Concerns about the ATSC 3.0 transition’s effect on MVPDs raised by Charter are “misplaced and premature,” said Sinclair's One Media in a letter to the FCC posted Friday in docket 16-142. MVPDs won’t need equipment to decode 3.0 signals “at this time and for the foreseeable future” because broadcasters are simulcasting 3.0 channels in the current standard, One Media said. Broadcasters have “a strong interest” in MVPD carriage of 3.0 and are negotiating carriage terms through retransmission consent agreements, One Media said. One Media also objected to Charter concerns that 3.0 doesn’t have consumer devices and that it duplicates features available through the internet. Those deployment considerations “have zero impact on MVPD access to broadcaster-provided programming” and reflect “a particularly jaundiced view of the Commission’s regulatory role,” One Media said.
Verance will add Project OAR support to its Aspect watermarking platform, said the company Wednesday. OAR, for Open Addressable Ready, is the Vizio-led consortium of media companies formed in the spring to develop open technical standards for addressable advertising on connected TVs (see 1903120071). Watermarking technologies like Aspect “are expected to factor into the accurate delivery and decisioning” of addressable TV advertising, said Verance. Aspect has been in “wide commercial trials” with broadcasters and TV makers since being designated ATSC 3.0's A/335 video watermark standard three years ago, said Verance. It’s working with broadcast equipment vendors to include OAR “watermark embedding capabilities” into products for implementation later this year, it said.
Broadcaster disputes with AT&T and Dish will likely wrap up by September, political advertising will be bigger than ever before in 2020, and chipmaker partner Saankhya made its first sale of ATSC 3.0 chips, said Sinclair Broadcast executives on the company’s Q2 earnings call Wednesday. Sinclair’s total revenue for Q2 was $771 million, versus $730 million the prior year, it said in a news release.
Third-party streaming of local live TV broadcasts is growing, with Locast adding markets and Didja, trialing in three markets, hoping to sign retrans agreements with major broadcasters soon. Though the copyright and retans lawsuits some saw as possible with the early 2018 launch of Sports Fans Coalition's Locast (see 1801110026) haven't materialized, some say it's not in the clear.
NAB Senior Vice President-Technology Lynn Claudy doesn’t buy into the notion that 8K long term will be “impractical” for terrestrial broadcasting, he blogged Tuesday. “In the world of ATSC 3.0, 8K is not on the near-term roadmap,” said Claudy, ATSC’s board chairman. But an “efficient compression scheme,” such as the Versatile Video Coding system due to be standardized by the end of 2020 (see 1903210057), in “concert” with single-frequency-network transmission configurations that increase the average signal-to-noise ratio in the broadcast service area, “could potentially facilitate reliable delivery of the data rates that are in the ballpark needed for 8K service,” said Claudy: “Never say never?” His “main point” is for broadcasters to “take notice that 8K is likely to become a major part of the media landscape, although not immediately,” he said. “It will be a niche market initially due to all the technical and economic challenges but in the longer term we’re likely to have 8K sets in our homes, high value content is likely to be produced in 8K and one way or another that content will be made available to the mainstream consumer audience.” There will be 8K opportunities for broadcasters, as 3.0 and “its eventual successors take hold,” he said. He advised “keeping up to date on the progress of 8K technology, products and market penetration” as “time well spent.”
Localities and broadcasters have many options to offer some multilingual emergency alerts, but none is comprehensive, and federal rules requiring them are unlikely to help, said alerting officials Friday during the FCC Public Safety Bureau's Multilingual Alerting Workshop. “There's enough toys in the toy box, let us fit them together,” said Sage Alerting Systems President Harold Price on the event's final panel. “Multilingual still has a long way to go, but there are still things you can do,” said Public Safety Bureau Attorney Adviser David Munson.
The FCC should exempt noncommercial educational TV stations from the simulcasting requirements of the ATSC 3.0 transition, PBS and America’s Public Television Stations told Media Bureau staff Tuesday, according to a filing posted Friday in docket 16-142. Only low-power TV stations currently are allowed to “flash-cut” to 3.0 -- full-power broadcasters must continue broadcasting substantially similar content in the current 1.0 standard along with a 3.0 broadcast stream. Commercial broadcasters are cooperating to host each others’ broadcasts to make the shift, but public TV officials argued NCE stations will have difficulty finding transition partners. “Without such an exemption, the simulcasting mandate will preclude many public television stations from pursuing a transition to ATSC 3.0,” the filing said. That will disproportionately affect noncommercial stations and rural communities, it said.
The current FCC is unlikely to consider the national TV ownership cap or further relax broadcast ownership rules, said Gray Television Chief Legal and Development Officer Kevin Latek on a panel of broadcasting executives Thursday at S&P Global's Kagan Media Summit. The agency will “accomplish essentially nothing” between now and 2020, Latek said. Things could be different “next time” if the Republicans retain the White House, Latek said in New York, though “we'd probably need a new chairman.” The FCC didn't comment.
Broadcast TV transitioning to 4K will be a “matter of time,” and an evolution to 8K broadcasts is well off, said Sharp Home Electronics President Jim Sanduski. The in-home ecosystem required to handle increased bandwidth required for a fatter 8K signal is “evolving quite nicely” with the ratification of Wi-Fi 6 and with 5G on the horizon, he said at CE Week in New York Thursday. Samsung’s Andrew Sivori, vice president-TV product marketing, said a quarter of U.S. households today can handle 75 Mbps data speeds. That's the high end of what 8K transmissions will demand, he said. “That’s only going to get better and better over time," he said. Value Electronics President Robert Zohn is a proponent for over-the-air 4K and 8K content -- “as they do in Japan and South Korea.” Zohn said he’s been told by contacts in those industries that “when the TV manufacturers are ready, we’ll be ready." He cited ATSC 3.0 and the ability to deliver 8K content over the air, via IP or over the top, and spoke glowingly of the possibilities for sports via 8K broadcasts: “Can you imagine sports at 120 frames per second?" Zohn imagined the ability to have a replay of a wide-angle shot with digital zoom: “You can do that with 8K.” Tim Alessi, LG senior director-product marketing, downplayed the lack of available native 8K content. He compared that to early days of HDTV: “All of a sudden, boom, there it all was.”
Fox Television names Richard Friedel, ex-Fox Network Center and former ATSC chairman, executive vice president-engineering, operations and technology, working on ATSC 3.0 ... Windstream taps Michael Foor, ex-North Georgia Network and its affiliated Georgia Communications, as vice president-state government affairs, Georgia ... American Enterprise Institute names Jillian Wheeler, ex-congressional Joint Economic Committee, associate director-government relations ... U.S. Chamber of Commerce names Sabrina Fang, ex-American Petroleum Institute, senior director-media relations.