Broadcasters and tech companies are high on the broadband-related prospects of ATSC 3.0, particularly for automotive applications as a near term starter, but ultimately only as a complement to the mothership of a primary TV signal sporting major new upgrades due to that Next Gen TV-branded broadcast transmission standard.

That was one of the takeaways from a combined National Association of Broadcasters/Consumer Technology Association webinar on the future of ATSC 3.0, prefaced by a speech from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr signaling the FCC would help broadcasters team up to add that broadband element. 

Related: FCC Signals TV Stations Can Team Up For Broadcast Internet 

Zooming in from their respected shelters-in-place for the video conference were John Godfrey, senior VP of public policy for Samsung Electronics America; Anne Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV (a Next Gen TV consortium); John Taylor, senior VP, public affairs and communications, LG Electronics USA; and Lonna Thompson, executive VP/COO and general counsel of America's Public Television Stations. 

Carr announced in his speech that the FCC would be issuing a declaratory ruling at its June 9 meeting "clarifying" that broadcasters can team up or lease spectrum to third parties for broadband applications without being subject to attribution rules that apply to TV stations' broadcast signals.  

Related: Tech Company Using ATSC 3.0 to Challenge MVPDs 

Schelle welcomed the announcement. She said that Pearl TV had been talking with automotive companies interested in using broadcast spectrum for connected car applications, but had been questioning whether broadcasters could do it. She said making it clear that broadcasters could team up, not just market to market, but nationally. She also said that given that it is an open standard, some of the innovations could come from some of the partners attracted by that regulatory certainty.  

She said they have been asking if broadcasters have the rights to do this and that "clarifying will help us work with automotive companies." 

Automotive appears to be the a near-term opportunity for broadcast internet service applications. "Automotive is the clear first winner," said Schelle. 

Taylor said there have been some "great" field trials of ATSC 3.0 in South Korea and that auto applications are not just about live and local back seat entertainment, but updating maps, and helping auto fleets navigate smart cities, updating digital signage, and more. He said the sky is the limit, but that to get off the ground, broadcasters still need to focus on the TV side, with broadband working in parallel.  

Related: FCC Seeks Comment on ATSC 3.0 Signal Extension 

Samsung's Godfrey emphasized the value of sending data to a whole lot of endpoints, including signage and environmental sensors, all-at-once data that is hard to collect on wireless nets.  

CTA's Jamie Susskind asked what kind of partnerships were being explored. 

APTS' Thompson said a lot of her station members had been talking about smart cities tech. For example, she said, if water contamination is discovered by a sensor, there are a lot of different people who need to get that info. They could all get it almost instantly using ATSC 3.0.  

She also said they were talking with potential partners about precision agriculture, particularly in rural areas where there is broadcasting, but no high-speed broadband access. 

Related: Everything You Need to Know About ATSC 3.0 

Broadcasters are required to deliver a primary TV signal. Asked if they would want the ability to morph that spectrum to broadband, National Association of Broadcasters executive VP Rick Kaplan said that would need Congress since it is a requirement of the Communications Act, but in any event it was not something broadcasters would want to change.

Thompson agreed. She said ATSC 3.0 allows for more spectrum capacity, so stations could look at new ancillary services but remain committed to their primary TV channel. 

They all agreed that one big challenge of rolling out the ATSC 3.0 broadcast signal is letting consumers know just how many new innovations it will bring.  

Godfrey said having such a diverse toolkit made it an "educational challenge" to market to consumers. Taylor agreed, adding that not overpromising should be one watchword, while still making the point that ATSC 3.0 will be a way to unlock the future of TV. 

Taylor said one key is not overpromising while also letting consumers know that they will be unlocking a new future of TV with immersive audio and ultra-high-def pictures.

The rollout of next generation of broadcast TV will drive 50% increases in revenue growth for TV station groups over the next 10 years, according to a new report from research firm BIA.

That would be an 8% growth rate as compared to an existing 3.8% baseline.

That next generation TV is the ATSC 3.0 transmission standard that allows for geo-targeted advertising, interactivity, data transmission, wireless backhaul, 4K video and more.

BIA released the report as part of its presentation to a D.C. chapter meeting of the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers Wednesday (Jan. 16).

“While a number of questions remain, there are clear upside scenarios for local TV groups investing in NextGen TV. Consumer side revenue business models will take longer to scale, but business and government business models can scale much faster," said BIA managing director Rick Ducey.

BIA was clearly high on the prospects, with one of the report takeaways billed as "“If Data is the New Oil, local TV operators might be forgiven for mistaking their towers for oil rigs." (The historic inside joke about the value of a TV station was that it was a license to print money).

But BIA cautioned that those new high-tech broadcast capabilities notwithstanding, linear TV ad and retrans dollars will continue to account for the "lion's share" of overall revenues over the next decade. In part that is because broadcasters are under no FCC timetable for rolling out ATSC 3.0, which is on a market-by-market basis.

By contrast, broadcasters were under a hard deadline for the switch from analog to digital, the last major transmission upgrade.

The year 2020 is here and TV will, once again, never be the same. Streaming video, subscription services, pirates, connected TVs, interactive programming and much more have changed the way, the where and the how of content consumption.

And it doesn’t stop there. There is so much more that will continue to change. Think of what we already know for 2020:

• Next-Gen TV will start to make ATSC 3.0 a household name.

• New over-the-top services from titans like NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia will join the battle for streaming TV viewers.

• The rumor mill for more mergers and acquisitions is already full, and will continue to reshape the business landscape of video.

Collectively, our industry will thrive if we plan for what’s next. To do so, broadcasters, OTT companies, content owners and technology companies should look ahead. Here are a few predictions:

Bundling: Meet the rebirth of pay TV and the growth of streaming and subscription VOD. Bundling is already happening, but it will increase exponentially. The cross-service TV bundle will move center stage as the perceived wisdom that cord-cutting is decimating the traditional pay TV sector will prove false. With the world’s media powerhouses launching streaming services into an already crowded market, consumers will be confronted with too many siloed options. The result is that many services won’t survive and some cord-cutters, tired of searching for content, may ultimately watch less. To avoid this fate, traditional pay TV programmers and new players will join forces to offer converged, curated “new pay TV” bundles that better meet consumer demand.

Piracy: Whether it’s casual credentials-sharing or the illegal sale of passwords and illicit streaming, piracy will continue to grow. We will see the industry raise the volume about the impact of casual credentials-sharing and the toxicity of streaming piracy and fraudulent, for-profit sharing. While individual operators facing severe piracy situations are already calling for more to be done to combat pirates, we are only at the start of this battle to protect both the value of premium content and operator revenues.

The proof of the severity of the problem is found in the numbers. Synamedia recently unveiled the findings from analyses of two video service providers, which uncovered more than 3 million viewer credentials were compromised across both the dark and open Web over the course of just six months. Additionally, the analysis found these particular video service providers are likely to be losing more than $72 million of potential annual subscription-fee revenue due to password-sharing from roughly 500,000 non-paying users.

These statistics illustrate a microcosm of the real impact piracy is already having in the industry. In order to survive, video providers must defend their livelihood with state-of-the-art technology, the intelligence of experts who think like pirates do and who know how they work, so they can move even faster than the relentless thieves. Simply, they must stay ahead of the game.

Latency: Achieving synchronized latency between live broadcast and OTT streaming at scale will become a ‘must-have’ as live sports streaming goes mainstream. This will require optimizing the entire end-to-end chain for low latency. Using a low-delay encoder is a moot point if the content delivery network (CDN) platform and player introduce delays down the line. Operators will also start to converge their broadcast and IP streams at the headend to help minimize any delay and optimize their workflows.

At the same time, we will also see a flurry of activity around ATSC 3.0 as U.S. broadcasters prepare the technical, commercial and legal ground for rollouts that will open up new application opportunities. It’s no secret that the way TV is viewed has changed since ATSC 1.0 was rolled out. There is no longer one screen in the home where viewing takes place. The TV-watching experience has changed, the platforms have grown in size (or shrunk in some cases) and the options have expanded. With ATSC 3.0, there’s more of nearly everything: More immersive experiences, more personalization and more content and related services.

Hybrid Operations and Cloud: As the move to the cloud accelerates, we will see greater adoption by pay TV providers of solutions to find the optimal balance between capital expenditures and operating expenditures. For example, solutions that offer the ability to launch, scale up and scale down high availability channels for smarter hybrid on-premise and public cloud deployments while keeping a tight control on costs.

From the viewers’ perspective, a hybrid approach takes into consideration their desire for accessible content, superior experiences and reliable services. Consumers expect to be able to watch any show they want, on any device they want, at any time they want. To keep up, companies must consider a blend of broadcast and IP to deliver more viewing options, must have cloud DVR and greater flexibility for a complete viewing experience.

Addressable Advertising: We expect to see new ecosystems and partnerships to address the growing demand for linear TV addressable advertising. This will include more pay TV operator and broadcaster collaborations based upon sharing advanced advertising platforms and audience data to create solutions matching the needs of advertisers and agencies. The entire industry will also need to work together to define a standard way of measuring addressable advertising audiences and outcomes.

However it all plays out, there’s one prediction that is certain to come true: It will be another exciting year in the ongoing evolution and revolution of the TV industry.

Jean-Marc Racine is chief product officer at Synamedia, a London-based video software and services company.

WASHINGTON — In the weeks since Charter Communications executives met with senior Federal Communications Commission staffers to explain their reluctance to carry ATSC 3.0 (“Next Gen TV”) signals, a continuing flurry of discussions has simmered, often couched in questions about why the cable operator picked now to voice its opposition to carrying the value-added broadcast transmissions.

The Next Generation TV rulemaking proposal has been percolating at the FCC for nearly two years as major broadcasters run field trials.

Charter’s primary points to the FCC were that it doesn’t intend to carry 3.0 signals, since broadcasters have not yet settled on standards, and that many of the proposed auxiliary services (such as wireless data transmission) don’t fit with retransmission agreements.

Analysts contend Charter’s meeting was “a ploy to slow down” ATSC 3.0. They claimed to be perplexed since cable equipment will be relatively inexpensive. Some believed it was part of a cable scheme to impede broadcasters’ entry into data transmission businesses.

Skeptics wondered about Charter’s timing, as the current ATSC 3.0 plan envisions at least a five-year period in which local TV stations will continue to transmit existing ATSC 1.0 signals.

Moreover, at the FCC meeting, Charter demonstrated the problems that will arise in Phoenix (site of the Pearl TV consortium’s NextGen TV field test), although Charter has only a small piece of that market. In fact, it used illustrations from Cox Communications, Phoenix’s largest operator.

Shortly after Charter’s ex parte disclosure of its late-July FCC meeting, One Media 3.0, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s high-tech development subsidiary, accused the operator of confusing standards with flexible uses for non-television delivery of data.

“If an MVPD [multichannel video programming distributor] and a broadcaster are motivated to add an ATSC-3.0 delivered feature or service to the MVPD’s platform, implementation will be achieved in a reasonable timeframe and based on mutual business objectives,” One Media executive vice president for strategic and legal affairs Jerald Fritz said. “Broadcasters have been working closely with equipment vendors to establish basic television service profiles.”

Managing director Anne Schelle said Pearl TV was working with CableLabs to explore “3.0 implementation in many different ways with cable.” She acknowledged it will take “more time,” but, like Fritz, Schelle noted that 1.0 transmissions will continue for several years.

After Charter’s filing, the SCTE’s Engineering Committee sent a message to Advanced TV Standards Committee president Madeleine Noland that was fundamentally a “thanks but no thanks” response to an invitation to begin working on cable carriage of ATSC 3.0. In its Aug. 13 memo (obtained by Multichannel News), the committee said it does not “feel that the ATSC 3.0 specification in its current form is ready for work in SCTE.”

As for the Charter executives who appeared before the FCC, they have clammed up. “We have no comment beyond the ex parte filing,” a Charter official said. “It speaks for itself.”

NCTA-The Internet & Television Association responded to a query about its stance by forwarding the trade group’s FCC comments from 18 months ago, with a spokesman adding it would have “nothing more to say.”

The National Association of Broadcasters said Charter’s filing “raises issues that are simply irrelevant.”

“The only apparent motivation behind Charter’s filing is its desire to stifle competitive innovation,” NAB executive vice president Dennis Wharton said.

WASHINGTON — In the weeks since Charter Communications executives met with senior Federal Communications Commission staffers to explain their reluctance to carry ATSC 3.0 (“Next Gen TV”) signals, a continuing flurry of discussions has simmered, often couched in questions about why the cable operator picked now to voice its opposition to carrying the value-added broadcast transmissions.

The Next Generation TV rulemaking proposal has been percolating at the FCC for nearly two years as major broadcasters run field trials.

Charter’s primary points to the FCC were that it doesn’t intend to carry 3.0 signals, since broadcasters have not yet settled on standards, and that many of the proposed auxiliary services (such as wireless data transmission) don’t fit with retransmission agreements.

Analysts contend Charter’s meeting was “a ploy to slow down” ATSC 3.0. They claimed to be perplexed since cable equipment will be relatively inexpensive. Some believed it was part of a cable scheme to impede broadcasters’ entry into data transmission businesses.

Skeptics wondered about Charter’s timing, as the current ATSC 3.0 plan envisions at least a five-year period in which local TV stations will continue to transmit existing ATSC 1.0 signals.

Moreover, at the FCC meeting, Charter demonstrated the problems that will arise in Phoenix (site of the Pearl TV consortium’s NextGen TV field test), although Charter has only a small piece of that market. In fact, it used illustrations from Cox Communications, Phoenix’s largest operator.

Shortly after Charter’s ex parte disclosure of its late-July FCC meeting, One Media 3.0, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s high-tech development subsidiary, accused the operator of confusing standards with flexible uses for non-television delivery of data.

“If an MVPD [multichannel video programming distributor] and a broadcaster are motivated to add an ATSC-3.0 delivered feature or service to the MVPD’s platform, implementation will be achieved in a reasonable timeframe and based on mutual business objectives,” One Media executive vice president for strategic and legal affairs Jerald Fritz said. “Broadcasters have been working closely with equipment vendors to establish basic television service profiles.”

Managing director Anne Schelle said Pearl TV was working with CableLabs to explore “3.0 implementation in many different ways with cable.” She acknowledged it will take “more time,” but, like Fritz, Schelle noted that 1.0 transmissions will continue for several years.

After Charter’s filing, the SCTE’s Engineering Committee sent a message to Advanced TV Standards Committee president Madeleine Noland that was fundamentally a “thanks but no thanks” response to an invitation to begin working on cable carriage of ATSC 3.0. In its Aug. 13 memo (obtained by Multichannel News), the committee said it does not “feel that the ATSC 3.0 specification in its current form is ready for work in SCTE.”

As for the Charter executives who appeared before the FCC, they have clammed up. “We have no comment beyond the ex parte filing,” a Charter official said. “It speaks for itself.”

NCTA-The Internet & Television Association responded to a query about its stance by forwarding the trade group’s FCC comments from 18 months ago, with a spokesman adding it would have “nothing more to say.”

The National Association of Broadcasters said Charter’s filing “raises issues that are simply irrelevant.”

“The only apparent motivation behind Charter’s filing is its desire to stifle competitive innovation,” NAB executive vice president Dennis Wharton said.