consultant who chairs ATSC’s S34 specialist group on ATSC 3.0 video, in a write-up in The Standard. During the event, “detailed comparative demonstrations were conducted using common pro-reference monitors and common content for apples-to-apples comparisons among the systems,” Noland said: “An expert viewing area was set up with a wall of monitors -- five consumer displays and 10 professional reference displays. Equipment also included a number of cameras, encoders, video servers, and more. Two live sets were constructed -- one predominantly light and the other dark. The sets were carefully designed to provide a range of luminance and colors to both show off and challenge the proposed technologies. In addition to content captured live, the demonstrations used pre-recorded content prepared in advance.” Noland didn’t indicate which of the six proponent systems fared best.
The FCC should apply the lessons from the spectrum frontiers proceeding to the ATSC 3.0 rulemaking, said NAB General Counsel Rick Kaplan in a blog post Wednesday. “The Commission’s approach has been to “promote a flexible regulatory environment for the next generation of wireless services,” Kaplan said. “5G’s nascent status has not prevented the Commission from moving forward in the Spectrum Frontiers proceeding, and it shouldn’t stop the Commission from moving forward with authorizing Next Gen TV. As it did for 5G, the FCC should reject calls for delay to study ATSC 3.0," Kaplan said. “Delays in approving voluntary use of a new television transmission standard could affect U.S. leadership in broadcast television and deprive consumers of new features and services.” Since broadcasters and CTA have asked for an Oct. 1 NPRM, a nine-month timeline similar to the spectrum frontiers proceeding would lead to final ATSC 3.0 rules being issued in July 2017, Kaplan said. “Just one year from now, the Commission should be in the admirable position of having laid the foundation for the future of both the wireless and television industries.” Commissioners are voting Thursday on the spectrum frontiers order.
After three years of work, ITU finalized its new standard (BT.2100) for high-dynamic-range TV “that represents a major advance in television broadcasting,” the group said in a Tuesday announcement. BT.2100 builds further on the “superior colour fidelity” of ITU’s BT.2020 standard, ITU said.
WRAL-TV Raleigh launched an ATSC 3.0 station operating under an experimental license, licensee Capitol Broadcasting said in a news release Wednesday. The official launch was a live simulcast of a WRAL newscast and a simultaneous second channel broadcasting of a documentary shot in 4K/UHD HDR. WRAL plans to use ATSC 3.0 “to provide a deep offering of On-Demand content, access to multiple sources of video to enhance linear viewing, and a number of other 24/7 streams of TV and radio programming,” the release said. “We intend to share what we learn with the broadcast industry while utilizing ATSC 3.0’s capabilities to become better providers of news and information for our viewers,” said James Goodmon, general manager of CBC New Media. “We will be broadcasting throughout Raleigh and Durham, N.C. and performing test measurements to learn about the characteristics of this new delivery platform,” said Capitol Broadcasting Director-Engineering and Operations Peter Sockett in the release. WRAL provided a similar function for the original ATSC standard for HDTV.
CAMPBELL, Calif. -- There seems growing sentiment in the engineering community that 4K resolution doesn't give the biggest bang for the buck, at least for delivering high-dynamic-range Ultra HD content via over-the-top or broadcast streams to the consumer. Disclosures on a recent Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers webinar suggested strongly that broadcasters that adopt ATSC 3.0 would prefer transmitting 1080p images with HDR and wide color gamut at 10 bits rather than use bandwidth-hungry 4K (see 1606160052). Panelists at an HDR workshop took much the same tack Tuesday during the Emerging Technology in the Connected Age conference hosted by SMPTE.
The FCC should launch a rulemaking on the ATSC 3.0 transition by Oct. 1, said numerous broadcasters in reply comments posted Monday and Tuesday in docket 16-142. “Time is of the essence,” said a joint filing from petitioners NAB, CTA, America's Public Television Systems and the AWARN Alliance. “Broadcasters, the consumer electronics industry and broadcast equipment manufacturers are ready to move forward if the Commission will just let them.” Initial comments included a cable focus on carriage burdens from 3.0 (see 1605270054).
An apparent “error” in a slide presented during the June 16 webinar on ATSC 3.0's “Ins and Outs” (see 1606160052) prompted webinar producer Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers to take the unusual step Friday of issuing an “updated slide” that restores July 31 as the date when the candidate-standard period expires for the A/341 document on ATSC 3.0 video. The original slide, presented on the webinar by Skip Pizzi, NAB senior director-new media technologies, said the expiration date had been pushed back by two months to Sept. 30, prompting an extended discussion in the webinar’s Q&A in which Pizzi and Dave Siegler, vice president-technical operations at Cox Media Group, described how ATSC’s S34-1 ad hoc group on ATSC 3.0 video needed more time to pick a winning high-dynamic-range proposal for the A/341 document. But that unexpected disclosure appeared to take by surprise ATSC President Mark Richer, who told us Pizzi mistakenly jumped the gun on publicizing a two-month deadline extension, and July 31 remains the expiration date until ATSC’s Technology Group 3 (TG3) changes it, which it may do when it meets in mid-July. Pizzi provided the corrected slide, said Joel Welch, SMPTE director-education, in a Friday email to participants in the June 16 webinar. The new slide still says, as it did in the original, that a winning HDR proposal will be picked in Q3, though S34-1 representatives told ATSC's annual broadcast conference last month the winning technology would be chosen by July 31 (see 1605100047). Welch has "no explanation" why the new stack of slides also contained one slide that hadn’t been part of the original presentation, except that Pizzi provided only the corrected slide on HDR's status, Welch emailed us Friday. Titled “Subject to Change,” the new slide summarizes ATSC’s standard public disclaimer: “Specialist Groups and ad hoc groups have made preliminary decisions to select technologies for incorporation in ATSC 3.0. Selections of all technologies are subject to approval of TG3 and ultimately the Voting Membership in accordance with ATSC due process.”