Advanced Television System Committee (ATSC) president Madeleine Noland recently reminded the standards body’s membership that “every technology transition has its challenges.”
Indeed, 2023 was perhaps the most challenging year for the ATSC 3.0 standard overall. But she was specifically speaking of LG's decision last fall to stop including ASTC 3.0 tuners in future OLED smart TV sets after the company lost a relatively small patent case against Maryland-based tech company Constellation Designs.
Since that time, ATSC 3.0 has enjoyed a steady drumbeat of progress, with stations in Chicago, Detroit and San Antonio launching NextGen TV broadcasts, smart TV giant TCL integrating ATSC 3.0 into its sets, and UK music video service Roxi working with Sinclair Broadcast Group to launch ATSC 3.0 channels.
Does ATSC 3.0 finally have momentum?
Certainly, at the time, the LG news seemed damning.
Constellation was awarded $1.68 million in damages associated with its ATSC 3.0 patents and LG reported that the required royalty payments going forward would drive up the cost for including a ATSC 3.0 tuner in each set from $3 to $6.75. NextGen sets generally start at about $599.
In a letter to the FCC, LG said, “This decision was not made lightly, because LG has been a vocal ATSC 3.0 advocate, a strong supporter of local broadcasters and a leading developer of television products with the latest NextGen TV technologies.”
In fact, LG Electronics made a big splash at CES 2020 as one of the first TV makers to integrate ATSC 3.0 tuners into its sets.
LG complained about “companies like Constellation Designs that are not participating in the main patent pools for ATSC 3.0 technology,” saying they’re not committed to licensing their IP on “reasonable and nondiscriminatory” (RAND) terms.
LG left the door open for reintegrating the tuners in future lines, so perhaps they were just making a stand on the principle of the matter. But it’s safe to assume that a company of that size wouldn’t just abandon a wildly popular consumer electronics product line in the run-up to Christmas if it were a profitable business, especially over such a small cost increase.
The news sparked a flurry of speculation about other TV manufacturers. Our sibling publication TechRadar wondered if Samsung and Sony might end up dropping ATSC 3.0 tuners from their products, as well.
So far, there’s no sign of a mass defection, but it’s worth noting that in August, when Scripps rolled out the latest edition of the Tablo OTA DVR, after quietly acquiring Ottawa-based manufacturer Nuvyyo, it was assumed that since Scripps is primarily a broadcaster, the latest model would offer an ATSC 3.0 tuner, but alas, it did not, not even as an optional add-on.
Next TV caught up with Nuvyyo founder and CEO Grant Hall, who was still calling the shots under the new ownership to ask about the decision to leave out an ATSC 3.0 tuner.
“We started this development a little while ago,“ Hall explained. “Back then, ATSC 3.0 was evolving as well, in the earlier stages. And it wasn't quite ready to, you know, for us to bet the farm and to include it into the very first product.”
He added, “We do have ATSC 3.0 on the roadmap, and we're actively working on products with that technology.”
TV Sets
Pearl TV, the industry association that has been orchestrating the U.S. NextGen TV rollout, estimates that by the end of 2023, NextGen TV signals will “reach” 75% of U.S. television households in more than 70 markets.
But how many TV sets and/or standalone tuners are actually watching? Or more importantly, how much overlap is there between the OTA market and the target demographic for brand-new 4K UHD TV sets with a built-in tuner?
Pearl TV predicted that more than 10 million NextGen TV-capable devices will have shipped by the end of 2023. Meanwhile, the CTA estimated that about 5 million NextGen TV sets will ship in 2023 alone, representing 12% of all TV shipments and that the percentage will reach 50% by 2025.
There are now approximately 75 models available at retail, at a starting price point between $600 and $700.
On a global scale, so far only South Korea, Jamaica and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago have officially adopted the platform, with other countries still evaluating their options.
The Promise
ATSC 3.0 is designed to deliver stunning 4K, and High Dynamic Range (HDR) video with movie-theater-quality sound and added voice clarity with Dolby’s Voice Plus.
It allows for two-way interactivity, both over the air and in tandem with internet connections, opening a broad range of possibilities for broadcasters. That includes enhanced internet content on demand, data delivery to cars and mobile video, expanded hyperlocal news, dual-language support and addressable advertising, as well as advanced emergency alerts and information.
There’s also the promise of 8K OTA signals in the future.
In 2022, Pearl TV introduced a key component for the platform, Run3TV, which acts as an application development platform for broadcasters.
“An industry first, Run3TV gives broadcasters the ability to leverage the new ATSC 3.0 A/344 Interactive Content broadcast standard to create television applications that enhance over-the-air viewing with interactive and on-demand content delivered over broadband,” explained Anne Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV. “With NextGen TV and Run3TV, broadcasters can now bring the OTA environment into the digital world.”
But the platform’s vast and somewhat nebulous potential is turning out to be a both blessing and curse.
In April 2023, going into NAB, Next TV contributor David Bloom called NextGen TV “a tech TV version of 'Waiting for Godot,' where an unspecified something is imminently arriving to make everything better ... yet never quite materializes.”
He explained that “a problem that has been bedeviling this platform for years” is that “broadcasters seemingly can’t decide what to do with ATSC 3.0’s many possibilities.”
Charter Communications has been vocal in its complaints about the thousands of potential configurations of the new standard that make it difficult for them to deliver an ATSC 3.0 signal over their wired networks. Charter noted that the NAB itself has said that ATSC 3.0 has 40,000 possible configurations.
“Worse, many of the things made possible in ATSC 3.0 -- movie downloads, video on phones, data delivery to cars and Lord knows lots of sports betting information -- are already being done with other devices,” Bloom explained.
He reported that Charter warned the FCC and lawmakers that “station indecision and service duplication will reduce consumer demand for ATSC 3.0-capable equipment, slowing the rollout even more.”
In January 2023, the National Association of Broadcasters warned that ATSC 3.0 transition was in peril, and with it broadcasters’ future calling on the FCC to phase out the "wasteful" ATSC 1.0 simulcast requirement.
Nexstar Media Group CEO Perry Sook and other top broadcast group executives met with FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel and other commissioners and staffers to stress that the “stalled transition” represents an existential threat to free, over-the-air broadcasting.
For one thing, NAB pointed out that 4K HDR is growing across other platforms and will soon be little more than table stakes to play in the video game. They called for a firm plan for phasing out the “wasteful dual transmission in both ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0.”
At the 2023 NAB Show in Las Vegas, Rosenworcel announced a partnership, the Future of Television initiative, led by NAB and with the goal of a smooth transition to the new standard.
“Today, we are announcing a public-private initiative, led by the National Association of Broadcasters, to help us work through outstanding challenges faced by industry and consumers,” Rosenworcel said in a speech to the assembled broadcasters.
NAB set up three stakeholder working groups to deal with existing hardware, the technical aspects of executing the transition and other regulatory issues implicated by the evolution in broadcasting standards, respectively.
Business Models
Launched in 2020, Evoca TV was one of the earliest attempts to build a business around NextGen TV, leveraging the system to provide a virtual pay TV service using ATSC 3.0 broadcast instead of the internet.
Evoca TV operated in a handful of markets in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon and Michigan, packaging local broadcast stations, a few inexpensive cable channels and regional sports networks in skinny bundles priced at around $25 a month.
The initial play was for rural consumers who lacked the reliable bandwidth needed for streaming. Over time, Evoca turned itself into a platform that enabled inexpensive access to RSNs.
However, after making a brief splash, the Idaho-based start up ran out of cash at the end of 2022 and was forced to shutter.
Earlier this year, Next TV reported that from the ashes of Evoca, we could be witnessing the emergence of an innovative post-RSN distribution scheme that finally utilizes the vast potential of NextGen TV.
With the NBA's Phoenix Suns and Utah Jazz both leaving their respective regional-sports-network homes and returning their regular-season games to over-the-air broadcast television, Next TV wondered if ATSC 3.0 might be used to gateway access to premium subscribers.
This was inspired by what sources close to Evoca called the “Denver Example” --inb that region, Evoca had been bundling AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain, home of Major League Baseball's Colorado Rockies, along with Altitude Sports, home of the NBA's Denver Nuggets and NHL's Colorado Avalanche, delivering the package to consumers, primarily via ATSC 3.0, for $25 a month.
Sports media consultant Patrick Crakes noted that "The potential model has components to it including tiered non-exclusive pay-TV distribution, as well as broadcast enabled pay walls via ATSC 3.0. Will those appear all at once? That I don’t know. But I do know it can keep rights fees within current parameters,"
But the rights market is complicated and with Bally Sports bogged down in bankruptcy court and Evoca out of the picture, a technical solution still seems evasive.
Other use cases have included things like distance learning. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, education technology company SpectraRep partnered with Sinclair Broadcast Group’s D.C. station, WIAV-CD, to deliver EduCast over ATSC 3.0. EduCast is SpectraRep’s broadcast internet product for K-12 and college learners without broadband internet services at home.
NextGen Stations
Meanwhile, the slow market-driven rollout continued apace throughout the last year.
In 2023, Miami, Florida emerged as a top U.S. NextGen TV market with a combined total of 11 channels serving the city’s 1.7 million television households. Multiple major networks, including ABC, FOX, CBS, NBC, PBS, Telemundo and Univision are now available.
In December, Mission Broadcasting-owned station WPIX in New York kicked off NextGen TV broadcasts in the country’s top market. Operated by Nexstar Media Group, WPIX is using its new ATSC 3.0 signal to carry its own programming, as well as programming from The Walt Disney Co.’s WABC and TelevisaUnivision’s WXTV and signals for Rewind TV and Antenna TV in the Big Apple.
Also in December, Sinclair-owned KFOX in El Paso, Texas converted to an ATSC 3.0 transmitter and is using the new format to broadcast its own programming as well as the programming of four other participating stations in the market.
In August, five local Minneapolis stations joined the party, along with six local stations in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the country’s fourth largest TV broadcast market.
Six stations in Boston, Massachusetts, the country’s 10th-largest television market launched service last January in a market of roughly 2.5 million households.
So, while broadcasters have been making progress in a difficult transitionary period, we’re not quite seeing a deluge of new stations going online.
The History
In 2019, the FCC started accepting applications to start broadcasting the ATSC 3.0 standard, stressing a “voluntary, market-driven” deployment of the technology. The new platform is a complete overhaul of the previous ATSC 1.0 system that first brought digital HD to American living rooms.
(In case you’re wondering, they just skipped ATSC 2.0. It’s kind of a “marketing thing.”)
The original ASTC standard was forged in a contentious process that included input from computer manufacturers, the TV industry and the consumer electronics industry, which finally hammered out a “Grand Alliance” blueprint for the U.S. conversion to digital in 1996.
The standard embraced no less than 18 different broadcast formats, incorporated as part of a compromise meant to replace the NTSC standard that ruled the airwaves from 1941 until stations started adopting the new standard in the late 1990s. That process concluded with the shutdown of the last major NTSC broadcasts in the U.S. in June 2009, although low-power TV (LPTV) stations in remote areas were permitted to continue for a few more years.
But the original format met with pushback from some corners of the U.S. broadcast industry at the time, most notably Sinclair Broadcast Group, which advocated for the rival European standard, DVB, citing ATSC’s issues with multipath interference and other strengths of the DVB’s COFDM modulation like the ability to reach mobile users.
At the time, ATSCs proponents argued that that with its inherent cellular design, COFDM would never be able to replicate the coverage range of legacy NTSC transmission towers, (a key design requirement at the time) and that it was more suited to the dense population centers of Europe than the vast expanses of rural America.
ATSC 3.0, which adopts a similar COFDM modulation scheme, was designed to open up a whole new world of opportunities for U.S. broadcasters, first and perhaps foremost is 4K UHD OTA broadcast. When ATSC 1.0 first went on sale, high definition, in both its 1080P and 720P variants, quickly emerged as the key selling point among consumers who were enthralled by the big, bright, clear pictures.
But while 4K UHD, especially combined with Dolby Atmos, could certainly deliver the next bright shiny thing consumers want in their living rooms, getting there is proving to be more challenging than anyone anticipated.
