The broadcast TV industry doesn’t have to guess whether it’s moving toward consolidation. With last week's release of the FCC incentive auction procedures public notice, TV licensees even have a firm timeline for how it's going to happen. While it’s not clear where participation will fall on the continuum between the FCC’s largest Greenhill auction book projections and the most gloomy broadcaster predictions, most industry observers said some stations will be going dark and selling their spectrum and some portion of existing low-power TV (LPTV) and translators could be displaced. Some said that may hurt diversity -- and consumers' choice of programming available for free for those owning a TV and over-air antenna.
A House Republican warned low-power TV (LPTV) broadcasters and translators that other “powerful” forces are seeking their spectrum and will exert intense lobbying power in Washington to acquire it. House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., listened to multiple stakeholders outlining anxieties about the FCC’s broadcast TV incentive auction, in a discussion lasting more than an hour in his home district.
Whether ATSC 3.0's framers pick a single mandatory audio codec for the next-generation broadcast standard or multiple voluntary audio codecs is one of the mysteries that will be solved when the imminent choice of an ATSC 3.0 audio system is made public, possibly within days. ATSC has ruled out combining the ingredients of competing audio systems into a unified ATSC 3.0 codec, but has left the door open on choosing multiple codecs.
Sinclair’s memorandum of understanding with Samsung and Pearl TV to support the speedy commercial implementation of ATSC 3.0 (see 1506170046) signals “to the broadcast industry and to the world at large and the federal government that the broadcast industry is about ready to move” to the next-generation broadcast platform, Sinclair CEO David Smith said on a Wednesday earnings call. Samsung, “as the largest manufacturer in the world, is clearly now fully engaged in the process of preparing prototype products” for ATSC 3.0 “that will be likely on demonstration” at the January CES and April’s NAB Show, “in all probability,” said Smith, whose company has been a strong advocate of commercializing ATSC 3.0 sooner rather than later. Through the MOU, “I think when you look at what we're all going to be doing together, we're going to be demonstrating over the next three to five months some incredible capability to the technology,” he said. ATSC 3.0 is “really now on what I would say is a very fast track to being adopted by the industry,” Smith said. “And once that's done, then we'll go to the FCC and we'll say, it's time to go and we'll go through that process. And then we'll start to prepare for a transition.”
TP Vision, which makes and markets Philips-brand TVs in most regions of the world outside North America, Tuesday became the third TV maker to announce a collaboration with Dolby Labs to promote the adoption of the AC-4 audio codec. Dolby announced similar collaborations last month with Sony and Vizio. Dolby expects consumer TVs with AC-4 audio built in to become available in 2017, it said. AC-4 is vying against the MPEG-H consortium of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor to be chosen as the audio codec for the next-gen ATSC 3.0, and a decision on that selection is expected within the next two weeks (see 1507240030). AC-4 was published last year as an international spec at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (see 1501210023), and is available in a toolkit for use with European-based DVB broadcast systems, Dolby said.
Some of the most “pressing work” facing the many specialist and ad hoc groups working to frame ATSC 3.0 “relates to reaching consensus on a few remaining open items” for ATSC 3.0's physical layer transmission system, ATSC President Mark Richer said in the August issue, published Monday, of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. ATSC’s many subgroups “will be very busy in August putting the finishing touches on documenting core building blocks” of the physical layer transmission system as it heads toward ATSC 3.0 “candidate standard” status, Richer said. Work “in parallel” on ATSC 3.0's “upper layers,” including decisions about the ATSC 3.0 audio system, also continues unabated,” Richer said. Under ATSC’s call for audio proposals issued in December, the S34-2 ad hoc group that’s studying ATSC 3.0 audio proposals faces an Aug. 14 deadline for delivering a recommended audio standard to its parent S34 specialist group on "applications and presentation," and Richer told us recently that work is “generally on track” toward completion (see 1507240030). “While there’s a flurry of ATSC activity focused on our aggressive short-term goals of moving various ATSC 3.0 elements” to candidate standard status this year, “we also have our eye on the horizon,” Richer said. One “exciting opportunity for many ATSC members” that the ATSC board has identified “is the desire for prototype broadcast and reception hardware” based on the ATSC 3.0 candidate standard, Richer said. “A critical mass of equipment from various manufacturers will be needed for laboratory and field testing as ATSC 3.0 moves toward Proposed Standard status in 2016. And we encourage our members to begin developing such prototypes as the suite of standards collectively known as ATSC 3.0 solidifies in the months ahead.”
Proposals connected with the incentive auction's vacant channel proceeding that would freeze the service contours of broadcasters could impair TV broadcasters' ability to take full advantage of ATSC 3.0, said a group of broadcasters in meetings last week with Commissioner Mike O'Rielly and aides to Chairman Tom Wheeler and Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, according to an ex parte filing from pro-ATSC 3.0 group Pearl TV. Pearl's members are Cox Media, Graham Media, Hearst TV, Media General, Meredith, Raycom Media, Schurz Communications and Tegna. ATSC 3.0 development is in its final stages, is being promoted by Samsung along with Pearl and will be launched in South Korea in time for the 2016 Summer Olympics, the filing said. Under the new ATSC standard, it will be easier for broadcasters to channel share, but doing so would involve possible changes to service contours, the filing said. Proposals to prevent that would leave broadcasters with “no ability to adapt to the very different engineering and technical landscape that will exist post-repacking,” the ex parte filing said. The FCC should allow six years after the repacking to allow for broadcaster adjustments, it said. “That period will give broadcasters an opportunity to respond to the repacking process. It also will give broadcasters interested in channel sharing the confidence that they can enter the auction and be able to serve their existing audience,” Pearl said in the filing.
Though ATSC President Mark Richer “can't name a specific date for the work of a subcommittee, the process to select audio technology for use in ATSC 3.0 is making great progress and is generally on track," he emailed us Friday. Under ATSC’s call for audio proposals issued in December, the S34-2 ad hoc group that’s studying ATSC 3.0 audio proposals faces an Aug. 14 deadline for delivering a recommended audio standard to its parent S34 specialist group on "applications and presentation" chaired by Madeleine Noland, an LG Electronics consultant. Dolby Labs CEO Kevin Yeaman on a Wednesday earnings call generally sidestepped questions about Dolby’s fate in the ATSC 3.0 audio selection process, though he said "we’ve been highly engaged in that process.” Dolby’s AC-4 technology is one of the proposals that the S34-2 ad hoc group is considering for adoption, along with a second proposal from the MPEG-H audio alliance of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor. A third proponent, DTS, dropped out of the running days before the NAB Show opened in mid-April (see 1504130030). “We have a fantastic solution that both increases efficiency and also opens up possibilities for new and enhanced audio experiences,” Yeaman said of Dolby AC-4. “We feel good about where we are at this stage in the game,” though “we’re still ways off from any broad implementation,” he said. Pressed in Q&A on when ATSC might pick an audio winner for ATSC 3.0, Yeaman said: “I don’t think we have a firm date from them.”
Broadcasters planning to take advantage of the capabilities of the upcoming ATSC 3.0 technological shift to lease spectrum to wireless carriers would be better served by participating in the TV incentive auction, said Incentive Auction Task Force Vice Chairman Howard Symons during a webinar Thursday. Largely about the incentive auction, the webinar, hosted by Broadcasting and Cable, also touched on the new broadcast standard and repacking.
CLEVELAND -- ATSC President Mark Richer thinks commercial launches of ATSC 3.0 TVs and broadcast services (see 1504130028) are possible by the end of the decade, perhaps sooner, he said Thursday at field trials to showcase the LG-Zenith-GatesAir Futurecast technology proposal for ATSC 3.0. Richer was among a group of several dozen broadcast industry dignitaries, including Lynn Claudy, NAB senior vice president-technology, and ATSC Chairman Glenn Reitmeier of NBCUniversal invited to Cleveland to witness the Futurecast field trials in action.