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.
There needs to be “a business entity” that drives the commercial adoption of ATSC 3.0, and “those pieces are being lined up,” Mark Aitken, Sinclair vice president-advanced technology, told us. “If you ask me, what’s going to drive this thing forward, it’s going to be the equivalent of something like the Wi-Fi Alliance,” Aitken said of the group formed by big tech companies in 1999 as the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (see 0209170020) and later renamed the Wi-Fi Alliance to promote and certify Wi-Fi products and services. “Think of this Wi-Fi Alliance being called something like the IP Broadcast Alliance,” Aitken said. “There was a standard in the analog days built around being able to convey pictures and sound over the air,” he said. “TV was the one thing.” But in ATSC 3.0, “we’ve got this broadcast platform, and it’s all IP-based,” Aitken said. “It’s a tremendous economic engine, but TV is only one of the services that it has to offer.” Aitken sees ATSC 3.0 as an opportunity to use existing TV services as an economic springboard “to get into new services that are possible because we have a wireless IP platform,” he said. “For me, that is the story. The story is IP broadcast.”
Sinclair subsidiary One Media got special temporary authority (STA) from the FCC to build and operate a “complete transmission facility” in Las Vegas that will beam “experimental” ATSC 3.0 content in Ultra HD to the floor of CES in January and the NAB Show in April, Mark Aitken, Sinclair vice president-advanced technology, told us Thursday. The transmission facility, which will come online just before Thanksgiving and will operate during CES on vacant Channel 39, is part of the “full-blown” ATSC 3.0 demonstration that Sinclair and its partners are planning for CES, as disclosed Wednesday by Sinclair CEO David Smith (see 1511040026).
High dynamic range “will ultimately be part of the ATSC 3.0 video specification, allowing broadcasters to compete effectively with other distributors of HDR content,” such as over-the-top (OTT) video providers and marketers of Ultra HD Blu-ray players and discs, said Alan Stein, Technicolor vice president-research and development, in an interview in the November issue of The Standard, ATSC’s monthly online newsletter. The S34-1 ad hoc group on video technology that Stein chairs reached consensus on the use of the H.265 video codec and its Main-10 profile, Stein said. “HDR solutions will need to be 10-bit and compatible with this specification." Stein agrees “there’s huge interest in broadcast HDR,” he said. But over-the-air HDR faces “some particular challenges” that are “quite different” from streaming HDR over the top or delivering HDR through physical media like Ultra HD Blu-ray, he said. Broadcast TV’s live production environment, regional opt-outs and interstitial advertising all “contribute to an environment that is quite different from offline-produced content,” he said. “That said, there is a real fear of fragmented HDR solutions entering the marketplace, which could confuse consumers and hurt adoption. It’s important that ATSC specify technologies that are adapted to our unique environment and can be deployed at scale across various devices when ATSC 3.0 launches.” So elusive was consensus within S34-1 on HDR that it’s possible the candidate standard draft for ATSC 3.0 video wouldn't have HDR included, Stein told the ATSC 3.0 Boot Camp conference in May (see 1505130058). ATSC President Mark Richer thinks his group is “still on track to have most ATSC 3.0 elements approved or balloted for Candidate Standards by year end,” Richer said in his “President’s Memo” column in The Standard. Coming soon to ATSC 3.0 “are middle and upper layer standards for video and audio coding, closed captioning, and more,” Richer said. “Although ballots for some areas like interactivity and transport are expected in early 2016, the majority of the overall ATSC 3.0 Candidate Standard will be in place for manufacturers to build equipment to support field testing as the standard moves to Proposed Standard status next year.”
Sinclair plans a “full-blown demonstration” of ATSC 3.0 at January CES and “even a larger demonstration” at the NAB Show in April, now that the core elements of ATSC 3.0's physical transmission layer have been elevated to candidate standard status (see 1509290029), CEO David Smith said on a Wednesday earnings call. That the ATSC reached that milestone “now clears the way” for the FCC “to consider and adopt new rules to allow television broadcasters to better compete with other forms of media, telecom and technology companies in providing consumers a more robust and efficient delivery pipeline,” Smith said Wednesday in a statement accompanying Sinclair’s release of its Q3 financial results.
Google and Microsoft countered the complaints of broadcasters and urged the FCC to set aside either one or two vacant TV band channels in every market nationwide for unlicensed use after the TV incentive auction. In June, the FCC proposed to reserve at least one blank TV channel in every market in the U.S. for white spaces devices and wireless mics after the incentive auction and repacking (see 1506160043).
Three incentive auction items that had been on the agenda for Thursday’s FCC meeting were approved and won’t be part of Thursday’s session, agency officials said in interviews. An item involving proposed rules for broadcaster channel sharing was released Wednesday after being approved by the full commission. Rules on interference after the auction between wireless carriers in the 600 MHz band and broadcasters, and an item defining when broadcasters and unlicensed users need to vacate their spectrum to make way for the new wireless owners, have also been approved, they said.
Broadcasters unanimously opposed the FCC proposal to preserve more channels for unlicensed and wireless mic use, in comments on a vacant channel rulemaking. Prioritizing unlicensed use over licensed TV broadcasters upends FCC policy, said Mako, Sinclair and numerous other broadcasters in docket 15-146. The commission can't make such a “radical shift” without first establishing a record to inform it, Sinclair said. There is “no logical way” for the FCC to “legally determine that unlicensed services, which have never" before "been accorded priority” over licensed services, “should now be found to have priority,” Mako said. Without a record, the proposed policy shift is “arbitrary and capricious,” Sinclair said. The vacant band rule would interfere with broadcasters taking full advantage of the new ATSC 3.0 standard, said Bonten Media and Pearl TV. “ATSC 3.0 is a near-term reality, and the Commission’s decision in this docket should preserve its significant benefits for the American public,” Pearl said. Implementing some of the channel sharing facilitated by the new standard will require stations to alter their contours, which could become “impractical or impossible” if TV stations have to worry about protecting unlicensed channels, Pearl said. The vacant channel rule would “improperly constrain television stations’ options for new or expanded television services” and reduce the chances to make broadcasting more diverse, said the Association of Public Television Stations, Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS jointly. If the FCC does enact the rule, it should come with exemptions for noncommercial educational full-power stations and translators, they filing said. The agency can't make the vacant channel proposal into a rule because it conflicts with congressional directives to preserve low-power TV spectrum, said the LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition. The FCC must instead go back to Congress for guidance, the coalition said. The commission must provide “a legitimate opportunity” for displaced LPTV and translators to get new channels after the auction, Gray Television said. The FCC should also allow qualified LPTV stations after the auction to transition to Class A status, Gray said. The vacant channel policy is unlikely to be useful, Sinclair said. “The likelihood that the white spaces will have practical (as opposed to theoretical) value for unlicensed service is very small,” said Sinclair. “Unlicensed uses have been permitted in the white spaces of the broadcast bands for years, but the only evidence of usage suggests a few isolated experiments (and failed experiments at that).”
Having just elevated ATSC 3.0's physical layer to a candidate standard (see 1509290029), ATSC is “on target to move essentially the entire suite of ATSC 3.0 standards” to candidate-standard status by year-end, ATSC President Mark Richer said in a "President's Memo" in the October issue of The Standard, ATSC’s monthly newsletter, published Thursday. In emphasizing “the need for speed” on ATSC 3.0, “we’re not just going fast for the sake of going fast,” Richer said. Broadcasters, CE makers and others in the U.S., South Korea and other countries “are clamoring for the completion of ATSC 3.0,” he said. Elevating the ATSC 3.0 suite to candidate-standard status will give stakeholders “confidence for short- and mid-term business planning and investments, while providing a critical platform for evaluating the technology under real-world conditions,” in preparation for moving the suite to proposed-standard status in 2016, Richer said. The candidate standard phase “provides an opportunity for the industry to implement some or all of the documented aspects of the standard,” he said. “That will help to assure that standard works as advertised, that professional and consumer electronics products will be interoperable and that there’s a good understanding of implementation issues.” Sinclair’s affiliated ONE Media is launching experimental broadcasts in Baltimore and Washington that will include the first single frequency network implementations using base elements of the new transmission candidate standard, the newsletter said in a separate column. “The full-power, multi-site test platform” in both markets “will deploy a full range of next-generation services that include fixed, portable and mobile capabilities,” it said. “The test broadcasts are being designed to provide real-time assessments of quality of service” using the new IP-based physical layer, it said. The testing is being done under the memorandum of understanding signed mid-June by Samsung, Sinclair and Pearl TV (see 1506170046), it said.