The numbers for NextGen TV look good right now:

• Stations in 16 more markets are lighting up their ATSC 3.0 signals this summer, bringing the total to 47 metro areas. 

• About 150 stations are involved, with many transmitting multiple channels. 

• Sales forecasts envision 2 million receivers this year, 4 million next year and 11 million in 2023, plus a new line of 3.0 set-top boxes. 

With those data points in hand — and a September multi-station launch in Washington, D.C., to provide a tech showcase for politicos — NextGen TV cheerleaders are bubbling with enthusiasm. 

"NextGen TV signals now reach 22% of households in our stations' footprints,” said Mark Aitken, VP of advanced technology at Sinclair Broadcast Group and president of its One Media subsidiary. Aitken said every market Sinclair launch offers "Advanced HDR (high dynamic range) by Technicolor" content and “hybrid TV” is also in the works across the company's stations. 

Overall, according to FCC data, one-third of U.S. homes will be within range of a NextGen TV signal as of mid-August when Atlanta stations light up. 

Sinclair’s “hybrid TV” approach includes STIRR, the ad-supported video-on-demand streaming service. “We’ll have OTA (over-the-air) and OTT (over-the-top) brought together in our hybrid environment,” Aitken said.

Scale Will Be ‘A Lot Faster’

The Pearl TV broadcast group consortium backing the new format is “100% focused on scale,” the always-ebullient managing director Anne Schelle said. “This is not your grandmother’s [digital] transition. The economics are much different. … Scale will happen a lot faster.” 

Patrick Butler, president of America’s Public Television Stations, noted that about a dozen public TV stations have transitioned to 3.0 and that New Mexico PBS now carries all five streams in the new format: PBS, PBS Kids, FNX, World and Create. 

Butler, though, said many public TV stations are “stymied” by the costs and have asked Congress for funding.

Analysts are keeping their expectations in check. Stephen Baker, VP of industry analysis at the NPD Group, said “we’re barely in the infancy” of NextGen TV. 

“Until the costs [drop] and availability becomes more widespread, then whatever the tech and software bring doesn’t mean a lot,” said Baker, who follows consumer electronics for the market research firm.  

Importantly, questions remain about the non-broadcast services NextGen TV promoters have promised: capabilities to provide new business options.  

John Hane is president of BitPath, a joint venture of Sinclair and Nexstar Media Group, two of Pearl TV’s members. BitPath’s main mission is “to create data broadcasting services that are profitable and serve the public interest,” he said. To do that, it’s necessary to have 3.0 capacity “on the air,” he said. He expects to be on at least 25 towers this year and to serve more than 100 stations by the end of 2022.  

BitPath, too, is “just at the beginning of the process,” Hane said.

At E.W. Scripps-owned WXYZ Detroit, a local development team customized Run3TV to match the station’s branding and supplied the framework with on-demand content that viewers can access via NextGen TV remotes.

“The content includes categorized news video packages along with daily weather forecasts from their local weather meteorologists,” Scripps VP and chief technology officer Bryan Dunbar said. 

Adoption Coming Quickly

Catherine Badalamente, VP and chief innovation officer at Graham Media Group, has also focused on supplementary interactive content. She called the Pearl framework a “solid base” for developing live streams, VOD and data-based services.

Badalamente said Graham has been working with Google to experiment with addressable advertising — “initially within the supplementary content, but as we find solutions, we hope to directly monetize the broadcast ad breaks.” 

After a year of pandemic-induced virtual development, the NextGen TV community will plunge into a round of personal meetings, addressing issues around operations and digital opportunities. 

Up first is the Advanced Television Systems Committee’s 2021 NextGen Broadcast conference in Washington, D.C., Aug. 25 and 26. At the CEDIA Expo in Indianapolis on Sept. 1-3, NextGen TV hopes to make inroads prior to CES in Las Vegas in January. 

September also will see the landmark launch of a special NextGen TV showcase in Washington, D.C., with coordination of signals between public TV station WHUT and WIAV, Sinclair’s newly acquired Class A station. Program details and promotional plans (including to policymakers) are still being developed. 

Broadcast stations in 16 more markets are lighting up their ATSC 3.0 signals this summer, bringing the total to 47 metro areas. About 150 stations are involved, with many of them transmitting multiple channels in the NextGen TV standard. 

Since May, NextGen stations have popped up in Atlanta; Baltimore; Charlotte, North Carolina; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Hartford-New Haven, Connecticut; Houston; Indianapolis; Kansas City; St. Louis; Little Rock, Arkansas; Orlando and West Palm Beach, Florida; and Sacramento, California. 

In Phoenix, where the “model market” launch has been underway for more than a year, Single Frequency Network (SFN) transmissions started in July. 

Following a year of pandemic-induced virtual development, the NextGen TV community will plunge into a new round of personal meetings in coming months. Among the issues confronting them are operations and competitive digital services. 

Supporters hope that many of the concerns will be addressed and resolved during the Advanced Systems Committee’s 2021 NextGen Broadcast conference, a live annual event in Washington, D.C., Aug. 25-26.   

Sinclair Broadcasting Group, part of the Pearl TV broadcaster consortium that also includes Nexstar Media Group, plans to show its first mock-up of a network operations center for 3.0, with an eye toward bringing stations together to operation effectively as a distribution network, Mark Aitken, vice president of advance technology at Sinclair and president of its ONE Media subsidiary, said. 

Also on the conference calendar agenda is the Consumer Electronics Design and Installation Association’s CEDIA Expo in Indianapolis on Sept. 1-3, where NextGen TV hopes to make inroads – prior to its next pitch to the CE industry at the Consumer Technology Association's CES 2022 in Las Vegas in January. 

Looking further into the future, by the time of the NAB Show convention Las Vegas in October, Sinclair plans to show off SFN capabilities and also mobile applications on “true consumer phones.” Aitken said that Sinclair’s chip subsidiary Saankhya Labs has made a deal with one of the handset makers (which he declined to identify) that supplies devices to Verizon. 

Another landmark in the ATSC 3.0 rollout will be the launch of a special NextGen TV showcase in the nation's capital in September. It will focus on the coordination of signals from two sticks: WHUT-TV, the public-TV channel, is handling several of the signals and the new WIAV-CD (a Class A station that Sinclair acquired late last year) will transmit channels. Program details and promotional plans (including political focus) are still being developed. 

ATSC 3.0 in smartphones took a big step forward this week with delivery of the first of hundreds of production sample phones to the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a key part of the station group’s strategy to ensure that NextGen TV one day is an integral part of mobile phones and other devices.

The One Media Mark One phone powered by Saankhya Labs is an Android smartphone with built-in Saankhya Labs SL4000 ATSC 3.0 receiver chip providing NextGen TV reception, tuning and demodulation. The Mark One relies on an embedded antenna –not a pull-out or hang-on antenna—and is an unlocked AT&T- and T-Mobile-compatible device, says Mark Aitken, President of ONE Media 3.0 and senior vice president of technology at Sinclair.

“This is the phone that we had hoped we would have had in sample form for the NAB Show,” says Aitken, “but COVID struck—it struck hard and shut things down.”

The Mark One has been two years in the making, delayed for months because the electronics industry in China where certain components are fabricated was shut down as the virus affected the nation, he says.

By jointly developing the underlying technology with Saankhya Labs (working with BORQS, a device OEM), building the phone and deploying NextGen TV stations around the country, Sinclair in essence has eliminated the chicken-egg problem. “We are both the chicken and the egg,” says Aitken.

The Bigger Picture

Sinclair is in talks with two large MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) that ride on the AT&T and T-Mobile wireless networks about offering the phone, says Aitken, who declined to identify the operators.

“There are millions of MVNO subscribers that would be ripe for the picking so to speak with a smartphone of this sort. That’s one of the reasons for pushing so hard to get this phone to a ready state,” says Aitken, adding that at the moment the Mark One is not ready for mass consumer sales but that “it’s not far away.”

With a 3.0 smartphone on the way to potentially millions of consumers, it will be easier for the station group to implement another key aspect of its NextGen TV deployment strategy: state government mandates requiring smartphones to be built with 3.0 receivers.

“We are in the process of getting legislation into multiple states, specifically state house and senate legislation in New York at the moment, for a mandate to include ATSC 3.0 receivers in smartphones because of the public safety and public service side of the standard,” he says.

In July, New York State Senator Kevin Parker and Clyde Vanel (State Assembly Chairman, Internet and New Technology Subcommittee) introduced legislation (S8797) mandating inclusion of the 3.0 receiver chip in portable electronic devices defined in the bill as “any handheld mobile telephone… personal digital assistant (PDA), or handheld device with mobile data access.” 

“On and after January first, Two Thousand Twenty-Two, no manufacturer shall provide for sale in this state any portable electronic device not equipped with an ATSC 3.0 chip,” the legislation reads. 

The Advanced Emergency Alerting and Informing (AEAI) aspects of ATSC 3.0 “are not going unnoticed at the state level,” says Aitken.

Creating Leverage

While the Federal Communications Commission has expressed no interest publicly in mandating 3.0 receivers in smartphones, the AWARN Alliance and others in the television industry have spent the past several years educating local, state and federal emergency managers about ways in which NextGen TV can help inform the public and assist them in the event of a disaster.

Broadcasters and vendors of emergency alerting technology used by TV broadcasters have stepped up as well. For example, the News-Press & Gazette station group has worked with AWARN to demonstrate how the standard could have been used to alert viewers in specific neighborhoods of Santa Barbara, Calif., to the threat of mudslides. 

But until the Mark One, such alerts would only have been useful to home viewers. With a 3.0-enabled smartphone, the public can stay informed of emergencies regardless of where they are, says Aitken.

“Very soon, I am going to be sending phones to AT&T and other mobile companies, and I will ask a simple question,” he says. “What is preventing your organization, your business, from manufacturing a phone that could save lives in the event of natural disaster, a public safety situation or crime?”

The offer Aitken made a couple of years ago at the ATSC Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., to provide AT&T and other wireless companies with a million 3.0 receiver chips, each, for free stands to this day, he says.

Consumer Interest

Initially, the Mark One will be put into the hands of friends and family of Sinclair staff in markets where it delivers ATSC 3.0 to help the station group fine tune its NextGen TV service. The phones are equipped with a return channel so that data collected about reception levels at various locations can help guide the station group as it makes decisions about deploying ATSC 3.0 single frequency networks (SFNs) around the country, he says. 

However, that’s just the start. Aitken anticipates strong interest in the phone from consumers. “There’s not a person I’ve talked to over the past two years of getting to this point who hasn’t said, ‘As soon as you have it, I want one,’” he says.

The Mark One is aimed at the middle of the market. Target pricing is below $300 if the production run is in the tens of thousands, $200 if it is in the hundreds of thousands of units and even less if millions of the phones are produced, he says.

“We’re not in this for the money [from phone sales],” says Aitken. “I guess we are a little bit crazy, but we are not so crazy as to think that we want to be in the business of selling phones.”

Beyond the Mark One, Aitken envisions the SL4000 3.0 receiver chip being used in a range of other consumer devices, such as NextGen TV gateways capable of receiving 3.0 and retransmitting content via Wi-Fi to tablets and other home devices, and even into cars for a range of applications from receiving map and navigation data to enabling wireless firmware updates to onboard car systems.

“It [the SL4000] is the lowest common denominator that fills the largest number of possible use cases,” he says.

A video detailing the Mark One smartphone is available here.

This story was originally published by Next TV sibling publication TV Technology. 

One Media, which is owned by advanced TV pioneer Sinclair, said the FCC should adopt the "modest" modifications to its plan for deployment of the ATSC 3.0 advanced broadcast transmission standard, but should also look to be a little less modest, including recognizing the value of distributed transmission to localism.

That came in comments on the FCC's recent NPRM.

One Media said that the commission should also consider 1) furthering maximization of broadcast coverage areas; 2) "[r]ecognizing the importance of this proceeding, and policies supporting the advancement of Next Gen TV services, to promoting localism and the ability of broadcasters to continue serving the public interests"; and 3) streamlining the licensing process.

Related: FCC Provides Push to Internet Broadcasting

The FCC voted unanimously in March to adopt a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) seeking comment on a broadcaster proposal to allow broadcasters greater flexibility in using distributed transmission systems (DTS) to deliver new ATSC 3.0 signals.

The FCC said, and broadcasters agreed, that allowing that flexibility with the new advanced TV broadcast standard would get those signals to hard-to-reach viewers, improve indoor reception and be more efficient with the spectrum, a big priority for the FCC.

The FCC's proposal is responsive to a petition by the National Association of Broadcasters and America's Public Television Stations to change the current DTS rules, which were adopted during the last transmission sea change--to digital, to allow for single frequency networks (the DTS systems comprise "two or more transmission sites located around a station’s service area, each using the same RF channel").

The item sought comment on whether and how to allow signals to exceed a TV station's service area by more than the current de minimis (minimal) amount. The FCC also wants input on the possible impact of extending the signals on other uses, including low-power TV stations, and whether to extend the signals of current ATSC 1.0 signals as well. Broadcasters currently use translators to boost their signals at the fringes of the service area and in other areas where terrain weakens a signal, but translators usually use a different channel, while DTS use the same channel.

Computer companies, most notably Microsoft, have argued against the rule change, saying it could be "catastrophic" to its rural broadband rollout and arguing broadcasters could get what they want through existing rules. Microsoft is using the "white spaces" between TV signals to deliver it.

The FCC had signaled concerns about the DTS expansion to areas that could not be reached with a single antenna because it could undermine localism.

One Media begs to differ.

"[A]s the deployment of ATSC 3.0, and adoption of the proposed rules in the NPRM, together promote localism by allowing stations to provide better over-the-air coverage throughout the contour and the delivery of tailored local content to more viewers. Moreover, the recommended interference contour will prevent DTS stations from encroaching on the service of stations in adjacent markets."

It also said DTS will allow for "hyper" localization.