This year’s show, which runs Jan. 9-12, should be bigger than the 2023 edition. That show drew 117,000 attendees and 3,200 exhibitors and represented a significant bounce-back from the 45,000 attendees and 2,300 exhibitors that came in 2022, the first show after a one-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which owns and produces CES and is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2024, is projecting attendance to be 130,000 with more than 3,500 exhibitors.

“We are seeing huge momentum for CES 2024,” says Kinsey Fabrizio, CTA senior vice president of CES and membership.

A Bigger Footprint

As of early December, CTA had already booked 2.4 million net square feet of exhibit space, Fabrizio says, which is over a 10% jump from CES 2023. The CES 2024 exhibition and conference will be spread across the North, Central and West Halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center as well as several Las Vegas hotels, including 1,000 startup companies exhibiting in “Eureka Park” at the Venetian. Over half of Fortune 500 companies will be in attendance, including Amazon, Google, Intel, Qualcomm, LG, Samsung and Sony.

AI’s Big Year

AI is the “hottest topic in the tech industry right now,” says John Kelley, VP and show director, CES. AI will be “pervasive” across the show floor and conference sessions, Kelley says, including a keynote from Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger discussing the critical role that chips and software play in making AI more accessible.

“What’s changed in the last year is generative AI has taken the world by storm, and every company is thinking about how to use it,” says CTA President-CEO Gary Shapiro. “And I know many, many, many companies are going to be talking about AI and introducing and showing products that take advantage of that.”

Another growth area for CES is automotive and mobility, Kelley says, with more than 300 companies exhibiting in an at-capacity West Hall including Honda, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and Kia. The “C Space” Entertainment and Content conference at the Aria, which features brands like Amazon Ads, Netflix, NBC Universal, Roku and Snap, has also expanded with additional space in the Cosmopolitan hotel this year including new exhibitors Disney, NVIDIA, Paramount and Reddit.

Noteworthy “C Space” panels for broadcasters include “2024: The AI Inflection Point — Entertainment, Internet & Media” featuring Steve Canepa, GM, Global Industries, IBM and Richard Kerris, VP/GM, media and entertainment, NVIDIA; “Future of TV & Streaming: Cable, Internet TV & FAST Strategies,” with executives from Tubi, Disney, PBS and Nielsen; “Monetizing the TV/Streaming, Programming Platforms: The Strategies” with executives from Uber, Amazon Ads, Vizio, Disney and Estrella Media; and “Transforming An All-American Brand: Technology Inside The Weather Channel,” with Tom O’Brien, EVP, Allen Media Group; Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, Allen Media Group; and Alexandra Wilson, meteorologist, The Weather Company.

‘A Good Way To Kick Off The Year’

With many top network and station group executives at CES, many media technology vendors will also be there, if not to exhibit but to simply meet with their customers and partners. One of them is IP transport provider Zixi, which has been experiencing big growth in its live event business due to the explosion in streaming sports coverage. Zixi won’t have a booth or suite at CES but is still sending a team of six, including members of its executive team as well as technical support personnel. That is double the number of people it sent in 2023.

“The number of companies that is going is starting to grow again,” says John Wastcoat, Zixi SVP business development and marketing. “We’re not going to be able to handle it with just a handful of people this year, so that’s why we’re doubling our team that’s going to go out and meet with everybody. And it’s an easy hop from L.A., so people can make a day trip if they need to … they’ll be in and have three or four meetings and be out, without a significant investment.”

Zixi has two motivations to attend CES that are interconnected.

“One is that our customers and our partners are looking for different ways to monetize their content,” Wastcoat says. “That could be sending it directly to a new smart TV, we do that with Bloomberg around the world. We have conversations with the automobile manufacturers about sending content directly to their screens as well. So, we’ve got that angle.

“And then our customers and partners are still looking at what’s going to be new and interesting for them over the next few years,” he adds. “So, we’re there to talk with them about what we need to do together in 2024, whether that aligns with anything that’s found at CES or not. But it’s a good way to kick off the year.”

While over time the overall focus at CES has shifted away from television sets and Blu-ray players to a range of different consumer technology products, Zixi is still very interested in how its IP transport technology integrates with TV sets to deliver programming to the living room.

“We are seeing a tremendous increase in our business because of the reallocation of sports rights to digital-first platforms that didn’t have infrastructure for it before,” Wastcoat says. “We’re forecasting a million live sports events in 2024 that will use Zixi, and two years ago we probably would have said we’re not very interested in occasional use business like that, we’re looking for the 24/7 constant traffic. But it has become such a volume pay that it has got our attention. So, companies like Amazon Prime [Video] are coming to us and asking us for new features and functionality, like scheduling tools to be able to manage these thousands of events that they’re doing.”

Another broadcast vendor making the trip is robotic camera specialist Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC), which will be exhibiting in the booth of its parent company Nikon. MRMC will once again collaborate with virtual production specialist Vu Studios to deliver the “Unreal Ride.” For CES 2024 the Unreal Ride environment will take place in a virtual jungle, where participants will get to experience the thrill of riding through it in a futuristic Jeep and once again be able to take away a video of themselves travelling through the virtual world.

MRMC’s technology can also be seen elsewhere on the show floor as several companies rent MRMC’s robotic arms just to draw attention to their booths.

“One of them has a light wand on it, and it attracts people because they see it doing funny patterns,” says Paddy Taylor, MRMC head of broadcast.

While MRMC does makes some products that it is actively marketing at CES, such as automatic tracking software and low-cost sliders for PTZ cameras, Taylor doesn’t expect to get many new customers for the company’s high-end specialized robotics at CES.

“It’s more of a positioning exercise,” Taylor says.

One of the messages that MRMC is looking to get across is that Nikon is serious about video, as more broadcasters and other professional videographers start to use DSLR-style cameras for content capture.

“With the Z 9 Nikon probably has the best DSLR-style mirrorless camera for video, and Nikon’s starting to make a really big thing about that,” Taylor says. “And we’re doing some things to move that camera and make it do interesting things.”

The other message that Taylor wants to emphasize is that MRMC expects full-frame cameras like the Sony HDC-F5500, which use the same type of large sensors as digital cinema cameras, will start to be used en masse in broadcast production in 2024 to provide a different look for live sports and news. And MRMC sees an opportunity there for its robotic systems.

“We have a few customers using Sony Venice [digital cinema cameras] with our robotics, but in live current affairs and sports studios,” Taylor says. “And I think with the Olympics and a few other events next year you’ve got more full-frame system cameras coming onto the market. You’re going to see a marry-up, where people are trying to mix different types of full-frame cameras in different workflows for sporting events, festivals, concerts — anything with a creative edge people are trying to strive for.”

New Services For NextGen TV

Broadcasters will also use CES 2024 to promote the continued rollout of the ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV, digital television standard through demonstrations put on by ATSC and the Pearl TV coalition of station groups.

“There’s going to be a focus on the consumer, both on the services side and device side,” says ATSC President Madeleine Noland. “You’re going to see a proliferation of devices, more set-top boxes, more television models and a few extras.”

NextGen launched in 12 more markets in 2023, including top 10 markets Philadelphia and New York, and CTA says that 10 million NextGen TV sets have been sold in the U.S. to date. With planned launches in Chicago, San Diego and Tucson coming next month, 3.0 signals should be lit up in 75 markets covering 75% of U.S. TV households by the end of January, Noland says. She notes that 3.0 is also making significant progress internationally, with Brazil having chosen 3.0 technology for most of its new mandated digital TV standard and a final decision on the physical, or RF transmission, layer due next year.

Big Four networks ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are all sponsors of the ATSC booth in Central Hall, which will have 13 different TV models, four different set-tops and one prototype mobile phone. The booth will also feature various demonstrations of high dynamic range (HDR) and enhanced audio content, including an “immersive entertainment room” sponsored by Dolby and major-league sports programming. There will also be a mosaic of various interactive applications enabled by 3.0’s broadband backchannel including “Start Over” capability developed by E.W. Scripps; an interactive music service from Sinclair; and sports statistics, gaming and news applications.

“What you’ll see at CES are almost fully-baked services that will hit the consumer this year, the gaming applications, the sports interactivity, the Start Over application,” says Mark Aitken, president, ONE Media and SVP of advanced technology for Sinclair. “There are a number of broadcasters, beyond us, who are now beyond the planning phase of adding HDR to their programming. Some of these become more and more relevant in respect to sports coming back to local broadcasting.”

Another new capability that ATSC and Pearl TV will be demonstrating is “broadcast IP,” which is a way to deliver a local station’s enhanced 3.0 programming to a 3.0 TV set as a “virtual channel” over broadband. This is a capability that is particularly important given the current spectrum landscape for 3.0, where often there is not enough capacity for every station that wants to offer 3.0 to be supported in a market.

Pearl TV first tested broadcast IP in Phoenix several years ago, says Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle, working with set makers LG, Sony and Samsung, and successfully deployed it last spring for South Florida PBS’s stations in Miami.

The way that broadcast IP works is that a host 3.0 station transmits tiny bits of metadata within its over-the-air stream that can be picked up by a NextGen TV set and point to an internet server carrying the “virtual channel” of another station in the market that isn’t actually broadcasting in 3.0 due to capacity constraints. The virtual channel is displayed like a 3.0 channel in the over-the-air electronic program guide (EPG) on the NextGen TV set. When a viewer clicks on it that station’s 3.0 programming is then streamed to the set via the broadband connection.

However, the broadcast IP “virtual channel” shouldn’t be thought of as simply another FAST or streaming channel because it’s only available through the OTA guide, Schelle says. And it does require an agreement between two stations to enable transmission of the “tiny bits” of data necessary for the guide info.

“Our first goal was to bring up the PBS stations in South Florida to ensure that TVs can see it,” Schelle says. “It’s geofenced, you’re transmitting the URL in your stream, and it goes out and grabs the content from a server and puts it up in the OTA EPG. But you can only get it if you have antenna, you can’t get it otherwise.”

In Las Vegas, Sinclair is working with Gray Television and Fox to enable the broadcast IP transmission of KVVU, Gray’s Fox affiliate in the market, which couldn’t find traditional RF capacity for 3.0 programming.

“They want to offer their Fox station in 3.0 so they can enhance it with the same capabilities as if they were on-air in 3.0, to do 1080p and HDR, or even do 4K,” Schelle says. “They can also do [interactive] applications, the RUN3TV app works in the IP channel as well. They can basically do everything they can do in 3.0.”

The post For Broadcasters And Their Vendors, AI And IP Delivery Are Top Of Mind At CES appeared first on TV News Check.

The leadership award recognizes women who have contributed significantly to advancing their industry technologically, and Schelle has promoted the new voluntary ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard that broadcasters, manufacturers and consumers are embracing. She believes ATSC 3.0 will transform the industry. In introducing Schelle, 2021 WIT Leadership recipient Marci Lefkovitz, VP of technology and workflow strategy for Disney Content Operations, called Schelle a force of nature when it comes to promoting the 3.0 initiative.

“To take a new broadcast standard from concept to implementation without government support or early broad support from the industry is not for faint of heart, or for anyone who craves immediate gratification,” said Lefkovitz, who met Schelle when appointed as the ABC representative to the ATSC 3.0 initiative.

Schelle, who called herself an eternal optimist, said the movement is making progress. “I believe this is transformative for the industry, and we will get there,” she said.

Five other women were recognized during TVNewsCheck’s 13th annual awards program — two Futurists and three Women to Watch.

This year’s WIT Futurists — those who take a long-range view of where the television industry should be moving and figure out how to get it there — are Cobalt Digital’s Suzana Brady and Ateme’s Chrystelle Le Gall. Brady, SVP for worldwide sales and marketing at Cobalt Digital, chairs the Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST) Forum. As chair for RIST, Brady has expanded the forum to more than 200 members and has also educated the media industry about the HDR aspects of the ATSC 3.0 standard. Le Gall is lead cloud solutions architect at Ateme who designed a reference architecture for cloud solutions that automated operations for Ateme clients. Her moves helped lay the foundation for the company’s customers to transition to the cloud during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2020 recipient of the WIT Leadership award, Barbara Lange, previous executive director of Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), said Brady “lives and breathes futurist.”

Brady “pivoted to technology by falling in love with fast-paced technology in Silcon Valley” and has worked to create a standard for reliable internet stream transport and educate the industry about it, she said.

Brady urged those involved in RIST to “choose to give back to the industry” and invest their decades of experience and knowledge in the RIST cause.

Speaking to the young generation entering the industry, she said: “Girls, you were born with this inner strength — your resilience your empathy, your sense of awareness, your unique views, your talents, your determination. You have super powers. All of you. Superpowers. Use them to fulfil your dreams. Don’t tell anything hold you back. Respect yourself. Every work place should embrace women. You should not be the exception.”

Janet Gardner, 2020 Futurist recipient and co-founder of Perspective Media, called Le Gall a passionate and practical strategist and technologist. “When she joined Ateme in 2018, she took another leap, really starting to drive Ateme to the cloud,” she said.

Le Gall said historically she hasn’t thought that women couldn’t be in technology.

But teamwork was essential, she said. She urged the younger women not to have doubts about going into science or technology because they think it’s a man’s world.

“I never thought women in technology is a challenge. I’m not saying it was really easy,” she said. “Women, you can do whatever you want, you just have to work for it.”

WIT also recognizes Women to Watch, who have contributed toward advancing the industry technologically. For 2023, the Women to Watch are Hannah Barnhardt, COO of TMT Insights, Emily Stone, VP for digital content and LiveNOW for Fox Television Stations, and Nadia Khan, chief marketing officer at LTN.

Nadia Khan with Sinclair’s Del Parks (JohnStaleyPhoto.com)

Barnhardt developed a production and operational strategy for bringing to market a cloud-native, technology-agnostic operational management platform for media supply chain operational users created an important new option for content creators and distributors competing in a multimedia environment.

Terri Davies, president of the Trusted Partner Network, called Barnhardt optimistic and full of promise. Davies said Barnhardt’s advice to the next generation of entrepreneurs is to “recognize your passion, play to your strengths, be humble, know what you don’t know, and ask for help.”

For her part, Barnhardt said she has been fortunate to be surrounded by incredible mentors and to collaborate with some of the sharpest minds inside and outside the industry. “It’s a joy every day to support initiatives that matter to the industry.”

Stone oversaw the complete overhaul of the Fox TV websites and apps to deliver a better user experience, while adding new features such as the ability to watch live news from  all of the Fox markets on each station’s website. The integral role developing and expanding the streaming service LiveNOW from Fox, created an unfiltered look at live news breaking across the U.S.”

Abby Auerbach, Chief Communications Officer for Television Bureau of Advertising, said Stone is focused on delivering an excellent user experience through LiveNOW. “She said, “You don’t have a great user experience if you don’t have great content, and you can’t share it without a great tool,” Auerbach said. “We can’t be stuck in how we’ve always done things.”

Stone first attended NAB in 2018 to talk with broadcast engineers about digital content in 2018. “I was supposed to explain how digital content works and how they could work with their digital teams,” she said. “I was one of three women in the room.” It is hard to believe, she said, that was only five years ago. “Being a woman in this industry is not always easy, but it is always 100% worth it,” Stone said.

Khan developed a strategic marketing and communications plan, including digital, social media and demand-generation programs, drove sales while positioning LTN as an increasingly important technology provider to the media industry.

Del Parks, president of technology at Sinclair Inc., said he first met Khan when she was doing an internship, and she reminded him of his daughters. “We hit it off right away. She was very intense, incredibly competent.”

Khan said it was humbling to be included in the company of women who are so accomplished.

Read more about this year’s Women in Technology Awards here.

The post WIT Honorees Emphasize Opportunities And Contributions Of Women In Technology appeared first on TV News Check.

Schelle, the managing director of the Pearl TV consortium, has promoted the new voluntary ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard that broadcasters, manufacturers and consumers are embracing. On April 18 at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, TVNewsCheck will recognize her for this effort with the Women in Technology Leadership Award.

Bringing all those disparate groups to the table required serious consensus building and perseverance.

Schelle says she helps those with different points of view find common areas of agreement. This was critical, she says, as she helped the industry build a new transmission standard that had to be adopted by the FCC, adopted by broadcasters, supported by manufacturers and accepted by consumers.

“I’m good at bringing together coalitions to make decisions,” she says.

Part of it is the fact that she understands the technology and its value and is able to articulate that in a simple way. “Whether it’s a broadcaster or a TV manufacturer or a regulator, what’s in it for them?” Schelle says. “I think about it as a value proposition that at the end of the day benefits the consumer.”

She says she has been fortunate to learn about technologies from the Pearl members who are “a bunch of Navy SEALs” with strong technology specialties.

“They know so much about a technology that I’ll never know. I’m curious and they teach me. They lead,” she says.

Schelle at the 2019 NAB Show announcing the launch of NextGen TV.

Working on the NextGen TV wasn’t the first time she’s used her consensus-building muscles. She’s previously brought groups together in digital wireless as well as with the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC).

John I. Taylor, SVP for public affairs and communications at LG Electronics USA, says he first saw Schelle’s ability to bring stakeholders together to advance a cause with the OMVC and later through Pearl TV and the NextGen effort.

“She’s a tireless advocate for the new standard and the benefits it’s going to bring” to broadcasters, equipment manufacturers and viewers, Taylor says. “NextGen TV wouldn’t be where it is today without her vision, without the creation of the Pearl TV group and advancing the cause of reaching across the industry to bring everyone together.”

Schelle, Taylor says, is not the kind of leader who only operates from the 90,000-foot level. “She has a vision as a leader at that level, but she is also really in the weeds. She knows the technology, she knows the business, and she is very adept at working with both engineers and corporate executives in making a compelling case for NextGen TV.”

Catherine Badalamente, president-CEO of Graham Media Group, says Schelle “gets the technology probably better than anybody else that I know” and understands how to have the “difficult technology conversations.”

In addition to understanding the technology, she says, Schelle understands how it can benefit the future of broadcast, mapping out a way forward for broadcasters through the NextGen effort.

“She’s figured out that world for us and allowed us to stay relevant in the game,” Badalamente says. “She sees the path forward better than anybody, and she’s relentless to make sure we stay on that path.”

And it hasn’t been easy, Badalamente adds. “I see her worry, just like I do. We need [NextGen TV] to be able to compete today so that we’re even in the game. And that has been her mission.”

Schelle at CES 2023 following a Pearl TV demonstration to FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington (center) and ATSC Board Chair Richard Friedel.

Pat LaPlatney, co-CEO-president of Gray Television, says Schelle’s perseverance has helped push NextGen through a long process. “Early on, she saw that a this was going to be a long road,” he says. “She persevered. She found a way to get all the many different constituencies involved and invested. And when we had a setback, she never lost sight of the broader goal. For that reason, we’ve come a really long way in 10 years.”

And staying with a project that has taken so long could prompt some with lesser staying power to opt out, he notes. “It would be easy to say, ‘I’m done with it.’ But she’s got a ton of juice” and has brought energy and excitement to the journey. “She’s never lost an ounce of that over the years from what I can tell.”

And she also brought the right skills — including big-picture thinking — to the job, he says.

“She’s a wonderful blend of technologist, government relations person, with a really solid understanding of the media business,” LaPlatney says. “She’s not an engineer, but she absolutely understands the engineering, and she understands how the government works, and she understands the media business. There aren’t a lot of folks who really understand all three of those distinct areas and you really have to, to be effective in what she’s doing.”

As Schelle puts it, she’s worn a lot of hats to push NextGen and ATSC 3.0 from concept to reality and get buy-in from the various groups. “We did tests together, and we all tripped over the truth together. Each partner sees the benefit when you see the benefit.”

Currently, NextGen TV is at the rollout phase, which she calls the hardest phase and requires “delighting the consumer” with services being introduced. The marketplace started teasing NextGen TV technology to consumers during the 2020 CES (Consumer Electronic Show) with a number of TV models on offer.

“It wasn’t just one TV, it was 20 models from three manufacturers” that kicked off the marketplace, says Schelle, who enjoys hanging out with her daughters and taking family trips when she’s not consensus building for NextGen TV, and is on the board of noncommercial WYPR-FM Baltimore.

In 2021, Phoenix marked the first market to have a commercial NextGen station on air. “In Phoenix, we brought in an entire ecosystem. Ecosystems don’t happen overnight. It happens through collaboration,” she says.

The Phoenix rollout tested the reception of NextGen technology with consumers.

“Those two moments were validation of our ideas,” she says. “Innovation and progress can be complex, but this process we put in place worked, and it culminated in a real device that was being sold at retail to consumers.”

The whole project has been a big lift for broadcast, Schelle says, because NextGen is not backward compatible.

“It requires investment from broadcasters, it requires belief from the regulators to do it, it requires consumers to want it,” she says. “It’s completely voluntary. It’s voluntary for broadcasters to do it, voluntary for consumers to buy it, voluntary for manufacturers to make these devices.”

Schelle during an ATSC board visit to Jeju Island, South Korea, in 2018.

And while Schelle has had successes in her past, she’s also had some failure. She co-founded XDSL Networks and raised a lot of money, but when the market went sideways in 2001, she says, it imploded.

“We believed in the technology so much, but we didn’t see the marketplace. That was a real lesson for me,” she says. “It didn’t change the way I look at things, but I just got smarter.”

In order to win, she adds, “You’ve got to place bets. There are going to be some things that don’t work. That’s part of it.”

And, she says, for those entering the world of technology, it’s important to know that “if you haven’t failed at something, you’re going to fail at something.”

Those failures, Schelle says, can make you “a better businessperson, a better technologist.”

All through the long NextGen journey, Schelle says she has maintained a belief in the technology itself.

“I have a strong belief in the curiosity around technology and the passion for how it can transform consumer’s lives, and the good it can bring,” she says.

Read more about this year’s Women in Technology Awards here.

The post For Pearl TV’s Anne Schelle, NextGen Coalition Is Built On Belief appeared first on TV News Check.

But after the initial rush to get early “lighthouse” stations on air, NextGen TV’s momentum has slowed as broadcasters have run into delays launching in the biggest markets. There are still only four consumer electronics manufacturers making compatible TV sets — Sony, LG, Samsung and Hisense — and no accessory devices have yet been officially certified to receive NextGen TV signals. And some early set-top boxes with 3.0 tuners that did come to market have lost functionality as stations have begun encrypting their signals to provide copy protection for high-value content.

Task Force Sought

NAB CEO Curtis LeGeyt and top station group executives including Nexstar CEO Perry Sook and Graham Media CEO Catherine Badalamente visited the FCC late last month to formally air their concerns about the rollout. An accompanying letter described a “stalled transition” and asked the FCC to both emphasize its support for the standard to CE manufacturers and create an ATSC 3.0 task force “to attack problems as they arise.”

The biggest problem, albeit not a new one, is a lack of available spectrum for both launching 3.0 in the biggest markets and fully exploiting the standard to offer new services in any market. That’s because unlike the 1.0 transition, broadcasters didn’t get any additional spectrum to launch 3.0, which the FCC deemed a voluntary standard.

Launching 3.0 first requires all the broadcasters in a market to work together to find a home for the existing 1.0 programming on one (or two) “lighthouse” station’s 6 Mhz channel, thus clearing it for 3.0 transmissions. This “channel-stacking” process is a complicated dance of shuffling the lighthouse station’s primary and secondary 1.0 program streams among multiple 1.0 “host” stations, with diginets from host stations sometimes switching sticks in order to create the most efficient 1.0 multiplexes across the market. In addition to some fancy engineering and investment in new MPEG-2 encoders, the process can also involve lengthy business negotiations between stations.

Jeff Birch

“It’s the same stumbling block in every market, and that’s divvying up the spectrum we’ve got to be able to accommodate everybody and all of their subchannels,” says Jeff Birch, VP engineering, CBS Television Stations. “And I’m not laying this at the FCC’s feet. In some of the markets, we’ve been able to make it happen, and it’s been a collective effort on the part of every broadcaster in every market.”

The channel-stacking problem is most acute in large urban markets, which tend to have both the most stations and the most diginets per station. Four of the top 10 DMAs—New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco—have yet to launch 3.0. Los Angeles and Dallas are on-air with 3.0, but without all of the “Big Four” networks.

“If you count up all of the program streams in the New York market and try to carve out enough space to get at least one or two ATSC 3.0 sticks, and move everything from those sticks elsewhere, the math doesn’t work,” Birch says.

Nonetheless, he is hopeful that at least one New York station will begin broadcasting 3.0 this summer, with at least some of the stations participating.

Persistent Spectrum Crunch

Dave Folsom

Once the 1.0 channel-stacking is complete in market, broadcasters still face a spectrum crunch with their new 3.0 product. That’s because all five or six stations involved are sharing one 6 MHz channel. Setting the modulation scheme of the 3.0 signal to replicate the existing 1.0 coverage in a market generally gives a total payload of anywhere from 24.5 megabits per second (Mbps) to 29 Mbps depending on a market’s characteristics, says Dave Folsom, CTO for broadcast consortium Pearl TV.

Most 3.0 markets on-air today are working with around 24.5 Mbps. That gives each station around 4.5 Mbps, enough to do 1080p/60 video with high dynamic range (HDR). Folsom says that is a meaningful improvement in picture quality over the 720p and 1080i SDR currently offered in 1.0, particularly given the efficiency of HEVC encoders from vendors like Ateme, Harmonic and Synamedia.

“That might sound like a low number, but remember, HEVC is four times more efficient than MPEG-2,” says Folsom, who adds that the 3.0 signals have superior receivability over 1.0 due to the improved multipath performance of COFDM modulation.

But 4.5 Mbps is not enough for the 4K HDR format offered by streaming competitors like Netflix as well as by broadcast networks themselves through their own apps, such as Fox Sports. Over-the-air 4K HDR would require at least 2.5 to 3x more bits for an acceptable picture, Folsom says, and perhaps more for live sports.

Different, But Same?

Broadcasters could differentiate their 3.0 product by offering unique content, but they face a regulatory constraint there as well. To protect the interests of both 1.0 viewers and cable operators, stations transmitting in 3.0 are required by the FCC to offer “substantially similar” programing on their 1.0 signal, a de facto simulcasting rule that sunsets this July but is expected to be extended by 3.0 insiders.

Joe St. Jean

“I think the FCC is going to extend it, and we think that’s the right thing to do, and I think they’re going to look to change that sunset date to something plus-three years or plus-five years, which makes a lot of sense for us, because with the volume of sets out there we certainly don’t want to drop the 1.0 audience on an OTA basis,” says Joe St. Jean, EVP technology policy and standards, Paramount. “We need to give it some time where everyone is starting to manufacture in 3.0 before you can even think about sunsetting [1.0]. And then of course, the cable folks will need to convert to 3.0 at some point if it’s going to be differentiated.”

Broadcasters aren’t prohibited by the “substantially similar” rule from offering the same programming in 4K on their 3.0 broadcasts, but with channel-sharing they don’t have the available bits to do so. That’s why the NAB urged the FCC to speed up the entire process of shifting completely to the new standard. It called the dual transmission of the same programming in both 1.0 and 3.0 “wasteful” and noted the growth of 4K across streaming platforms. It said 4K will soon be considered “table stakes” for getting rights to high-value content like live sports and that broadcasters risk losing them to “pay TV platforms that are permitted to employ more advanced technologies.”

Sam Matheny

“If you want to unlock the true capability of the NextGen TV standard, you need to get past the point where we are, which is a lighthouse station and a whole bunch of channel-sharing,” says NAB CTO Sam Matheny. “We need to get to full deployment.”

Bet On HDR, Not 4K

What wasn’t mentioned in the NAB’s letter is that broadcast networks aren’t yet even delivering 1080p HDR feeds to their O&Os and affiliates. That is despite the fact that some are producing a bevy of content in the format, including all NFL coverage on Fox and CBS this past season (Fox used it to create upconverted 4K HDR for its app and pay-TV partners, and downconverted it for 1.0 distribution).

Folsom says none of the 3.0 stations he’s worked with are yet receiving native 1080p HDR network content. Instead, they are providing their 720p or 1080i SDR 1.0 feeds to the lighthouse station in the market, usually at a high-quality contribution rate of around 20 Mbps. The feeds are then converted to 1080p before they are fed into an HEVC encoder for 3.0 broadcast.

Stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which represent a large chunk of existing 3.0 sticks, are upconverting the SDR feeds to HDR using advanced HDR by Technicolor. That technology, formally known as SL-HDR1, dynamically adjusts the brightness, contrast and color saturation on a frame-by-frame basis. Other 3.0 stations are simply transmitting 1080p SDR.

Folsom says there are myriad issues relating to networks’ slow pace in providing 1080p HDR, including rights issues and upgrades that still need to be made to broadcast centers, distribution networks and commercial insertion systems at local stations. He says Fox, with its new fully IP, SMPTE 2110-compliant plant in Tempe, Ariz., is probably the furthest along.

“We have the bandwidth to do 1080p 60 HDR, and that is gorgeous,” Folsom says. “If the networks would only give us HDR, and I think they’re working on it, then that would be a real gamechanger.”

After upgrading its satellite IRDs from AVC to HEVC encoding during the C-band auction process several years ago, CBS is fully capable of delivering 1080p HDR to its affiliates. The network also has sufficient capacity to deliver both an SDR and HDR feed for some time, which it would probably do for an interim period to give stations time for necessary upgrades.

“We can deliver it to the affiliates’ door,” St. Jean says. “But they have to upgrade their plant in their station to support it, and that’s really where the heavy lift is going to be.”

None of the CBS-owned stations are fully ready to handle a 1080p HDR signal with their current infrastructure, Birch says. While fully supporting 1080p HDR doesn’t require a 2110 plant, it may mean upgrading to 3-gig HD-SDI in some cases. In the interim, CBS would probably take a phased approach as it did with the initial conversion from SD to HD, first allowing “pass-through” of a complete network signal and then creating “islands” of 1080p HDR equipment to support some local functions.

“I see that same scenario here, where we just get it from the IRD to the transmitter first,” Birch says. “Then we’ll have to figure out how to upconvert some local content so it looks like HDR and get that out to the transmitter, and then eventually rebuild the station to handle it all natively, which will not be cheap.”

Considerable Costs

Birch says a “very crude pass-through” would probably cost $100,000 to $150,000 per station. Before spending more on things like switchers and cameras to support HDR and/or 4K there would have to be “a philosophical conversation” about how much local stations are really going to change their operations for 3.0.

“Because will I do local news in 4K HDR in the near future?” Birch says. “Probably not. Maybe my live infrastructure doesn’t change that much, but my commercial playout and my network pass-through has to change. You’re still probably looking at $1 million a station to do some of this.”

Overall, Birch says there is a much greater difference in picture quality between SDR and HDR than there is between 1080p and 4K.

“We want to give the viewer the biggest bang for their buck,” Birch says. “The real grabber is HDR.”

St. Jean concurs and says that 4K is more of a “marketing effort” with consumers.

“I don’t think anyone really intends to deliver 4K anytime soon,” he says. “And quite frankly, I’m not sure there’s a need to, when the TV set is doing such a good job of upconverting.”

Stretching The Receiver Pipeline

As the NAB emphasized in its letter to the FCC, more NextGen TV receivers at lower prices need to come to market for the new standard to be successful. Pearl TV has been working on that issue with its “FastTrack to NextGen TV” program, partnering with semiconductor supplier MediaTek to develop a “reference platform” for high-volume TV manufacturers that includes a TV System on Chip (SoC), ATSC3 demodulators and software stack. That saves individual set-makers from investing in their own engineering work.

Of course, there are millions of existing 4K- and HDR-capable TVs in living rooms across the country that don’t have 3.0 tuners. Offering consumers a low-cost accessory device, such as a set-top receiver, would be the most cost-effective way to turn them into NextGen TV sets. There is also a strong demand for low-cost set-top receivers in countries like Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago that have recently adopted 3.0.

In that vein, Pearl recently released a detailed set of requirements for a “Stand-Alone Receiver” that includes both a 1.0 and 3.0 tuner and connects to a legacy TV set via HDMI. It lists all technical requirements that need to be implemented under the standard including content protection under the A3SA [ATSC 3.0 Security Authority] specification, which involves encrypting content to avoid unauthorized duplication.

The encryption of 3.0 signals has become a thorny issue for some purchasers of early 3.0 set-tops, who initially used them to receive 3.0 lighthouse stations but then could no longer watch them after the stations began implementing A3SA encryption last year. Some viewers have complained about the issue on TV-focused message boards like AVS Forum, and even speculated that broadcasters are trying to create a pay TV service with 3.0.

Folsom notes that such encryption is standard practice with most internet media today including YouTube videos and is generally invisible to the consumer, and that it was always part of the 3.0 standard. He adds that there are no existing NextGen TV sets that have a problem receiving encrypted signals, and that Pearl is working with at least one set-top maker to help them address their issue.

“Some manufacturers put out receivers that did not have decryption capability in them, and when those receivers first were announced, there was at least one manufacturer that put a receiver out that did not have decryption capability in it,” Folsom says. “We warned that company that encryption was coming. So, there is now a vocal audience out there that said wait, you’re encrypting.”

Certifying such accessory devices to actually be NextGen TV-compliant and thus allow manufacturers to use the “NextGen TV” logo to indicate as much would obviously avoid such problems in the future. Pearl announced earlier this month that software firm Tolka is the first company to officially enter their “Accessory Device Certification Program,” which involves NextGen TV certification services and tools provided by Resillion (formerly Eurofins Digital Testing) on behalf of the CTA and the NAB.

“It speaks to the trust of having that logo,” Matheny says. “I’m buying a device designed to leverage the new standard, as opposed to something that could break on you later.”

Anne Schelle

The Tolka software stack, designed specifically for accessory receivers, was demonstrated at CES 2023 in January as one of several products being “next for certification” under Pearl’s FastTrack program. Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle is hopeful that Tolka will have a fully certified product ready in time for the NAB Show in April. She adds that Pearl is working with several other vendors in the accessory device program, which includes rounds of pre-testing at its lab in Bradenton, Fla. A big priority is keeping the engineering costs down for smaller companies that might be selling sub-$50 products like USB accessories, while also making sure consumers don’t get burned by a non-compliant product.

“Our goal is to get them all funneled through, so they’re getting logoed this year,” she says.

The post For NextGen TV, Cheaper Receivers, Bigger Markets And More HDR Are Next appeared first on TV News Check.

The award will be presented during the NAB Show on Tuesday, April 18, at 6 p.m. in the Las Vegas Convention Center.

For the past six years, Schelle has led Pearl TV’s effort to rally the fractious TV station group community to implement a new, advanced broadcast TV transmission standard, while convincing consumer electronics companies to produce compatible sets. The consortium of eight of the larger broadcast TV companies has helped lead the way for the industry’s ever-growing adoption of the ATSC 3.0 standard and the opportunities it opens for expanded, personalized programming and new industry revenue streams including advanced advertising and datacasting.

“Anne’s work has brought NextGen TV to an inflection point,” said TVNewsCheck Publisher and Co-Founder Kathy Haley. “Her ability to keep the industry relentlessly focused on the end goal, even as a chorus of naysayers predicted that 5G and streaming would swamp the fledgling technology, has given local broadcasters the ability to reinvent their role in a fragmenting media world.”

TVNewsCheck’s Women in Technology Leadership Award recognizes women who have contributed substantially toward advancing their industry technologically. It supports the National Association of Broadcasters Education Foundation’s Technology Apprenticeship Program, which trains, informs and recruits a diverse workforce that meets the emerging technology and engineering needs within the broadcast community.

Register here to attend the 13^th annual Women in Technology Awards Presentation Ceremony and Reception at NAB Show in Las Vegas.

Previous Women in Technology Leadership Award honorees:

• Sharri Berg, president, Fox Weather and COO of news and operations, Fox Television Stations
• Judy Parnall, head of standards and industry, BBC
• Marcy Lefkovitz, VP, technology and workflow strategy, The Walt Disney Co.
• Barbara Lange, former executive director of SMPTE
• Lisa Pedrogo, VP of engineering and strategic initiatives, WarnerMedia
• Tish Graham, former VP of broadcast technology at ABC Owned Television Stations
• Diane Tryneski, now board member and adviser to several digital technology companies
• Glodina Connan-Lostanlen, now chief sales officer, Imagine Communications
• Michelle Munson, now founder, Eluvio
• Renu Thomas, then EVP of media operations, technology and IT at Disney ABC Television Group
• Darcy Antonellis, now executive adviser, Amdocs
• Wendy Aylsworth, now CEO, Walden Pond
• Cindy Hutter-Cavell, senior engineer and practice manager, Cavell Mertz & Associates
• Andrea Berry, now EVP operations & technology, Telemundo Enterprises and LATAM

The post Pearl TV’s Anne Schelle To Receive TVN’s Women In Technology Leadership Award appeared first on TV News Check.

CES 2023 comes amidst specific challenges for the technology industry, including continued supply chain vulnerability and softening demand for semiconductors, as well as bigger economic issues like inflation and the threat of a broad recession. CTA cited those last two factors in forecasting U.S. technology retail revenues of $485 billion in 2023, lower than the $505 billion CTA initially predicted for 2022 as well as the record $512 billion in revenues it said the industry accrued in 2021.

The trade group has subsequently lowered expectations for sales of laptops, LCD TVs, tablets, smartphones and gaming consoles in 2023. It did point to a few areas of growth in consumer hardware devices, including high-end OLED TVs and portable gaming consoles.

CTA noted the industry had enjoyed a surge in consumer technology spending over the past three years due to pandemic, and that the $485 billion number is still “roughly $50 billion above pre-pandemic levels.”

Meanwhile, CTA said major areas of revenue growth in 2023 include:

• Technology services such as gaming and video streaming apps, which CTA said will generate $151 billion in consumer spending.
• Automotive technology, with factory-installed automotive technology revenues rising 4% to $15.5 billion in 2023 and companies like Panasonic and LG increasing battery production for electric vehicles.
• Health and fitness technology, with health and fitness services including fitness subscription services and digital therapeutics projected to rise 9% to $928 million in 2023.

Gadget Debuts Wane

Of course, the historical role of CES as the place to introduce consumer gadgets, particularly TVs and other devices for the living room, has been steadily waning for years. In that vein, CTA has dedicated the new West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center to automotive and mobility companies, with more than 300 exhibitors, including the latest in EVs and in-car displays.

Sony, which made a splash in 2022 by declaring plans to make its own EVs, announced before the show that it wouldn’t be revealing any of its 2023 TV sets in Las Vegas. Samsung, the world’s leading TV manufacturer by volume, also didn’t discuss any new TV models in its press briefing. And during the “CES 2023 Tech Trends to Watch” presentation previewing the show on Tuesday night, CTA VP of Research Steven Koenig didn’t touch on TVs at all, focusing instead on enterprise technology and the transformative potential of 5G.

“5G is the first wireless generation that will actually be led by enterprise innovation,” Koenig declared. “5G means faster mobile broadband for consumers, but for commercial, industrial and IoT applications it’s really the greater capacity and ultra-low-latency that is going to unlock so much innovation. And we’re going to see that across this decade.”

Koenig didn’t talk about NextGen TV, or ATSC 3.0, which many broadcasters see as an alternative wireless data pipe to 5G. Neither did Samsung, LG and Sony, the first three set makers to declare support for 3.0 back at CES 2020. The lone set maker to mention it was Hisense, which introduced its first NextGen TV model at CES 2022 and this year detailed several higher-end LCD sets with NextGen TV capability.

LG did introduce some new TV models, including its first wireless OLED TV, the “LG Signature OLED M.” The 97-inch OLED, designed for sleek wall mounting, is only a panel with integrated speakers and a power cord. All of its electronic functions are supported by a separate “Zero Connect” transmitter box, that connects to peripherals like a cable set-top or gaming console and wirelessly transmits 4K video and audio at distances of up to 30 feet away.

LG Global CEO William Cho was also joined on stage by Paramount Streaming President-CEO Tom Ryan to announce that more Paramount streaming content will be coming to LG TVs. That includes the addition of 100 channels globally from Paramount Global’s Pluto TV to the LG Channels content platform, and the inclusion of the streaming app Paramount+ in LG sets on a global basis.

“Today I’m excited to announce that Paramount+ is ready to start its global expansion on LG smart TVs, with the first launch to start today in the U.K. and Ireland,” Ryan said. “Paramount+ will be available in more countries on LG smart TVs soon to follow in the coming days.”

Connecting Homes And Cars

Overall, the big consumer electronics manufacturers spent most of their time Wednesday talking about a connected world of intelligent devices, where smart TVs easily link to smartphone apps to control other devices in the home such as washing machines, air conditioners or security systems. And LG, Samsung and Sony are looking to extend that connected world to the automobile, as all three announced smart car software platforms that would naturally compete with Apple CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto.

LG and Samsung also pointed to digital health and content services as growth drivers, while Sony detailed advancements in its Playstation gaming unit, including a new VR headset as well as the continued adaption of popular games like Gran Turismo into major motion pictures. Andy Sony rolled out a prototype of the “Afeela” four-door EV sedan it has developed in partnership with Honda Mobility, which will be available for pre-orders in early 2025 with U.S. shipments in 2026.

One of Sony’s key technology partners on the Afeela project is Qualcomm, which is providing the “Snapdragon Digital Chassis,” an automotive version of the Snapdragon processing chip used in many smartphones today.

“We are on a mission to really make everyone and everything connected and intelligent, to make every single device intelligent and have high-performance computing,” said Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon. “We look at the opportunity to turn the car into a software-defined vehicle that is 100% connected.”

Broadcasters’ CES Roadmap

Anne Schelle, managing director of broadcast consortium Pearl TV, said her CES schedule is chock full of meetings with set makers and other CE manufacturers about NextGen TV. But she wasn’t surprised the big players aren’t highlighting it at CES.

“It’s up to broadcasters to educate consumers on the services that will be available to them on NextGen,” Schelle said. “To them, it’s just another feature on the TV set.”

The biggest news for broadcasters at CES, Schelle said, is actually the announcement late last month that system-on-a-chip supplier MediaTek has now entered commercial production of TV System on Chip (SoC) ATSC 3.0 demodulators. That should help pave the way for other manufacturers to launch high-volume, low-cost NextGen TV sets as well as accessory devices.

“It will be available first quarter and they’ve been working with us on getting it certified and ready,” Schelle said. “That’s huge, because those are the chipset solutions purchased by the Tier IIs, and they do it in a way that allows you to create a lower-cost device.”

Another boost for NextGen TV could come today, Jan. 5, with the planned launch of 3.0 broadcasts in Miami. Boston is expected to light up later this month.

Sixty-six U.S. markets were live with 3.0 broadcasts as of Tuesday, according to ATSC. In its CES booth the standards body is discussing its efforts to expand 3.0 adoption internationally and demonstrating set-top and USB receivers that can be used to upgrade existing smart TVs to NextGen TV capability. Sponsors include Gaian Solutions, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Pearl TV and Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Sinclair’s Plans

Sinclair has been devoting a lot of time and resources to the connected car market itself in the past few years, as it sees 3.0 as a natural complement to cellular connectivity for delivering software updates; position, navigation and timing (PNT) data; and various infotainment services. Through CAST.ERA, its joint venture with Korean mobile operator SK Telecom, it began testing 3.0 automotive applications in Korea back in 2019, using 3.0 to deliver broadcast programming and 5G to deliver targeted ads based on GPS information.

Last year, Sinclair reached an agreement with Korean automotive supplier Hyundai Mobis to partner on developing and implementing 3.0 automotive applications in both Korea and the U.S. Hyundai Mobis has developed a windshield antenna and a 3.0 receiver with Wi-Fi gateway capability that allows connected tablets or phones in the car to easily receive the 3.0 programming.

Late last month, Sinclair successfully tested the automotive solution developed with its Korean partners in the Washington, D.C., market. A live 3.0 feed was broadcast from Sinclair’s WIAV with the help of SK Telecom control software. It was received in a Hyundai Palisade SUV equipped with the Hyundai Mobis receiver and several connected tables, with geo-targeted information delivered based on GPS data.

At CES Sinclair is demonstrating several automotive applications for 3.0. One is a fully mobile audio infotainment service that is being readied for consumer trials by several auto dealerships in the Baltimore market. Another is a prototype EV charging kiosk that can receive local content and advertising through 3.0 datacasting, an application that Sinclair aims to commercialize nationally through a partnership with digital signage firm USSI Global.

Sinclair will also be demonstrating how its “broadcast app” developed for 3.0 can not only be received and used by NextGen TV sets getting a 3.0 signal, but also through a station’s 1.0 signal, whether the sets are getting that signal over-the-air or through a legacy cable or set-top box.

The key is the Verance Aspect audio-based watermarking solution that is part of the 3.0 standard but is also designed to be backward-compatible with 1.0. It would allow Sinclair or other broadcasters to offer 3.0’s interactive features, like weather or traffic information or OTT content, without having a live 3.0 signal in the market or without it being carried by pay TV platforms. Aspect is currently included in LG’s NextGen TV sets.

“If the consumer has a 3.0-capable television set that’s supporting Verance, we can convey the information to that 3.0 smart TV watching an ATSC 1.0-derived channel and drive them to the broadcast app,” explained Sinclair SVP of Advanced Technology Mark Aitken. “It also means that for all of the markets that have ATSC 1.0, but don’t have 3.0 live, we can still do and produce the broadcast app and bring value to the consumer.”

Evoca’s Fall

One piece of bad 3.0 news this week was the shuttering of Evoca, the fledging pay TV service that blended 3.0 and 1.0 over-the-air transmission with OTT streaming in a hybrid set-top box. Created as a low-cost alternative to traditional pay TV platforms, Evoca launched in 2020 in Idaho and expanded to Arizona, Colorado, Oregon and Michigan using LPTV spectrum and consumers’ broadband connections to deliver 80 channels. The company raised $35 million from strategic investors and netted 10,000 subscribers in total, with a reported churn rate of less than 1%. But it shut down Dec. 31, 2022, after running out of money and being unable to raise additional capital, which Evoca CEO Todd Achilles said was mostly a matter of bad timing.

“We got this far on $35 million,” Achilles said. “The next natural stage for us was go to more financial investors. But the climate for that is completely on ice, unfortunately.”

Evoca had difficulty securing top content from major media companies given its scale. But Achilles said there was no problem with the 3.0 technology, which provided reliable reception to small indoor antennas that Evoca bundled with its set-tops.

“Without a doubt this kind of hybrid architecture is the best way to deliver video to the home — deliver your core content over the air and then supplement that with other programming over the Internet,” Achilles said. “It effectively gives you infinite capacity on your system, with the reach and efficiency of broadcast.”

Achilles, who worked in the “fiercely competitive” wireless industry before starting Evoca, concedes that high-power broadcasters have been hamstrung by the FCC’s simulcasting requirement on early 3.0 stations. But he also thinks the majority of broadcasters still don’t realize how much potential 3.0 has.

“Broadcasters have a huge opportunity,” he said. “They already had the best spectrum, now they have the best air interface. It’s a matter of putting those two things together to usher in a whole new age of media. The industry has to stop turning the crank and doing the same stuff. Otherwise, they’re going to lose more spectrum.”

The post In A Gadget-Light Year, CES Pitches A Connected, Mobile World appeared first on TV News Check.

To that point, none of the roughly 250 3.0 stations broadcasting across nearly 60 U.S. markets today are using the Dolby AC-4 audio technology included in the standard to deliver Dolby Atmos 5.1.4 audio, which offers additional overhead audio channels to create an immersive sound experience that makes viewers feel like they’re part of the action. Most are simply passing through the Dolby 5.1 surround sound from the Dolby AC-3 encoder used in their ATSC 1.0 broadcasts.

Mark Aitken

That includes Sinclair’s 3.0 stations, which are offering an improved picture today via 1080p video with “Advanced HDR by Technicolor” technology, which applies special processing to standard dynamic range (SDR) content to create HDR. Mark Aitken, Sinclair SVP of advanced technology, isn’t sure that immersive audio will ever be that important for local stations.

“I’m not sure there’s a big play for broadcasters in that immersive audio environment,” said Aitken. “Certainly, it’s not going to be used in local broadcast stations. News is almost entirely ‘center-stage’ with a personality, and so even stereo gets lost in that mix.”

Nor are any 3.0 stations currently using AC-4’s new object-based audio capabilities to deliver personalized audio streams to a TV set, such as a “home announcer” commentary feed for a sports broadcast, though a few stations have experimented with multiple language feeds.

Most of 3.0’s audio delay in the U.S. is attributable to the same factors that have held back the rollout of UHD content: there is still a small base of NextGen TV-capable sets; the distribution chain from networks to local stations is not fully ready for new formats; and broadcasters are somewhat hamstrung in experimenting with their 3.0 content because of FCC rules that require them to effectively simulcast their 1.0 programming. Rights considerations for high-value content like professional sports may also preclude 3.0 personalization features like alternative commentary for some time.

Some major U.S. broadcasters have produced live sports in immersive audio in conjunction with their UHD and HDR efforts, but distribution has been limited to special pay TV channels or streaming platforms. Industry insiders say the rest of the world is far ahead of North America in implementing immersive audio, whether it is Dolby Atmos or the competing MPEG-H standard developed by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute.

Larry Schindel

“Europe is leading the charge here,” said Larry Schindel, senior product manager for audio processing vendor Telos Alliance, which makes AC-4 encoders for broadcast applications as well as up- and down-mixers used to blend stereo, surround (Dolby 5.1) and immersive audio in live production.

NBC has been the leader among U.S. broadcasters in pursuing immersive audio, said Schindell, producing a number of Notre Dame college football games in Dolby Atmos as well as providing the 2021 Tokyo Olympics in 4K HDR and Dolby Atmos to Comcast subscribers. Turner and ESPN have also experimented with some Atmos productions, for basketball and college football, respectively.

Terrestrial U.S. broadcasters can’t deliver immersive audio without going to 3.0 and AC-4. But many cable and satellite operators as well as streaming platforms like Netflix can deliver Dolby Atmos by using Dolby Digital Plus JOC (Joint Object Coding), a process by which Dolby Digital Plus with Atmos decoders receive a legacy 5.1 mix and sideband metadata and use them to reconstruct the original Atmos mix.

“That last mile has proven to be a bit of a bottleneck, but it is getting better for sure,” said Schindell.

An Early Winner

One new AC-4 capability that early 3.0 stations are taking full advantage of is “Voice Plus,” a dialogue enhancement technology developed by Dolby Laboratories specifically to address problems viewers have hearing dialogue amid music and other sounds in entertainment programming. Voice Plus was one of the most popular 3.0 features with consumers in early focus groups conducted by broadcast coalition Pearl TV in Phoenix, Ariz.

Anne Schelle

“The sound is so amazing today that’s being produced, but it’s harder and harder to hear the actors’ voices,” said Pearl TV managing director Anne Schelle.

Dolby promoted the dialogue enhancement technology in a series of commercial spots in 2021. Those same spots are running again this year in 25 NextGen TV markets reaching 30 million households, Schelle said.

AC-4’s ability to enhance dialogue in legacy content was one of the key reasons it was selected by North American broadcasters for the 3.0 standard, said Mathias Bendull, Dolby’s head of consumer audio playback, broadcast. He noted that unlike immersive audio or personalization, Voice Plus doesn’t demand any extra work by broadcasters.

Mathias Bendull

“It doesn’t require any additional implementation or any additional content,” Bendull said. “It is just the way that the Dolby AC-4 encoder is configured that it delivers a signal that is capable in the AC-4 television sets to create this dialogue-enhanced version of the content that is processed through the TV station. That is a feature that consumers have very positively responded to.”

Another feature that is built into AC-4 is the ability to support high-quality audio description for the visually impaired. While the AC-3 codec used in 1.0 delivers audio description in mono or stereo audio, even if the program is in 5.1, AC-4 matches the quality of the audio description to the program’s overall audio quality whether it is stereo, surround or Atmos. Cable operators like Comcast that have tested AC-4’s audio description feature see that a major accessibility benefit of 3.0, Bendull said.

Competing Standards

Looking globally, adoption of Dolby Atmos and MPEG-H varies based on geographic region. And makers of professional audio equipment like Lawo currently need to support both, as do many consumer set manufacturers.

“There are some parts of the world that have chosen Atmos, and others are favoring MPEG-H,” said Christian Struck, senior product manager of audio for Lawo. “Brazil, China and Korea have standardized on MPEG-H, while most parts of Europe and North America are on the Atmos track.”

Christian Struck

Capabilities of the two standards for things like personalization and different language tracks are pretty similar, and Struck is hopeful that the industry will eventually standardize on one flavor of immersive and next-generation audio metadata.

Overall, broadcasters’ interest in immersive audio is picking up now that the COVID-19 pandemic situation has improved, Struck said. When COVID-19 first hit in 2020, he said, “broadcasters had to focus on staying on air, and so immersive audio was put on a backburner.”

Lawo started working on immersive audio back in 2011, doing special developments on 22.2-channel sound for the Japanese “Ultra-HD” consortium, and contributing to some early immersive trials during the 2014 Winter Games in Russia and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. At that time broadcasters were starting to debate whether viewers would embrace the aspect of audio personalization or rather preferred having “the best seat at the venue without leaving their homes,” Struck said.

While some broadcasters thought features like different languages or commentators would be the most compelling to viewers, the first step focused on providing the “kick that you get from a three-dimensional sonic image,” he said.

Since then supporting the development of immersive audio in live production has been a “continuous process” for Lawo, said Struck, who noted that most immersive audio activity to date has been in Europe and Asia. BT Sport in the U.K. began broadcasting Premiere League professional soccer in 4K and Dolby Atmos back in 2017. The Bundesliga soccer league in Germany has also adopted immersive audio for top matches broadcast on Sky, using a dedicated immersive audio control room in central Germany that remotely controls the audio processing equipment at the game venues.

There are two sides to immersive audio, Struck explained, the capturing side and the reproduction side. Capturing essentially involves more microphones and a tracking-based automated mixing system like Lawo’s KICK for compelling field-of-play noises. A suspended special microphone array, or “tree,” captures the crowd, announcements, etc., to provide the enveloping “sound bed,” while the other signals are arranged in the sound field based on other considerations.

The Lawo mc² 56 console supports an increasing amount of immersive audio production for live sports.

The mixing console then transmits separate submixes, called “stems”, to the immersive processor for encoding. This approach is often channel-based, i.e., any setting change by the user affects one of the 5.1.4 (or more) channels. Next-generation audio, on the other hand, relies on “sound objects” whose levels can be set by viewers at home for a personalized experience, with less or no commentary or a louder or softer crowd.

In the end the bigger challenge is on the reproduction side, which requires the appropriate data to be sent through the broadcast chain to a consumer receiver connected to an audio system that can receive and decode the information and then accurately deliver the immersive effect, such as through the use of extra speakers mounted in the ceiling.

One of the reasons that personalization initially rated higher as a new audio capability was that it was something that could be supported by conventional stereo speakers and didn’t require new equipment in the living room. But with more people listening on binaural headphones, the development of soundbars, and directional speakers that use controlled sound reflections from the ceiling and walls to create an immersive effect, a big technical hurdle has been lifted, Struck said.

“All big manufacturers of speakers have very good sounding soundbars for comparatively little money, and it kind of becomes the new standard,” he said. “If you buy a home cinema system you immediately have up-firing speakers or a soundbar that is able to reproduce three-dimensional sound. So that has helped a lot. And people really feel the difference.”

Working in immersive audio gives broadcasters more freedom to place audio sources that in a conventional stereo or surround mix would probably wind up as front or center channels. There are also new considerations, such as the need to add a layer or two of downmixing to validate surround and/or stereo mixes for viewers who don’t have immersive home audio systems. This means more monitoring work for audio engineers who also need to check their metadata encoding to make sure it can be properly decoded on the receiver side.

Struck is hopeful to see a significant increase in Dolby Atmos coverage to complement 4K picture quality globally, but says it is still early days with immersive audio for most U.S. broadcasters.

“Immersive is a topic in pretty much every conversation, but it’s not the leading or driving factor,” Struck said. “Broadcasters currently focus on remote production, ST2110-based infrastructure utilization, and the flexibility provided by distributed architectures. But I’m confident immersive audio will take off in the near future.”

The amount of live sports being produced in immersive audio is certainly growing; Bendull said a dozen international broadcasters are using Dolby Atmos for their coverage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Dolby Atmos is also being delivered with AC-4 in over-the-air broadcasts in Poland today, and Dolby is currently working with some partners in the U.S. to demonstrate Dolby Atmos at a local station in the near future, probably early 2023.

“There is content in much higher quality available than what makes it through the pipe,” Bendull said. “So we are doing some work to demonstrate what terrestrial ATSC 3.0 experienced with immersive audio will sound like.”

The post Immersive Audio Still A Work In Progress For NextGen TV appeared first on TV News Check.

But over the same time period streaming video has exploded for broadcasters in the form of free advertiser-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels, first with national offerings from major networks and more recently with regional and local services being launched by station groups. And the early consumer experience of NextGen TV has been hampered by government regulations that make it hard to differentiate the new services from the legacy ATSC 1.0 programming already delivered over-the-air, according to broadcasters speaking yesterday at TVNewsCheck’s TV2025 conference in New York.

Broadcasters’ biggest bone of contention is the FCC requirement for stations launching 3.0 to not only simulcast their primary programming stream in 1.0 but for the programming to be “substantially similar” through July 2023, even though they haven’t received any new spectrum for 3.0. So to launch 3.0 in a market, broadcasters are reaching channel-sharing agreements that cram multiple 3.0 program streams onto one (or two) “lighthouse” stations. The deals also find new homes for the lighthouse station’s displaced 1.0 programming, including multiple diginets, on “host” stations in the market.

“Even in markets that are lit up, about 75% of the bandwidth is actually on 1.0, because there are only one or two lighthouses in the market that actually get to do 3.0,” noted ATSC President Madeleine Noland, who spoke on the panel “NextGen TV, Streaming and the Future of Local Media” moderated by this reporter.

Capacity is tight for both the 3.0 and 1.0 broadcasts, and broadcasters are aggressively using video compression to make it all work. That means that they can’t increase the data rate of the 3.0 streams to offer dramatically improved pictures, such as 4K HDR, or even make the signal significantly easier to receive through more robust modulation schemes. The end result is the same programming in 1080p HDR that may not look very different from the 720p or 1080i content customers are already getting in 1.0, said Kerry Oslund, VP of strategy and business development for E.W. Scripps.

Oslund asked the audience how many people had NextGen TV sets currently receiving 3.0 signals, and a smattering of hands went up [New York is one of several big markets where 3.0 is not yet on-air].

“That’s one of the things we’re really concerned about,” Oslund said. “Right now, you know if you turn on your 3.0 TV set you get generally the same thing as if you were watching 1.0. And that’s not how you differentiate the experience. That bothers us and it makes us nervous. Because when a 3.0 customer goes to watch 3.0 television, we want them to see a differentiated experience beyond just better pictures and better sound, which it will have. But in a lot of ways that’s like a steering wheel and brakes on a car — you expect that.”

Oslund said that Scripps and other broadcasters would like to offer different programming in 3.0, perhaps with interactive enhancements, to make buying a new set a more compelling proposition.

Anne Schelle, managing director of the Pearl TV consortium of which Scripps is a member, also would like to see the “substantially similar” rule lift.

“I do understand the reasoning behind that, but we do feel like we need to be able to showcase content to get consumers excited to come over to NextGen,” Schelle said.

Another way the FCC could help the 3.0 rollout, she said, is to expedite a proceeding on the rules for how multicast [diginet] channels could be carried in 1.0 and 3.0, a rulemaking process that started back in November 2020. That would make it easier for broadcasters to juggle the multitude of program streams in large markets, a task at which she said they’ve done an “amazing” job so far.

“We’ve preserved every diginet and every main channel out there, and we’ve worked closely with the cable companies,” said Schelle. “In fact, they participate in every transition we do. That’s all to ensure that the consumer already watching ATSC 1.0 is not impacted at all — that’s our bread and butter.

“But by the same token, we need help,” she continued. “We need help in terms of some of these tougher markets, to have more flexibility in how we move around the diginets and the mains. That’s number one. That proceeding has been sitting there for a long time and it would be great if they could move that along.”

Oslund also addressed concerns about privacy and data collection via 3.0 sets that were raised in a speech earlier this week by FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks. Speaking at Penn Law on Tuesday, Starks touted 3.0’s various benefits but also said “we must set proper guardrails” when it came to data collection for targeted advertising, particularly geographic location information.

Oslund countered that geographic location data could provide great benefit to the public during emergencies, such as when Hurricane Ian lashed Fort Myers, Fla., earlier this month.

“We want to have enough data so that NextGen TV and enhanced emergency alerting services can help a consumer with a customized evacuation route from their home, their street, their neighborhood, to where they need to go to be safe,” Oslund said. “Some people talk about that same data and they think about it from an advertising perspective only. I can promise you this company is built on 140 years of trust and we’re not going to throw it away by abusing that trust by somehow reaching too far into the data quagmire. But we do want to have enough so we can enhance our emergency alerting and our community service aspects of what we do.”

Francesco Moretti, deputy CEO and CEO of international offices for Fincons Group, has already been working for the past 10 years with European broadcasters to pursue advanced advertising on connected TVs using the HbbTV broadcast standard. He said that privacy concerns there are addressed by consumers opting in to receive additional premium features from their providers in exchange for sharing data. He expects a similar model in the U.S.

Fincons helped Italian broadcaster Mediaset launch its first interactive advertising back in 2017, with a publishing overlay of targeted advertising for connected TVs. A year later Mediaset started dynamic ad replacement. For more than four years they’ve been able to get feedback from audiences on their preferences, behavior and expectations, Moretti said, which has helped them “transform and evolve the business model of advertising” combined with attribution.

Mediaset recently linked connected TVs with smartphones to create an attribution system that tracks the effectiveness of dynamic advertising insertion. During one week of an automotive campaign the linked TV/mobile system showed an increase of 18% in visits to dealers and an average visit of over an hour, a clear indication that consumers were spurred by the TV spots to go shopping.

“It’s a sort of win-win for both the broadcaster and the audience,” Moretti said. “Mediaset can create profiles of behavior and experience and track and understand exposure of the audience to a different campaign. And with the geolocation of the mobile it is able to understand during the week of the campaign how much the traffic to the store is increasing.”

Schelle said that such a dynamic advertising and attribution system could be supported in the U.S. today with NextGen TV, as the digital revenue models that broadcasters are currently using on their OTT or FAST channels are easily transferable. The “RUN3TV” WebTV application platform that Pearl TV has developed to run on NextGen TV sets uses the same server-side ad insertion (SSAI) model with client-side reporting prevalent in many existing IP content distribution scenarios. It will allow dynamic ads to be placed against interactive content such as VOD clips or localized newscasts that consumers can quickly access through the sets’ broadband connection.

“It’s really just bringing those models over in this Web environment,” Schelle said. “Everything you can do there, you can do on the live linear broadcast in the application environment.”

Pearl TV also announced at NAB New York that it has created a “FastTrack” program to speed the development and retail availability of low-cost upgrade accessory receivers for 3.0, such as HDMI peripherals for legacy TV sets and USB dongles for smartphones. Those devices would be in addition to the roughly 55 million NextGen-capable sets that CTA projects could be in U.S. households by 2024.

“You take the projection of over-the-air households at 18%, and you have a 10 million [set] base audience that you can reach, which gets very meaningful for advertisers,” Schelle said. “Right now, what’s important is to enable the Web features.”

For more TV2025 coverage, click here.

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Panelists Kerry Oslund, VP, strategy and business development, The E.W. Scripps Co.; Madeleine Noland, president, ATSC; Anne Schelle, managing director, Pearl Group; and Franceso Moretti, deputy CEO and CEO of international offices, Fincons Group will join moderator Glen Dickson, TVNewsCheck contributing editor, for the discussion at 3 p.m. on Oct. 19.

The executives will address how TV station groups will balance the content, marketing, revenue and technology needs associated with nurturing both distribution platforms, along with how technology is making it easier for local broadcasters to distribute content over many platforms while developing a mobile distribution feed that serves consumers in cars, on the beach and at the stadium. They’ll also consider when will data broadcasting will begin feeding significant revenue to support all this expansion.

“NextGen TV is entering an interesting period as it’s trying to move into the big markets, which are critical for scale,” said TVNewsCheck Publisher and Co-Founder Kathy Haley. “This panel will look at how the industry is managing that expansion into large markets at the same time as it’s racing to compete effectively in streaming, and we’ll examine both the the technical and business challenges on that path.”

Additional TV2025 panels will cover Cybersecurity: Strategies for Mitigating Risk in a High Visibility Industry; Creating More Content for a Multimedia Audience; How Data Will Redefine the TV/Audience Relationship; Technology, Data and the Future of Local TV Advertising; and Technology, the Cloud and the Station Group of the Future.

TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp will also moderate an annual conversation with station group leaders on the state of the industry, and E.W. Scripps’ President and CEO Adam Symson will accept TVNewsCheck’s Station Group of the Year Award on behalf of his company.

Register for TV2025 here.

The post NextGen, Streaming And The Future Of Local Media At TV2025 appeared first on TV News Check.

The new campaign from Pearl TV, which counts more than 750 stations and nine of the largest station groups in its membership, will run through Jan. 30 in big markets like Atlanta, Houston, Orlando and Tampa. It represents a significant ramp-up from last year’s brand awareness campaign, which only ran in six markets. While the 2021 campaign will replay some of the same creative, including a spot explaining the overall benefits of NextGen TV sets, it will also include new spots from audio technology giant Dolby that emphasize the audio benefits that come with 3.0.

“We’re excited, because it will be much more national in its rollout,” said Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle. “All of the stations are participating and promoting based on a suggested GRP [gross rating point] schedule from Black Friday through Jan. 30, gearing up for the Super Bowl. There are a lot of TVs bought between Christmas Day, because of the sales, all the way through January.”

The nine-week NextGen TV campaign will be run from promotional spot inventory across the Pearl TV stations in all of the on-air 3.0 markets and will be supplemented with advertising on station websites and social media platforms. So far, Facebook has been particularly effective as a marketing tool for NextGen TV, Schelle said.

Dolby’s “Sound Decisions” campaign highlights the Dolby AC-4 system’s enhanced audio features, including loudness control and dialogue enhancement, that proved popular with consumers in a Magid study conducted in Phoenix, Pearl TV’s main NextGen TV test market.

One spot, “Dialogue Drama,” shows a family sitting on a couch and eagerly awaiting a plot reveal in their TV drama, only to have it rendered inaudible by blaring background music. It then replays the scene and shows how Dolby’s “Voice +” technology makes the dialogue easy to hear. Another spot, “Sound Surprise,” depicts a sleeping grandfather sitting alongside his family who is jolted awake when the channel is changed; the scene is replayed using Dolby’s loudness control technology and Grandpa keeps snoozing through the channel change.

The new Dolby “Sound Decisions” campaign was produced by English advertising firm moremilk, while Pearl TV’s original NextGen TV brand awareness spot was created by Atlanta agency Hothouse Inc.

“We’re augmenting the main brand campaign with the Dolby, and stations are swapping out general brand spots and sometimes running the Dolby spots,” Schelle said. “They’re all tagged with the station information, they’re all tagged with the television logos, and they’re all tagged with www.watchnextgentv.com [Pearl TV’s website promoting 3.0 to consumers].”

No TV set manufacturers or electronics retailers are currently paying for their own spots advertising NextGen TV sets on local TV stations. But two Pearl TV stations currently on-air with 3.0 have reached co-op agreements with local retailers to sponsor programming, including a technology show and a lifestyle show.

Schelle said Magid research shows that last year’s promo effort for NextGen TV lent a “halo effect” to TV stations whereby consumers saw them as being innovative. It also helps “condition” consumers for future applications and services that stations will only offer through NextGen TV, she added.

Broadcasters’ expanded consumer marketing effort reflects the progress of the overall NextGen TV rollout. Thirty-four markets (and 46 total cities) are now on air with 3.0 signals, representing coverage to 35% of the country. Twenty more cities, including Los Angeles, are expected to launch by year-end, representing 45% of the country. Another 40 markets are planned to start broadcasting 3.0 in 2022, including top-10 DMAs New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, with perhaps 75% coverage reached by next summer.

(The stations currently on-air are simulcasting their 1.0 programming in 1080p with standard-dynamic range; some HDR and perhaps even 4K content should come in 2022 pending upgrades in networks’ distribution systems.)

The 3.0 TV set universe is growing as well, with 70 models from Sony, Samsung and LG available at electronics retailers like Best Buy and big-box stories like Costco. And more manufacturers are expected to introduce NextGen TV sets in January at the CES Show in Las Vegas.

While manufacturers like Samsung highlight the NextGen TV reception capability of sets on their websites, it is hard to find any mention of NextGen TV today on the websites of retailers like Best Buy and P.C. Richard, even when drilling down into the technical specifications for individual models. To make shopping for 3.0-capable sets easier for consumers, Pearl TV has created a “NextGen TV Holiday Gift Guide” that is available at www.watchnextgentv.com and which lists select models from LG, Sony and Samsung.

Sony, which has incorporated NextGen TV reception into all of its 2021 TV models, has led the way in marketing the technology to retailers by promoting it at kiosks which run the NextGen TV “sizzle reel” from the Pearl TV website, said Schelle. The company has also produced a training video to educate retailers about NextGen TV’s benefits.

Pearl TV will be focusing on retailer education at CES in January.

“Part of our big push at [CES] is to get retailers educated,” Schelle said. “Because we’re doing this big campaign, consumers are going to be walking into stores asking about NextGen TV.”

The post Pearl TV Makes Holiday Promo Push For NextGen TV appeared first on TV News Check.

The big potential of digital advertising insertion (DAI) for 3.0, or NextGenTV, is due both to growth in broadcasters’ existing OTT advertising businesses and the quick proliferation of NextGenTV-enabled TV sets into consumer households. And DAI can leverage ad-delivery and back-office software that broadcasters are already using today.

Shawn Makhijani

“The biggest opportunity is digital ad insertion, with targeting and interactivity,” said Shawn Makhijani, SVP of business development and strategy, TV and streaming for NBCUniversal Local. “This is the game changer. When we bring up OTT, people tend to focus on the content part of it, which is very legitimate and people love seeing all the shows, whatever the new hot show is. But in reality, what OTT did is transform television advertising. It allowed television to essentially become Google, Facebook.”

Makhijani runs NBC SpotOn, the OTT aggregation business that launched in 2020 and sells targeted local and regional spots for the NBCUniversal Local stations as well as on behalf of partner stations. He noted that back in 2008 broadcasters were lamenting the shift in ad dollars to digital platforms, but since then Google and other big digital companies haven’t been able to break into core television. Meanwhile, broadcasters still lacked the ability to target with their “one-dimensional” ATSC 1.0 standard.

“It was whatever was put out, and you could contextually target it based on programming, and that was pretty much it,” Makhijani said. “With ATSC 3.0, essentially the platform has been built in the same way as Android, iOS — any digital, OTT operating system. We can leverage all of our infrastructure to now deliver the same essential DAI product, with the targeting, demo, auto-intender, whatnot, and have interactive ads that can click out for commerce, click out for coupons. And that’s all being developed as we speak. I think that’s the biggest opportunity.”

NextGen TV will also solve the longtime measurement problem for local TV, he added, as broadcasters will now enjoy real-time aggregated measurement of who’s watching without having to rely on cable operators or other multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to share set-top box data.

Kerry Oslund

Kerry Oslund, VP of strategy and business development for E.W. Scripps, spoke about successful testing of automotive applications in Detroit and other markets by Scripps and other members of the Pearl TV consortium. While he said the automotive results are encouraging, he was also clear that targeted ads are a bigger near-term opportunity for broadcasters.

“It’s nice to talk about optionality and ancillary income and monetization opportunities with delivering data to automobiles,” Oslund said. “But everything that Shawn just said, is actually the priority that we look at, too.”

More Sets Available

As they look to build out targeted advertising with NextGenTV, broadcasters can take advantage of a connected TV market that is exploding, and one in which many new connected TVs will also have NextGenTV reception capability. Anne Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV, says that broadcasters are catching CTV at its “hockey stick” moment, as consumers are rapidly taking advantage of new TV sets with built-in streaming capability that replaces early peripheral streaming devices. And streaming use has greatly increased in the past year and a half with many consumers cooped up at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recent Pearl TV research also indicates that consumers consider interactivity as one of the most desirable features of NextGenTV, along with advanced audio features. Schelle noted the consortium has developed a software platform to support interactive applications, Run3TV, that is available to all 3.0 broadcasters.

Anne Schelle

“That is essentially the browser that allows for the web pages to be deployed, implemented, and all of the capabilities that Shawn talked about, exercised by broadcasters,” Schelle said. “It’s the digital teams that can easily do this, and we have markets up today enabling DAI on their OTT side, their hybrid channels that they’re pulling in. They’re also doing lead generation, connecting into their Google Analytics and they’re also connecting to their entire back office.”

Since first hitting retail shelves in April 2020, more than three million NextGen TVs have already been sold, Schelle said, outpacing sales of 4K HDTV sets, DVD players and streaming set-top boxes. One hundred percent of Sony’s TV sets now have NextGenTV reception capability, Samsung and LG are extending NextGenTV into their mid-tier sets and several new manufacturers plan to roll out NextGenTV sets next year, she added.

Pearl TV expects that there will be more than 45 million NextGenTV sets in households by 2024.

“I think you’re going to see a pretty quick proliferation of almost 100% ubiquity for NextGen on all TV sets by 2025,” Schelle said. “45 million sets are sold a year, so I’ll let you do the math.”

Motown Test Track

Forty-four NextGenTV markets are up today, and E.W. Scripps is involved in about a quarter of them, Oslund said, with its stations often serving as the 3.0 “lighthouse” in the market. One of them is WMYD Detroit, which is sharing channel capacity with Graham Media, Fox and CBS. The four companies have carved out 10% of their overall 3.0 capacity for the exclusive use and experimentation of the automotive industry and its vendors in a pilot called the “Motown 3.0 Test Track,” which is managed by Pearl TV and its partners.

“It’s a big-time invitation for anyone who wants to get their hands dirty in broadcast internet to come see what we have to offer,” Oslund said. “We’re starting to prove over and over again receivability, reliability, and certainly, when we look at the modeling, super affordability.”

Consumer electronics firms, automobile manufacturers and prospective entrants into the automotive market have all taken advantage of the “Test Track.” Broadcasters have also expanded the track’s footprint to experiment with single-frequency network and multi-frequency networks, including handoffs of signals between markets, proving the ability to “cellularize” the 3.0 broadcast system to provide similar mobile functionality as wireless networks.

While it may be farther out as a revenue opportunity compared to targeted ads, Oslund said the Broadcast Internet capabilities of 3.0 open up a “whole different possible set of customers who have interest in using one-to-many technologies, if for no other reason than to greatly reduce their bandwidth costs.” He noted that a study of RF patterns shows that groups like Scripps often have contiguous spectrum over broad geographic areas, allowing them to keep automobiles or internet of things (IoT) devices in a “bubble of data” no matter where they went.

“If you took a look at our footprint in Florida, for instance, you would see that six transmitters can pretty much blanket the state of Florida, where it would take literally hundreds of cellphone towers to do the same,” Oslund said. “Now I’m not suggesting it’s one versus the other, I’m just suggesting we have a way to deliver data in a very efficient manner using existing infrastructure and working with the 5G and 4G providers. Because there are always going to be gaps — there’s always going to be a mountain, there’s always going to be a tunnel, there’s always going to be a need.”

Single-Frequency Networks

Jim Stenberg

To ensure robust mobile reception for 3.0, single-frequency networks of multiple transmitters in a market will likely be required to provide more signal than a single stick can deliver, said Signal Infrastructure Group (SIG) EVP Jim Stenberg. His company is undertaking the design and construction of a nationwide SFN footprint along with developing a software platform to support app generation, intake, scheduling and delivery through the cloud.

SIG already has paying customers for distance learning and emergency alerting applications with ATSC 1.0 applications, which it is looking to extend to 3.0. The company is also working to create a spectrum exchange or brokerage to assist buyers and sellers in finding over-the-air capacity.

“We’re working on a model for that exchange that is basically based on a financial brokerage-type model,” Stenberg said. “And our model does not have any control over station bandwidth, it’s merely an introductory or broker-type relationship.”

While he conceded that some data customers may wind up using 3.0 in a hybrid model alongside wireless networks like 4G and 5G, he encouraged broadcasters to develop and promote their own 3.0 data services that don’t require cooperation from the wireless industry.

“We as a broadcast industry need to focus on being able to deliver our service as much by ourselves as we can,” Stenberg said. “Because the wireless carriers are always going to have their own interests, and we’ve seen that they don’t necessarily align with broadcaster needs and business models.

“We need to build out business models that revolve around this new delivery platform and not around providing additional delivery for wireless services,” he said. “The fact is, we’re able to deliver bits so effectively cost-wise that there will be benefits to moving things that are currently done with wireless carriers over to ATSC 3.0. Anything that’s currently one-way type of information, we can do that so much more cost-effectively that there won’t be a need to interface with wireless.”

Interestingly, there wasn’t much discussion of using 3.0 to deliver UHD formats like 4K HDR. Schelle noted that the base format the Pearl TV stations have specified to deliver is 1080p with high dynamic range (HDR), which is still a big quality jump from 1.0’s 720p and 1080i HD formats.

NBC delivered some 4K HDR programming to MVPD partners during the Tokyo Olympics, and one of them, YouTube TV, actually charged a premium for the 4K content. But whether a 4K premium tier of programming that would be provided only to MVPDs will prove viable in the future remains to be seen, Makhijani said.

“I think that will all play out, and we’ll see the use case that comes out of it,” he said. “But either way over-the-air will see a significant improvement, and that will still be free.”

To watch the video of this session, click here.

For more TV2025 2021 stories, click here.

The post Targeted Ads Lead NextGen TV’s Revenue Chase, Execs Say appeared first on TV News Check.

Shawn Makhijani

NextGen TV deployments have accelerated across the U.S. this year, bringing into sharper focus the question of how station groups will monetize the versatile new broadcast standard. A trio of industry executives will weigh in on the issue during a session, NextGen TV 2025, set to take place during TVNewsCheck’s sixth annual TV2025: Monetizing the Future conference set for Sept. 22-23.

Shawn Makhijani, SVP of business development and strategy at NBCU; Kerry Oslund, VP of strategy and business development at E.W. Scripps; and Anne Schelle, managing director, Pearl TV, will join moderator Glen Dickson, TVNewsCheck contributing editor, for the panel discussion at 2:10 p.m. ET on Sept. 22.

Kerry Oslund

Anne Schelle

“This panel brings together a highly-placed revenue officer, a highly respected strategy officer and the leader of the industry’s NextGen TV consortium to size up how soon the new ATSC 3.0 standard will reach critical mass, and opportunities to generate revenue via broadcasting to cars, leasing spectrum for Internet Broadcasting and delivering a new generation of targeted advertising capabilities for marketers,” said Kathy Haley, co-founder and publisher of NewsCheckMedia LLC. “We look forward to advancing the conversation about monetizing NextGen TV with this session.”

TV2025’s other panels include Station Group Leaders on the State of the Industry; Capitalizing On The Cloud; and Data, Technology & Optimizing Spot TV, along with the presentation of TVNewsCheck’s Station Group of the Year to Graham Media Group, an interview with its chief executive, Emily Barr, and a roundtable discussion, “Streaming is the New Local,” wrapping up the event.

Register for TV2025 here.

The post Monitizing NextGen TV At TV2025 appeared first on TV News Check.

Four months later, they appear to have stayed on track despite the logistical and financial challenges brought about by the pandemic. Stations in Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Nashville and Salt Lake City have all begun broadcasting in the new standard, with Portland, Ore., scheduled to launch 3.0 next week. Other large markets including Tampa and Seattle are poised to follow shortly.

Broadcasters are also exploring the full capabilities of the NextGen standard with several new initiatives this summer, including the launch of a NextGen-capable smartphone and a trial of advanced alerting capabilities in Washington, D.C.

Around 10 markets should be on-air with 3.0 broadcasts by the end of the third quarter and perhaps 20 by year’s end, according to representatives of Pearl TV, a consortium of several large station groups, and BitPath (formerly Spectrum Co.), a joint venture formed by Sinclair and Nexstar to explore data delivery businesses using the 3.0 spectrum. That would fall far short of the 40 top markets, and over 60 markets overall, that broadcasters initially pledged at NAB 2019 to launch with 3.0 by the end of this year.

Progress Despite Pandemic

But 3.0 insiders say the launches to date still represent significant progress considering the engineering challenges stations have faced in 2020, between wrapping up the FCC-mandated RF repack process and scrambling to create remote production workflows to deal with COVID-19 lockdowns. Due to the pandemic, 3.0 launches have been done with as little hands-on involvement as possible, since many of the software-based systems can be upgraded and controlled remotely.

BitPath’s John Hane

“It’s really spectacular given the environment we’re in,” says BitPath President John Hane, who predicts BitPath will launch in 18 markets this year. “Our approach is to keep going unless something physically stops us.”

Pearl TV Executive Director Anne Schelle says the initial launch schedule for the top 40 markets had already slipped by about a quarter before COVID-19 hit. She says about half of them will be done this year, with the rest to come on in the “early part” of 2021.

“We have a fair number of markets that we’re focusing on in the top 40 that were on the original list,” Schelle says. “For fall, that does include markets like Tampa, Orlando and Detroit. We’re also hoping for L.A., that’s in the works, and that could be first quarter next year.”

Schelle adds that Pearl has hired an advertising firm and is working with consumer electronics manufacturers on an “umbrella brand campaign” for NextGen TV which will include TV spots, sizzle reels for retail use and social media content.

“Given the COVID situation, we’re targeting markets for the late fall that have full services up and are markets that TVs are predominantly being sold in,” Schelle says.

Tapping UHD Benefits

One of the main benefits of 3.0 to broadcasters is its ability to deliver UHD formats like 1080p HDR and 4K. Fox, NBC and CBS have already produced HDR and 4K sports coverage in the past for pay TV and streaming partners. But none of the major networks are currently offering affiliates 3.0 programming feeds in those formats, though special-event UHD programming is being discussed.

Pearl TV’s Anne Schelle

So most early 3.0 stations are simply showing simulcasts of their ATSC 1.0 programming in 1080i or 720p HD, along with enhanced audio and interactive applications that can pull additional content via broadband. They plan to launch 1080p HDR at some point in the next year depending on networks’ available programming.

Sinclair, however, is offering high-dynamic range from all of its early 3.0 stations, and is even upconverting NBC’s 1080i programming to 1080p HDR at KSNV Las Vegas. Mark Aitken, Sinclair SVP of advanced technology, says that it’s important to broadcast 3.0 with HDR from the start in order to give a tangible benefit to early adopters of NextGen TV sets.

“There is no distribution from the networks of HDR content, and yet everybody is promulgating that one of the virtues of the new standard is HDR,” Aitken says. “We think if a consumer goes out and spends $3,500 on an 8K set [all of Samsung’s sets that support 3.0 are 8K sets], we want them to actually see something different when they come to our channel.”

The difficulty for the networks today is that to deliver HDR or 4K would require a separate distribution chain from the one currently used to deliver ATSC 1.0, an investment that at this point would only feed a handful of markets. Fox began regularly producing Thursday night NFL games last season in 1080p HDR and also produced Super Bowl LIV in the format, but the “good stuff” doesn’t make if very far past the truck as the rest of Fox’s distribution chain is geared to 720p SDR for ATSC 1.0 distribution, according to Winston Caldwell, Fox VP of spectrum engineering and advanced engineering.

Fox has no definitive plans for 3.0 programming. However, the network is considering how it could provide HDR feeds of event programming like Thursday Night Football to select 3.0 markets on a one-off basis.

“There may be an event soon where we will take a particular market, and subscribe to a fiber link to the station to take it directly,” says Caldwell, who says the same approach could also be used for entertainment programming.

Caldwell notes that Fox is building a new network distribution center in Tempe, Ariz., that will be able to support a wide array of UHD formats. But until that is complete, UHD programming will probably consist of such “stunts” to a handful of stations.

“This is a transitional period,” he says. “Eventually we’ll get down to one distribution path.”

Sinclair’s Mark Aitken

HDR achieves better contrast in late-model TVs by sending additional information that the sets use to display brighter highlights and a wider range of colors (technically called Wide Color Gamut). There are various flavors of HDR supported by different professional and consumer devices, including HDR10, Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG), Samsung’s HDR10+ and Dolby’s proprietary Dolby Vision.

Sinclair is creating HDR pictures for its 3.0 feeds by using Technicolor’s SL-HDR1 technology, which is included in the 3.0 standard. Aitken says that Sinclair favors SL-HDR1 because it can produce a quality picture on an HDR set while also being fully backwards-compatible with SDR displays, which simply ignore the HDR metadata. More important, if the HDR metadata gets lost within the transmission chain SL-HDR1 will still produce a good-looking SDR picture on an HDR set, Aitken says, which isn’t the case with some other HDR standards.

Sinclair inputs the standard-dynamic range (SDR) feeds from the networks into a Technicolor device that creates HDR metadata using Technicolor’s “Intelligent Tone Mapping” technology. In the case of NBC, it plugs in NBC’s recommended HDR value (technically called a LUT, or “look up table”) into the Technicolor device to create a final picture that matches NBC’s HDR intentions. It is also runs NBC’s 1080i video through a format converter to derive 1080p.

A NextGen-Capable Smartphone

Sinclair is broadcasting 720p HDR at 4 megabits per second (4 Mbps), while its 1080p HDR in Las Vegas is 4.5 Mbps. It is keeping the data rates low because it is transmitting its 3.0 programming in a “robust” mode that makes the signals easily receivable on mobile and portable devices as well as big-screen TVs. Sinclair has long been a proponent of mobile TV, and through its subsidiary ONE Media it has been working with Indian technology firm Saankhya Labs to develop a wireless chip capable of receiving both 3.0 and cellular signals.

That work is now complete in the form of the first reference design 3.0 smartphone receiver chipset, based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 chip, as well as a mid-range smartphone that will work on the AT&T and T-Mobile networks. Sinclair plans to market the unlocked smartphone to Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) that provide wireless service using those cellular platforms.

“We know there’s a lot of interest among the MVNO’s,” Aitken says. “They think broadcast television on a cellphone is a distinguishing product they can sell.”

The 3.0 smartphone, built by Indian manufacturer Borqs, has an embedded 3.0 broadcast antenna and receiver along with all the features of a mid-range phone that would typically retail for $300 to $400 (though Sinclair will initially sell the phones for far less, just covering costs of around $150). ONE Media has ordered two runs of the 3.0-enabled smartphones, with an initial 50 evaluation units coming next month and an additional 1,000 production models following a month later, which, Aitken says, Sinclair will give to “friends and family.”

Fox’s Winston Caldwell

Beyond stations offering mobile TV, emergency alerting, targeted advertising and interactive applications, the other big opportunity Sinclair sees for 3.0 is Data Delivery as a Service (DDaaS). Broadly, DDaaS means using the 3.0 spectrum for non-TV applications to derive revenue from third parties. That could encompass everything from “5G offloading” — broadcasting video streams of popular content for wireless carriers in order to reduce unicast traffic on their networks — to supplying Internet of Things (IoT) data, to industrial applications like delivering software updates to factory equipment.

Finding DDaaS applications and customers for the 3.0 spectrum is the core mission of BitPath, which plans to share data revenues equally between equity partners Sinclair and Nexstar and third-party stations that contribute capacity to the venture. Since early 3.0 launches involve multiple stations sharing one 6 Mhz channel, in the near term BitPath is eyeing data opportunities that use relatively little bandwidth — 1 Mbps or less on a continuous basis, or “bursty” applications with slightly higher bit-rates that only run intermittently.

“We don’t need to allocate a lot of capacity to this to start making money on it,” Hane says. “We can add services that are entirely additive without displacing anything we’re doing [in the core TV business].”

What BitPath does need, however, is scale, since most data customers are looking for national reach. Hane concedes that broadcasters won’t hit that critical mass this year.

“We have to build a market to build a service,” he says. “If you have 10% or 20% or 30% population coverage, there’s going to be limited interest. You have got to get close to 90%, 95%, and then you will have clients willing to rely on the platform.”

The post TVN Tech | NextGen TV Racing For Scale appeared first on TV News Check.

To any broadcaster attending this cacophonous tumble of conferences, exhibition floors and suite meetings, it can be challenging to tease out the industry’s more important narrative strands. But CES 2020, which runs from Jan. 7 to 10 in Las Vegas, can be distilled into some key areas through which broadcasters can elbow their way.

“For broadcasters, the starting point for seeing things geographically is going to be Central Hall because the bigger brands that are doing TVs and entertainment devices are there,” says Brian Markwalter, SVP of research and standards at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which presents CES. “That is the best way to understand where TV manufacturers are going.”

The technology formerly known as ATSC 3.0 makes its exhibition floor debut in 2020 in the Las Vegas Convention Center’s Central Hall (C 11329), ground zero for all the major TV set manufacturers at the show. Having lurked at the show’s periphery for years, this marks a pivotal moment for the newly rebranded NextGen TV, says Madeleine Noland, president of ATSC.

“NextGen TV is going to have its coming-out party from the point of view of commercial deployment at this CES show,” Noland says, noting it’s crucial to “make sure everybody recognizes the growing ecosystem of both consumer products as well as vendor products supporting the launch, and broadcaster services that are coming out.”

Noland says the NextGen TV booth will have products on display as well as “major broadcasters displaying some of the services they expect to launch in 2020.”

Details, however, remained elusive in the weeks running up to the show. Only LG has come forward so far with a NextGen-ready product, and Anne Schelle, managing partner of the Pearl TV consortium, is keeping her cards close to the vest as to other manufacturers in the wings.

“We really are under lock and key,” Schelle says of other potential product announcements. “But the good news is that the TV manufacturers are moving forward simultaneously, and these are TVs that will bear the NextGen TV logo and meet the requirements that CTA and broadcasters have set out.”

Schelle says attendees can expect a string of announcements from the show, including the release of feedback from the early service consumer labs and an update on progress being made in the transition to enable TV stations supporting the new services in the top 40 markets.

As to which markets are rolling out next and when, Schelle says: “We will be announcing some specific market information for some markets that are moving earlier in the year.”

For Sam Matheny, EVP and CTO of NAB, just the presence of the show floor booth itself and the many players demonstrating within it is a marker of how far NextGen TV has come. “A lot of work has been put in by both the consumer electronics companies and certainly broadcasters to develop this new standard,” he says.

“What is at stake this year is really coming out and saying NextGen TV is real in the U.S. and around the world,” Matheny adds. “Stations are coming on the air and launching, and consumer products are hitting the shelves.”

Noland says an equally important message that the booth sends is “the collaboration that has taken place between ATSC, NAB and CTA” on everything from the standard’s development to defining services in the marketplace to logo development and the lobbying work being done on Capitol Hill.

Del Parks, SVP and CTO of Sinclair Broadcast Group, echoes the sentiment. Sinclair, one of NextGen TV’s most vested players via its ONE Media Group, will be among the broadcasters on hand at the booth.

“The message from Sinclair is that we are cooperating with a lot of the broadcasters and we do have plans to start rolling out our markets,” Parks says.

That cooperation between broadcasters is necessary to create spectrum for 3.0, which has made for a much more complex rollout than the HD transition, he says. “The good news is it’s happening now,” Parks says. “It’s unprecedented, really, in the industry.”

Dave Burke, SVP and CTO for Gray Television, says NextGen TV’s biggest challenge at CES is simply consumer awareness. “A lot of people don’t quite understand what ‘over the air’ even means, and so what does it mean when you’re going to 3.0?” he says. “The consumer awareness of what 3.0 can do and that adoption kind of feeds itself in to the manufacturing side, which then helps with better adoption of the consumer electronics.”

But not everyone is optimistic that NextGen TV will even register with most attendees.

“My suspicion is that streaming services will dramatically overwhelm any ATSC conversations at all,” says Shelly Palmer, CEO of The Palmer Group, a technology consultancy that also leads private tours of the show floor. “I understand why broadcasters want it … but you don’t hear a buzz around it. That is really the industry talking to itself.”

For CTA’s Markwalter, streaming and NextGen TV aren’t necessarily competitive technologies. “Streaming is still on a big growth curve, but it’s not like a zero-sum game,” he says. “People are watching on more and more devices at more times.”

Attendees can judge for themselves. In addition to the booth, NextGen TV will be the subject of a main stage event in the LVCC’s Grand Lobby on Jan. 8 at 10 a.m. as well as a panel, “What NextGenTV Means For Tech,” featuring Noland, Matheny, Schelle and Dan Schinasi, director of product planning, consumer electronics, Samsung, at the Venetian at 9 a.m. on Jan. 9.

ATSC will also be offering a printed guide to all things NextGen TV at the booth so attendees can find examples of the technology elsewhere on the show floor.

Other Technologies, Other Narratives

Early arrivals to CES may want to check out the CES 2020 Trends to Watch session at LVCC’s North Hall N257 on Jan. 6 at 9 a.m. as a primer to the show. Steve Koenig, CTA’s VP of research, leads the talk.

Throughout Central Hall, 8K sets from the major manufacturers are likely to capture some of the biggest exclamations from attendees. Also tantalizing will be the promises of 5G again on evidence throughout CES, even if the infrastructure necessary to realize it is still half a trillion dollars away from reality.

Still, for a glimpse of what that reality may look like, the session “Prediction: How 5G Will Change Your Life” with Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon on Jan. 8 at 10:30 a.m. at the Venetian is probably worth dropping into.

CES isn’t likely to disappoint on two other related fronts of at least peripheral interest to broadcasters: voice and the internet of things (IoT). The ubiquity of the former has made voice command table stakes for new devices, while connectivity has wended its way into every imaginable appliance and user interface.

One session, “IoT: Moving Into An Anticipatory Tech World,” offers an intriguing future look, and the presence of Lindsey Turrentine, SVP content strategy, CBS Interactive Tech Sites, suggests a connection to broadcast’s role in the growing space. The panel runs Jan. 7 at 3 p.m. in LVCC’s North Hall.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai

Broadcasters looking for any clues on the regulatory front will want to drop in to a fireside chat with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and FTC Chairman Joseph Simons on Jan. 7 at 11:30 a.m. in LVCC’s North Hall moderated by CTA’s President and CEO Gary Shapiro.

As broadcasters watch their digital operations continue to grow, checking in with the chief privacy officer roundtable on Jan. 7 at 1 p.m. in LVCC’s North Hall may also be prudent. The talk features privacy officers from Facebook, Apple and Procter & Gamble, as well as FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.

Wrapping up other potentially interesting presentations, a keynote session with Samsung’s Hyun-Suk Kim, president and CEO of the consumer electronics division, may yield an interesting picture of new gadgetry on the horizon. It’s happening Jan. 6 at 6:30 p.m. in the Venetian’s Palazzo Ballroom.

Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg will be on hand to discuss Quibi, their much-chattered about new mobile entertainment platform (that has also been beset by pre-launch, high-profile departures) in a keynote on Jan. 8 at 9:30 a.m. at the Park MGM Park Theater.

And various NBC talents including Terry Crews, Mandy Moore and Today West Coast anchor Natalie Morales will discuss “If TV Was Invented Today: NBCUniversal Reimagines the Future of Entertainment” on Jan. 8 at 4 p.m. at the Park MGM Park Theater.

While NAB will fan some of its technologists across the show floor to scope out potential opportunities and threats among the emerging technologies, the organization will also be getting some business done. It hosts a standards development organization meeting during CES as well as a television technology committee meeting, Matheny says.

The Sociologist’s CES

It’s easy to get caught up in the details of new products and trends at CES on any given year, but consultant Palmer says the far more intriguing currents at the show run beneath its surface.

For broadcasters, the most relevant among them is how the biggest TV manufacturers will continue to approach their multi-screen competition in a world where the living room is losing its home entertainment centricity.

Palmer notes that kids aren’t asking for TVs anymore, preferring large-screen smartphones instead. Gen Zers and trailing edge millennials behave very differently in their viewing habits than leading edge Gen Xers or trailing edge baby boomers, while leading edge boomers are the last “couch potatoes.”

“The sociology around the behavior called ‘watching television’ is the most interesting of the changing behaviors now,” Palmer says. “Whose hardware is going to make that possible and empower those sociological changes?”

Palmer, who hosts his own Series Summit at CES, is emphatic that to go to CES simply on a hunt for new gadgets is to have entirely the wrong mind set. “You are going there to incrementally innovate in exponential times with tools that human beings are using to change the planet, and that doesn’t happen with a new gizmo,” he says.

What does make it happen, he says, is a lot of people gathering together to understand the application of commoditized, narrow-focused machine learning to make the world better and easier to navigate.

“My biggest expectation for CES is always my biggest expectation,” Dolan says. “It is going to be a gathering of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things and we are all in one place looking toward the future.

“That is a pretty positive place to be for a couple of days.”

The post TVN Tech | At CES, NextGen TV’s Coming Out Party appeared first on TV News Check.

Those were the key takeaways from “Investing In and Capitalizing on ATSC 3.0,” a panel discussion at TVNewsCheck’s TV2020 conference moderated by TVNewsCheck Publisher Kathy Haley and featuring executives from three consortiums of local stations formed to launch and monetize 3.0 services.

Anne Schelle, managing director of the Pearl TV station consortium, said that Pearl and its partners in its Phoenix Model Market, which include NBC, Fox, Univision and some public broadcasters, have already proven out the 3.0 launch model.

Schelle said Pearl members and other ATSC 3.0 proponents, like the Spectrum Co. consortium founded by Nexstar and Sinclair, are busy doing the hard work of reaching channel-sharing agreements but are on track to launch 3.0 in the top 40 markets, and 61 markets overall, next year. And they have shared their rollout plans for 2020 with their TV set manufacturer partners in Phoenix: LG, Samsung and Sony.

The initial investment required to launch in those 61 markets is relatively low, at $72 million, said Schelle. But that number is expected to climb as broadcasters launch more sticks and create single-frequency networks (SFNs) to improve coverage.

Nextgen Sets Coming

Schelle said that the Pearl TV stations are first “focusing on the home” for 3.0, and pointed to the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)’s recent approval of the “NextGen TV” consumer branding logo as an important step heading into January’s CES 2020 show. Audience member John Taylor, LG SVP of public affairs and chairman of the CTA’s video division board, confirmed that a variety of manufacturers will show 3.0 sets at CES.

“We expect to see real working sets on the floor of the show in Las Vegas in January, and coming on the market, in our industry, normally in the spring-summer time frame,” Taylor said.

However, Schelle said it may take until 2025 for enough receiver devices to hit consumer living rooms and enough 3.0 sticks to light up to deliver the necessary scale required for broadcast-driven businesses like addressable advertising. It may be longer still for nontraditional businesses like leasing spectrum to third parties for data broadcasting, such as sending software updates to automobiles.

“I think you’ll start to see scale for TV sets in 2023, 2024,” Schelle said. “You’re going to see revenues, but for return on investment, since we’re investing in more and more infrastructure, I think five years.”

Spectrum Co. President John Hane agreed that the ramp up to revenues will be slow, particularly for new businesses like data broadcasting. That’s because at the outset broadcasters are “not going to have a lot of data to sell” as there will only be one or two 3.0 transmitters operational in early markets. That will change as more markets and more sticks come online.

“We could have a small amount of revenue in one or two markets specifically in 2021,” Hane said. “You’re not going to notice it. I’m going to be realistic. The devices are going to be expensive, and it’s going to be sort of proving a concept.”

Services Follow Capacity

Hane said Spectrum Co. is looking at an actual commercial deployment in 2021 where there is already some 3.0 capacity. With more such capacity over time, it can introduce more services.

“We’re not going to have national services; we’re sort of frozen out of the national market immediately, because we’re not national,” he said. “But as we get to the national market, as we prove we’re going to be nationwide, then we can get the kind of engagement we want, the customers that would bring the big dollars.”

Public Media Group, a new company formed last May in partnership with major public broadcasters with the goal of building SFNs to deliver ATSC 3.0 services, also doesn’t expect revenues until 2021, said CEO Joe Chinnici.

His company, which has private equity firm Black Rock as its major financial backer and also counts established broadcast engineering firm Osborn Engineering as a partner, has raised $5 billion in capital to build out a national 3.0 transmission and data center infrastructure. It will then serve as a middleman for broadcasters to lease part of their spectrum to B-to-B customers like academic institutions and utilities.

“We’re in this for the long haul, and we’re all collectively interested in building a nationwide network,” Chinnici said. “That’s going to take us 10 to 15 years at minimum to build out. Luckily, we’ve got liquidity, the capital to pay for all that. So for you guys, it’s really a capex versus opex decision. Use our money, compete in front of the camera, don’t compete behind it. Use a shared-service type of thing.”

Public Media Group, a public benefit corporation, will count commercial broadcasters as well as public broadcasters as clients. It plans to begin building in the first quarter of 2020.

Speaking privately after the panel, Chinnici said PMG has already completed advanced engineering for 36 markets, with the idea of creating an SFN consisting of five to six transmitters in each market.

Rollout Uncertainty

While Haley wanted to talk about the “when” of ATSC 3.0 — as in when broadcasters might see a return on their investment — much of the conversation still seemed focused on the “why,” as Schelle and Hane continued to make the case for why 3.0 is so important to broadcasters’ future.

That may be because there still seems to be uncertainty about the 3.0 rollout. Broadcasters announced at last April’s NAB Show that they would launch 3.0 in the top 40 markets by next year, and the FCC formalized the application process to launch 3.0 services in May.

But since then, news of launches has been scarce. Only seven applications for 3.0 have been filed at the FCC, from one Class A station, KSBB-CD, in Santa Barbara, Calif., and six LPTVs spread across Idaho and Oregon. All were granted, and no further applications are pending.

An executive with a key 3.0 technology vendor, speaking on background, said that the Pearl and Spectrum Co. groups haven’t identified any call letters of the stations due to launch 3.0 in 2020. Instead, they have just identified the markets, and left the vendor to guess at which stations are involved.

“We’ve had to do our own homework,” said the executive, who added that 3.0 orders have come in and that interest was high at NAB NY.

Roadblocks Ahead

While NBC and Fox were part of the NAB announcement and are currently working with Pearl TV members in the Phoenix Model Market, neither CBS nor ABC has publicly expressed any support for 3.0. And the cable industry has also recently expressed opposition to the new standard.

Executives from Charter Communications met with the FCC in late July to explain that they don’t intend to carry 3.0 signals as “ATSC 3.0 is not backwards compatible with any existing equipment in the home or in the MVPD ecosystem” and “broadcasters have yet to adopt standards for the equipment necessary for MVPDs to provide ATSC 3.0 signals to subscribers.”

Then in August, the Society of Cable Television Engineers reportedly expressed reservations about 3.0 implementation across MVPDs in a memo to ATSC President Madeleine Noland, and said SCTE was going to delay integration work.

For her part, Schelle said that the Phoenix Model Market partners are “working with all of the MVPDs,” which she considers an important part of the 3.0 launch.

“We have an MVPD test environment in Phoenix, and we’re looking to integrate with the MVPDs to allow the features and functions that are in the 3.0 standard to be enabled for MVPD viewers as well,” Schelle said.

Hane said that 3.0 is a way for broadcasters to ensure they get revenues from both advertising and subscriptions going forward, which he said is essential to survive against their digital competitors.

Hane, a lawyer who formerly negotiated retrans deals for both broadcasters and MVPDs, already considers retransmission consent fees as subscription revenue. But he said stations can do better with 3.0, by both protecting their retrans leverage and giving them the ability to launch new, direct-to-consumer subscription services.

As they consider 3.0, Hane thinks broadcasters are too focused on maintaining picture quality in their ATSC 1.0 over-the-air signals, which eventually will need to be degraded somewhat as part of the transition as more and more 3.0 stations come online and 1.0 signals are “stacked” into less and less spectrum.

He said the current distribution model for 1.0, where cable operators already recompress the broadcast content for the vast majority of viewers, is already fundamentally flawed.

“Let’s think about our technology choices and how they affect revenue,” Hane said. “What we do today, is we are spending enormous amounts of time and money — and lost revenue opportunities — to provide a pristine over-the-air signal to 15% of the viewers, who receive over-the-air, which we monetize the least.”

Meanwhile, Hane said, the 85% of viewers who watch broadcast TV through cable and effectively generate the lion’s share of revenues (from both advertising dollars and retrans fees) often receive an inferior picture.

“What choices do we make there?” Hane said. “We don’t require the MVPDs to pass through an equal or better quality signal that we put out over the air. So the incentive we’re creating by our technology choices today is to for people to leave the paid platform, which has a lousy picture, and move to the free platform, which we go to the ends of the earth to make beautiful.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “We should be putting our focus on making sure that those who pay get at least as good a picture as those who don’t.”

To read more TV2020 stories, click here.

The post TVN Tech | Broadcasters Take Long View On 3.0 Payoff appeared first on TV News Check.

Anne Schelle

Anne Schelle, managing director, the Pearl Group; John Hane, president of Spectrum Co.; and Joe Chinnico, CEO of the Public Media Group will join moderator Kathy Haley, co-founder and publisher of TVNewsCheck, in a panel discussion grappling with the financial implications of ATSC 3.0 at 10:45 a.m. on Oct. 16 at the Javits Center.

“With so many broadcasters now behind the standard, we want to push the conversation on ATSC 3.0 further into a financial terrain,” said Haley. “Anne, John and Joe will explore how station groups are likely to estimate the costs of implementing the standard and forecast approximately when stations may begin to profit from it.”

John Hane

TV2020: Monetizing the Future is presented at NAB Show New York. This year’s conference will examine a range of issues facing the broadcasting industry, including the future of spot TV sales, sports rights and the future of broadcasting, diversifying broadcast revenue streams and broadcast leaders on the industry’s future.

A scene-setting opener from Radha Subramanyam, CBS’s chief research officer, will chart pivotal trends in TV audience behavior, and Zenith President of Investment Neil Vendetti will be the keynote interview.

Joe Chinnico

Produced by the National Association of Broadcasters and co-located with the Audio Engineering Society’s East Coast convention, NAB Show New York will be held October 16-17 at the Javits Convention Center. With more than 14,000 attendees and 300-plus exhibitors, NAB Show New York showcases the best in next-generation technology for media, entertainment and telecom professionals with conferences and workshops focused on television, film, satellite, online video, live events, podcasting, advertising, corporate A/V, production and post.

To register for TV2020, click here.

The post TV2020 Tackles ATSC 3.0’s Financial Future appeared first on TV News Check.

Anne Schelle, Pearl TV, was re-elected to the board. Newly-elected directors are Jim DeChant, News-Press & Gazette Broadcasting; Ira Goldstone, Fox; and Dave Siegler, Cox Media Group.
Board members whose terms expire at the end of 2018: Brett Jenkins,  Nexstar Media Group;  Richard Friedel, Fox; Glenn Reitmeier, NBC Universal; and Wayne Luplow, who represents the IEEE on the board this year. Friedel’s term as ATSC Board Chairman also expires at year-end. The board will elect its 2019 chairman at its first meeting of the new year.

Current board members whose terms continue in 2019 are: Lynn Claudy, National Association of Broadcasters; Mark Corl, Triveni Digital; Jon Fairhurst, Samsung; Dr. Paul Hearty, Sony Electronics; Dr. Jong Kim, LG Electronics; Brian Markwalter, Consumer Technology Association; Thomas Bause Mason, Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers; Andy Scott, NCTA – The Internet and Television Association; and Craig Todd, Dolby. Additionally, Dr. Yian Wu, Communications Research Centre, has been appointed to the 2019 ATSC board by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

“The ATSC is fortunate to have a talented, experienced and engaged board of directors, which drives our overarching strategy,” said ATSC President Mark Richer. “This is especially critical as the ATSC and its members continue to develop and update standards and support the implementation of Next Gen TV powered by ATSC 3.0.”

The four members:

Jim DeChant, VP of technology, News-Press & Gazette Broadcasting, has more than 35 years in the television industry. Throughout his career, has focused on utilizing best of class technologies to develop content creation and distribution systems for news, entertainment, educational and advertising systems.

From his early days in as a cable TV producer, he focused on the efficient production of programming for both community producers and local origination facilities. In 2008, with the advent of video-over-IP technologies, he created an all-IP playout system used by television and cable operators today.

At the News-Press & Gazette Company, he is, focused on web and mobile streaming, over the top file based content and advanced television broadcast transmission.

Ira Goldstone, executive engineer at Fox, brings extensive experience at Tribune Broadcasting, Univision and Fox. He previously served two terms on ATSC board of directors and led the S34-1 subgroup on HDR. He co-chaired the 32-4 ad hoc group on core broadcast services and participated in S35’s work to identify ATSC 3.0 interoperability requirements.

His 25 years with Tribune Broadcasting were capped as VP and CTO. In 2008, Goldstone joined Univision Television Group as engineering VP, and joined Fox in 2014.  A SMPTE Fellow, he received the NAB Engineering Lifetime Achievement award in recognition of 35 years of broadcast industry technical leadership, and the Broadcast & Cable Technology Leadership Award.

Anne Schelle is managing director of the Pearl TV broadcaster partnership. During her tenure as a member of the ATSC board, she has led numerous working group initiatives focused on the support of the ATSC 3.0 standard.

Previously she was senior adviser to NAB and led the Open Mobile Video Coalition. Schelle was a founding management team member for the nation’s first commercial digital cellular network (Sprint Spectrum) and also xDSL Networks (a competitive local exchange carrier.)

Previous experience included key roles at LCC Inc., McCaw Cellular Communications and MCI/ Airsignal. She is also a past CEO of Acta Wireless and was vice chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association Board and founding chair of its video committee.

Dave Siegler is VP of technical operations for Cox Media Group at the company’s Atlanta headquarters. He leads CMG’s Technical Operations groups to integrate new technologies and processes across various platforms for broadcast television stations, one local cable television station, radio stations and newspapers.

His previous experience includes six years with Turner Broadcasting and 13 years in various positions with Post-Newsweek (Graham) Television Stations. A SMPTE Fellow and SBE Life Member, he received the B&C Technology Leadership Award. He chairs the ATSC 3.0 Personalization Interactivity & Interactivity Implementation Team and NAB’s Television Technology Committee.  He also serves on the boards of directors of SBE and IEEE BTS.

The post ATSC BOARD Elects New Members appeared first on TV News Check.

Consumer education will definitely be a key component of making the new standard a commercial success. Several members of the panel “Field Deployments of the ATSC 3.0 Standard,” moderated by ATSC President Mark Richer, said that past public demonstrations have proven that many consumers have no idea that free over-the-air broadcasting in ATSC 1.0 is available, much less that a more powerful technology is coming.

Pete Sockett, director of engineering and operations for Capitol Broadcasting, described the various applications of ATSC 3.0 that WRAL Raleigh, N.C., has experimented with since launching ATSC 3.0 broadcasts back in June 2016. WRAL, which transmits its ATSC 3.0 streams from a 1,740-foot-high antenna at 40 kW using elliptical polarization, has shown 4K UHD footage from the last two Olympics and also tested 1080p HD, hybrid OTA/OTT content and advanced emergency alerting.

The station did a large public demonstration in February, showing ATSC 3.0 reception on LG and Samsung TV sets as well as portable tablets using USB dongles from Korean electronics institute ETRI.

“The most interesting part of the demonstration was how much I had to explain to people that the tablet was not getting a signal from Wi-Fi or cellular,” said Sockett. “Most people had no concept that we are available in the air [with ATSC 1.0] for free today, and they also didn’t know that we’ve been free in the market for the last 60 or 70 years.”

Anne Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV, the coalition of stations behind the Phoenix trial, recalled a similar tale from consumer tests of the ATSC Mobile/Handheld standard in Washington, D.C., several years back.

“We had to open the window and point to the TV tower to explain it,” said Schelle, who plans to do extensive consumer testing of 3.0 in Phoenix next year. LG is already supplying 3.0 connected sets to the trial, and a bevy of set makers will announce support for the standard Monday at NAB, she said.

In Raleigh, WRAL has been experimenting with different Physical Layer Pipes (PLPs) at different bit rates in its 6 MHz channel, said Sockett, trying to find “the sweet spot between a robust channel and a high-throughput channel.” The station has found good success with a “robust” 1080p/60 stream running at 4.5 megabits per second using QPSK modulation, combined with a “high capacity layer” of 4K UHD content running at 19.5 Mbps with 64 QAM modulation.

“You put them together and you’ve got both extremes of what we’re trying to do,” Sockett said.

WRAL has also tested advanced emergency alerting, which is an important new capability with 3.0, said Madeleine Noland, office of the CTO for LG and the new chair of the ATSC advanced emergency alert implementation team. She explained that the 3.0 standard will let consumer receivers monitor for alert information in a standby mode, and then “wake-up” to display alerts. She also noted that the standard allows both broadcasters and receiver manufacturers to create their own separate apps for displaying emergency information and 3.0 receivers will be able to handle either.

“The receiver understands what all the files are and how to present that information to the viewer,” Noland said.

LG is supplying 3.0 receivers to a demonstration in the NAB Futures Park here at the Las Vegas Convention Center and is also collaborating with NAB, ATSC and Sinclair on an autonomous shuttle bus that will be receiving ATSC 3.0 content and driving back and forth between the Central and South Halls.

Schelle and Sinclair Broadcast Group VP of Advanced Technology Mark Aitken, who is a key player in a business trial of Single-Frequency Network (SFN) in the Dallas market in partnership with Nexstar, Univision and American Tower, both emphasized the tremendous progress the 3.0 movement has made since early demonstrations at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2016.

Schelle said the Phoenix trial, which now involves 12 stations from eight groups and a bevy of vendors, came together in the space of four months after Pearl TV first petitioned the FCC last fall.

“We’ve made a lot of progress,” said Schelle, who said a “second stick” broadcasting 3.0 in Phoenix is planned, perhaps later this year.

As previously reported by TVNewsCheck, the Phoenix trial will focus on enhancements to what Schelle describes as the “core TV service”, like 4K UHD, interactive content and targeted advertising.

The Dallas trial will also test dynamic ad insertion, but is also targeting mobile services and datacasting with a clear aim at generating new revenue by bringing brand-new players and services onto the broadcast spectrum.

“We have a mobile-first strategy,” affirmed Aitken.

On that note, Aitken said that a “surprising party put signals up in Dallas on the 4th” using 3.0 technology, and that the company will be formally disclosed soon. Aitken has previously suggested that 3.0 technology could be used by holders of NB-IoT (Narrowband-Internet of Things) spectrum to reach smart appliances or mobile devices, and that NB-IoT could also serve as a backchannel for ATSC 3.0 receivers. Dish Network, T-Mobile and Verizon are the biggest current U.S. holders of NB-IoT spectrum.

Aitken also said that Sinclair is working hard with chip manufacturers to get 3.0 technology into mobile devices and that by year-end such devices may be “in the hands of consumers.” He expects 3.0 to become a real business soon after.

“I see a commercial launch of ATSC 3.0 services in about a two-year timeline,” said Aitken, a timeframe that Schelle also agreed was possible.

Read all of TVNewsCheck‘s NAB 2018 news here.

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“Right now if you search any breaking news story, you’re not getting [content from] the trusted news sources,” said Anne Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV, a coalition of broadcast groups advocating for the new standard. “You’re getting some guy … who set up his news site a week ago — and he’s getting the revenue.

“That’s a bad experience for the consumer,” she said.

Speaking at TVNewsCheck’s annual NewsTECHForum in New York Tuesday morning, Schelle said that under the new standard, which is IP-based, broadcasters will be better equipped to embed their content with “the signals” that will boost it to the top of search results.

The new standard, which has yet to receive FCC approval, will also improve local broadcasters’ ability to produce and distribute content based on what particular segments of their audiences want, she said.

“Local news will become more important.”

For instance, ATSC 3.0 would allow broadcasters use repeaters to deliver hyperlocal content to particular communities within their markets — as well as sell that hyperlocal inventory to advertisers wanting to target those viewers, Schelle said. That’s a particularly attractive option for TV stations whose markets include more than one city.

The IP foundation of ATSC 3.0 also means the new standard will make it easier for broadcasters to distribute content across multiple devices, Schelle said. At the moment, doing that is considerably more difficult because linear feeds are not necessarily compatible with digital platforms, she said.

In addition, the new standard provides local broadcasters with the means to make news content more dynamic, she said. Interactive capabilities mean stations could include polls, allow viewers to follow particular stories and offer other features that make consuming content a more engaging experience.

Under ATSC 3.0, local broadcasters will also have a more robust role serving communities in disasters, Schelle said. The standard’s emergency alert system will allow stations to deliver interactive tools like evacuation maps.

Although ATSC 3.0 will take seven to 10 years to fully deploy once approved (Schelle said she expects the industry to file the plan with the FCC sometime in 2016, hopefully by spring), adopting it will be far easier on broadcasters than earlier transitions, most notably the analog-to-digital conversion, Schelle said.

Not only will broadcasters be able to use the same equipment to broadcast under both the current 1.0 standard and next-gen 3.0, but the cost of fully transitioning is relatively inexpensive as well, she said.

Implementing the new standard will require TV stations to upgrade their transmission systems, which will cost each roughly $250,000-$500,000 each.

Broadcasters have said they find that particularly palatable when you consider the moneymaking opportunities enabled by ATSC 3.0, particularly targeted advertising.

Studies show the broadcast industry could generate an additional $20 billion a year — effectively doubling its current annual revenue — if it fully deploys the ATSC 3.0 standard.

All of which, Schelle said, makes the new standard an integral component in the long-term viability of local TV, which consumers already have identified as their most trusted source of local news.

“If we are the trusted news source, and we provide the news consumers (i.e., millennials) want, than we need to make that happen,” she said. “I believe 3.0 is a way to do that.”

To listen to a recording of this panel session, click here.

Read all of our NewsTECHForum 2015 coverage here.

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The broadcasters signed a memo of understanding with the consumer electronics giant, maker of TV sets as well as smartphones and tablets, to work together for the next 18 months on commercializing ATSC 3.0.

The cooperative arrangement does not come as a surprise. The parties have been working together within the Advanced Television Systems Committee to base the ATSC 3.0 standard on the technology of Samsung and ONE Media, a joint venture of the Sinclair Broadcast Group and Coherent Logix.

“We want to try out the capabilities that the standard brings, figure out what we can do with them … and figure out how attractive they are to consumers,” said John Godfrey, SVP, public policy, Samsung Electronics America. “We are not ready to announced specific devices, but we are going to be working on a range of things.”

The standard is loaded with potential, he said. “It enables ultra high-definition TV, high dynamic range and expanded color and more robust reception, including mobile reception.”

“And maybe the most overlooked, but potentially most important element ,” Godfrey added, “is that it is entirely based on Internet protocol so it really allows integration with all kinds of modern services — interactivity, targeted advertising, hybrid delivery of broadcast and broadband.”

With the initiative, Samsung and the broadcasters are racing ahead of ATSC’s standardizing work. The full preliminary or “candidate” standard will not be ready until the end of this year and the final standard, not until 2017, according to the ATSC.

But enough progress has been made that the broadcasters feel they can work on the “feature sets” that support evolving business model, said Anne Schelle, executive director of the Pearl Group.

“This is a precursor to the commercial development of devices,” she said. “We want to make sure we are developing products that consumers want and implementing them in a way that makes sense, both from a market perspective and a broadcaster perspective.”

Added Sinclair’s Del Parks: “Lots of work has already been done, but there is still more that needs to be done.”

The initiative will not be involved in developing a transition plan for introducing ATSC 3.0 to the public without causing service disruption, the principals said. The standard is incompatible with digital TV sets and the rest of today’s broadcasting ecosystem.

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As executive director of the now-defunct Open Mobile Video Coalition, Schelle worked closely with Pearl in trying to get the broadcast-centric mobile DTV group off the ground. She has also served as an adviser to Pearl.

Schelle has some 20 years of experience in media, much of it in the wireless industry. At Pearl, her job is to make sure its members keep pace with the proliferating ways that consumers are watching TV at home and on their mobile devices.

Pearl members have a lot at stake. Its members — Cox Media Group, E.W. Scripps Co., Gannett, Hearst Television, Media General, Meredith Local Media Group, Post-Newsweek Stations and Raycom Media — reach 63% of the U.S. population with 173 stations in 98 markets, and book more than $4 billion in annual ad revenue. 

In this interview with TVNewsCheck Tech Editor Phil Kurz, Schelle discusses her new role, how broadcasters can still make mobile a vital part of their business, why smart TVs are promising and Pearl’s shaper focus on developing a next-generation broadcast system through ATSC.

An edited transcript:

You formerly were executive director of the Open Mobile Video Coalition and most recently an adviser to the NAB on mobile television. Where does mobile DTV stand today and where it is going?

I continue to be a believer that mobile is an important platform for broadcasters. As you know, Pearl has an investment in Dyle [Pearl’s branded mobile DTV service]. They have been working to build out that network. Pearl is also looking to the new standards to support mobile as well.

I have to make it clear that today broadcasters distribute a lot of content and information to mobile viewers. This would be the linear feed, or the direct feed, and that continues to be a strong interest of theirs and investment of theirs.

I know there are more than 100 broadcasters simulcasting their linear channel via the mobile DTV standard. But from the receiver side, it’s been a lot tougher to make mobile DTV successful, right?

It continues to be a challenge, more so with getting onto smartphones, and I think that conversations are continuing with carriers. There are obvious challenges with the devices out there. I do think the broadcast platform brings a lot of value to the cellular platform. Even LTE Broadcast wouldn’t be able to provide a full TV service. There is value to broadcasting, especially as video usage increases.

So, you believe TV broadcasters can help wireless carriers offload video distribution to lessen the strain on their networks?
Yes. I think it is not unlike the Wi-Fi model that existed six or seven years ago where carriers weren’t allowing the offloading to Wi-Fi, and now they embrace that. Video on a bit basis is very expensive for them, especially when it is a lot of free video. So, mobile DTV is a great way to offload distributing that content.

It hasn’t quite happened yet, but I do think you will see interest in that from the carriers.

Is this really more a matter of settling business issues with carriers than technology issues?

Yes. I think down the road there are viable business models that would lend themselves to a partnership type of arrangement.

I think an interesting corollary is the FM radio chip in cell phones. In that instance, the silicon was already in the phones and the wireless carriers still weren’t allowing its use. A business arrangement developed with Sprint, and I think you will potentially see the other carriers adopt the phones that are being sold because consumers want it. So, there is a consumer pull-through for it.

Are you happy with the acceptance of mobile DTV by broadcasters? Do you have any thoughts about ABC and CBS and their decision not to get involved with it?

I can’t speak for other broadcasters. I can speak for Pearl. Pearl is dedicated to mobile. They invested in Dyle; they built out their markets; they support mobile as a service; and they are certainly looking to the platform for the future.

Pearl stations in West Palm Beach, Fla., later this month will begin a trial of mobile-EAS in a hurricane scenario. What can you tell us about the trial?

This is a technical trial to do multi-station M-EAS distribution and also to work out the implementation aspects of M-EAS.

It isn’t a consumer trial. It is a technical trial to do multi-station distribution. There is an implementation team at ATSC looking at M-EAS implementation. I also understand that this is a capability that will be transported over to ATSC 3.0.

They will be looking at the distribution of emergency alerts and coordination of it across stations.

What involvement, if any, does Pearl have with the upcoming LG demo of interactive television?

We are working with LG on that trial of their smart TVs, which we announced at NAB.

What is Pearl’s vision for interactive television, smart TVs, over-the-air television and Internet connectivity?

What is interesting about these Smart TVs is they have the return path so they are addressable if they have the ability to recognize content on the television set. With an Internet connection, the TV can see the content for the first time as opposed to being a one-way service.

With that, all types of engagement and addressable opportunities are available to broadcasters for the first time that are not dependent on a set-top box. These are new ACR (addressable content recognition) implementations.

We will be in a world of connected devices. Understanding how that works and how broadcasters implement interactive as an addressable service via Smart TVs is our goal with this test.

The ATSC is working on a next-generation broadcast system that could well determine whether there will be a next generation of broadcasters. Sinclair’s Mark Aitken has contended that the ATSC standards process is dominated by receiver makers and that their interests don’t line up with those of broadcasters, especially when it comes to mobile TV reception. Is Pearl concerned about the direction of ATSC in developing this new standard?

Pearl is very invested in working with the ATSC to ensure broadcasters are providing ATSC with the broadcast requirements we feel have to be implemented in a future standard.

We have become active. Pearl is a member of ATSC as are our member stations. We are very active, and our goal is to work with the ATSC and CE manufacturers to develop a broadcast-friendly standard.

It appears that Sinclair’s effort reveals a split in the standards effort. On one hand, the traditional ATSC standards work seeks consensus on a new broadcast standard with a mobile component and on the other Sinclair via ONE Media is seeking a next-generation standard that is as close to LTE as possible. Do you agree?

Again, what I will say is broadcasters must be active in the standards process, and their activity level has increased substantially within the ATSC over the past four or five months. I think with that you are going to see a better understanding of the broadcaster viewpoint on requirements, and working with the CE guys to get to a platform they can accept.

What you are pointing out isn’t necessarily where things are going to be four or five months from now. I would be careful about thinking about this in terms of any kind of split at this point.

Because the ATSC process allows for the investigation of these different kinds of opportunities, and it allows for requirements to be submitted from the service providers, the broadcasters, the CE guys. Out of that process — at the end of the day — you are going to come out with an agreed-upon platform.

A lot of the components of various proposals are all at play. So, I think the more we work together and the clearer broadcasters are about their requirements, the more you will see any kind of gap close by virtue of the ATSC process.

Is Pearl looking at other technologies or have other areas of interest we haven’t discussed?

No, not at this point. We are focused on development of a future standard. We are focused on interactive television and mobile. We are focused on connected devices and opportunities that will present themselves for broadcasters. Our goal is to help forge a future for broadcasters so that it is healthy business and keeping in step with consumers in terms of their media consumption on multiple devices.

To stay up to date on all things tech, follow Frank Beacham on TVNewsCheck’s Playout tech blog here. And follow him on Twitter: @TVplayout.

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Previously a senior adviser to the National Association of Broadcasters and executive director of the Open Mobile Video Coalition, Schelle led the outreach effort by broadcasters to introduce the mobile TV services now available from more than 130 local stations throughout the country. 

“Anne brings a wealth of media and wireless industry experience to the table,” said Pat LaPlatney, SVP at Raycom Media, one of Pearl’s member companies. “With many years of experience in operations, business development, marketing communications, and legislative/regulatory work, we believe Anne is the ideal candidate to serve as Pearl’s managing director.”

Pearl members include Cox Media Group, the E.W. Scripps Co., Gannett Co., Hearst Television, Media General, Meredith Local Media Group, Post-Newsweek Stations and Raycom Media. 

“I am excited about the opportunity to work on the innovate initiatives being explored by Pearl.  The assets of Pearl members reach millions of people and provide a vital link to communities.  Those opportunities will only grow as digital media distribution technology evolves and expands with local broadcasters and content providers,” Schelle said.

She is vice chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association’s North American board and vice chairman of the MMA’s video committee. She also served as manager of business development at LCC Inc., a cellular engineering consulting firm, and was a financial analyst for McCaw Cellular Communications, MCI/Airsignal.  She is also a past venture partner and CEO of Acta Wireless.

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As executive director of the Open Mobile Video Coalition, the industry group dedicated to promoting mobile DTV, Anne Schelle believes in it and this week she will be doing her best to convince the rest of the consumer electronics world at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to believe it, too.

“You are going to see the true launch of the service,” she said yesterday on her way to the airport and a flight to Vegas.

As part of the proselytizing, OMVC will sponsor the mobile DTV Tech Zone during the annual convention, explaining the technology and showing the growing number of mobile devices equipped to receive the mobile DTV signals.

The OMVC will release more encouraging results from its consumer trial on mobile DTV service. And it will open up its ranks to non-broadcasters — device manufacturers, app developers, content providers and others hoping to exploit the new platform. The charter members of the OMVC Mobile DTV Forum: LG Electronics, Samsung, Dell and Harris.

“There are huge opportunities to develop for this platform,” said Schelle. “You’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg on what can be done. We want to take this service to the 2.0 level.”

The OMVC will not alone in Vegas. Backing it up will be representatives of two consortia of broadcasters — the Mobile Content Venture and the Mobile500 Alliance — committed to bringing the mobile DTV services to market this year.

Indeed, it was MCV, comprising NBC, Fox and 10 other major station groups, that promised in November to provide at least two free, ad-supported channels of mobile DTV programming in at least 20 major markets this year.

At that time, MCV stopped short of saying exactly what the two channels would be. Most mobile DTV watchers believe they will be simulcasts of the conventional broadcasts of the O&Os and affiliates of NBC and Fox, assuming that the networks and stations can get the necessary copyright clearances.

Schelle said that the important thing is that it is free. “By offering a free level of programming, you are going to be enhancing the uptake of service.”

The MCV is expected to work with the Mobile 500 Alliance, comprising smaller station groups led by the likes of Fisher Communications and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, to insure that the service is available in most of the country. Many of the members of MCV and the Mobile500 are also members of the OMVC.

One of the hurdles that the OMVC and other mobile DTV proponents have to overcome is the major wireless carriers’ resistance to allowing mobile DTV receive chips in the millions of phones and other devices that they subsidize.

However, Schelle believes smaller carriers may embrace the technology in an effort to gain a marketplace edge. Also, she said, even the large carriers may discover that they cannot handle the demand of live broadcast video. “There is consumer demand for it; the question is, how do you deliver that?”

The OMVC consumer trial ran between May and October and involved nine stations, 23 channels of programming and nearly 350 consumers equipped with receive devices, including a smartphone, a Dell netbook and a portable DVD player. Rentrak tabulated the feedback from the participants.

Among the findings, according to OMVC:

Strong Consumer Interest: The majority of participants maintained a high level of excitement about mobile DTV and were interested in continuing to receive the service. While free over-the-air service was a major positive with viewers, nearly half also said they would be at least “somewhat likely” to subscribe to premium services for a monthly fee.

Live, Local News Ranks Highly: Participants found themselves tuning into their battery-powered mobile DTV devices when storms knocked out power to their home TVs or when breaking news unfolded while they were on the go. Local stations were considered essential to the viewing experience, but participants also liked having a variety of programming. More than 30 different program genres were viewed on the 23 available channels.

Daytime is Primetime: Unlike traditional TV viewing, which is tethered to the living room TV, mobile DTV viewing tends to peak during the weekday afternoon when consumers can watch programs while on a break from work or while waiting in line at the supermarket.

Mobile DTV Means More TV: The research suggests that mobile DTV will result in a net gain in overall TV consumption — 94% reported watching more or the same amount of TV as before.

The average daily viewer spent 50 minutes watching mobile DTV and tuned in more than twice during the day. In fact, over a quarter of the people watching on a typical day spent more than an hour viewing their mobile DTV device.

The CES Mobile DTV Tech Zone will feature a variety of receive devices from a variety of manufacturers, including Winegard (DVD player with 10.2-inch screen), Cydle (Wi-Fi enabled tablet), DTVinteractive (USB dongle), iMovee Mobeo (pocket Wi-Fi receiver), LG Mobile (DVD player with 7-inch screen), Pixtree (USB dongle), Hauppauge (USB dongle), Coby (USB dongle) and Valups (30-in Apple connector for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

In addition, new mobile DTV products will be on display at other exhibitors including RCA, Vizio, Siano, Audiovox and Enspert.

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