Newly elected to ATSC board for three-year terms beginning in January: Christopher Homer, PBS vice president-operations and engineering, Anne Schelle, Pearl TV executive director.
The FCC unanimously approved an order Wednesday designed to mitigate the incentive auction’s impact on low-power TV and translator licenses, leading to the item being pulled from the agenda shortly before the FCC’s meeting Thursday. Commissioner Ajit Pai said negotiations on the order were “productive.”
Reserving vacant channels for unlicensed use would be “devastating” to low-power TV and translator stations and make aspects of ATSC 3.0 impractical, said the Advanced Television Broadcasting Alliance Executive Director Louis Libin and Sinclair Broadcast Senior Vice President-Strategy and Policy Rebecca Hanson in a meeting with FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly Tuesday, according to an ex parte filing in docket 12-268. “Elevating unlicensed (which does not even have an allocation in the broadcast band) to supra-primary status would be arbitrary and capricious absent a full record,” said the filing: “The proposal would severely limit full power stations’ ability to enhance and expand service.”
ATSC President Mark Richer sees 10 more ATSC 3.0 ingredients moving to candidate standard status this month, he said in the December issue of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard, published Monday. The new candidate standards will include those of “major elements” of ATSC 3.0, among them video encoding, Internet protocol transport, electronic service guides, second-screen services and closed captioning, Richer said. He expects ATSC will “finalize the few remaining” candidate standards for audio, security and interactive capabilities in early 2016, he said. The candidate standard phase of ATSC 3.0 “is not a time to take a breath,” Richer said. It’s “a critical time for broadcasters to implement test services and for professional and consumer equipment manufacturers to fine-tune their prototypes and demonstrate the capabilities of ATSC 3.0,” he said. “And it’s the time for all stakeholders to work together on any necessary clarifications to the standards documents to assure interoperability.”
Sinclair treated a delegation of 11 South Korean broadcast industry experts in Las Vegas Thursday to the “first end-to-end transmission” of Ultra HD signals with high dynamic range using the proposed ATSC 3.0 transmission standard, the broadcaster said in a Thursday announcement. The broadcast of content encoded with the H.265's codec’s scalability extension adopted a year ago originated from Sinclair’s facility on Black Mountain near Las Vegas using a prototype Teamcast modulator and was received 15 miles away by prototype receiver technology developed by Technicolor and Sinclair’s subsidiary One Media, Sinclair said. South Korea is weighing whether to use ATSC 3.0 to transmit Ultra HD video of the February 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Sinclair said. While U.S. broadcasters will have the option to use ATSC 3.0 to transmit Ultra HD and other services within their existing 6-MHz channels, South Korea has assigned new channels to broadcasters specifically to transmit in Ultra HD, it said. The ATSC 3.0 demonstration for the South Korean delegation was “just a preview” of what Sinclair, Samsung and Pearl TV plan to show at CES (see 1511050048), Sinclair said.
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.