As broadcasters await a decision from the FCC to shut down the current ATSC 1.0 broadcast format, the industry’s leading lobbyist is reiterating its support for ATSC 3.0, (aka “NextGen TV”).

Since last October, when the FCC voted on a proposal to determine a date when to sunset ATSC 1.0, debate has swirled around the timing of the shutdown and what consumer protections will be in place to ensure viewers don’t lose access to free over the air broadcasting. The commission is expected to announce a final decision by the end of 2026.

The NAB, which has promoted NextGen TV as a way for broadcasters to better compete in the increasingly complex TV landscape, told the FCC six months ago that continuing uncertainty over the lack of a date is hampering progress.

“The record developed here confirms that the Commission’s central task is no longer to debate whether NextGen TV is worth pursuing—stakeholders across the ecosystem recognize that it is—but to decide whether the transition will be allowed to succeed through an orderly, coordinated framework, or instead be stranded indefinitely in a regime of regulatory uncertainty and half-measures, all to the detriment of the viewing public,” the NAB said in comments filed with the commission in February.

Currently approximately 76% of U.S. households can receive a NextGen TV signal, according to the ATSC. In April, Pearl TV Group, a consortium of broadcasters and tech suppliers, announced the launch of an initiative to develop consumer converter boxes that could retail for under $60.

The association has also launched a campaign to help preserve live sports on free over the air TV, again noting the increased competition from streaming giants.

The ability to access live sports over free TV, competition from Silicon Valley and the very survival of broadcasting were tied together in NAB’s latest blog. The association also took aim at viewers who criticize the content protection aspects of ATSC 3.0, with many claiming that certain devices on the market don’t carry the necessary software to decode DRM-protected signals.

“ATSC 3.0 includes security and service-protection mechanisms as part of its technical framework, just as modern communications and entertainment platforms routinely protect their content and distribution systems, the NAB said. “There is an important reason for these protections. Broadcasters invest substantial resources to secure sports, entertainment and other high-value programming. They also invest every day in local journalists, meteorologists, production professionals and the technology needed to keep communities informed and safe.”

“Without reasonable safeguards, unauthorized businesses can capture local stations’ signals and resell them at scale without permission or compensation,” the association added.

NAB also criticized the possibility that the broadcast industry could be saddled with outdated technology, impacting its competitiveness.

“Requiring broadcasters to operate a decades-old standard forever would effectively make free, over-the-air television the only major communications platform that is never permitted to modernize,” it said. “That would not protect viewers. Over time, it would leave viewers with an increasingly outdated service while streaming platforms, wireless providers and global technology companies continue to innovate.”

NAB’s latest blog can be accessed here.

WASHINGTON—Digital Alert Systems, a major supplier of Emergency Alert System and common alerting protocol equipment and solutions, has filed a letter with the Federal Communications Commission rebutting some of the assertions Weigel Broadcasting has made regarding NextGen TV/ATSC 3.0 and the standard's limitations in delivering emergency alerts.

In a recent filing with the FCC. Weigel released a study contending that the transition to 3.0 broadcasts would cause problems with the public’s ability to receive vital emergency alerts.

Weigel has been a consistent opponent of proposals by the NAB and broadcasters to speed up the transition to ATSC 3.0 and set a firm cutoff date for ATSC 1.0 broadcasts.

In a June 3 meeting with FCC officials, Weigel reiterated its opposition to a mandatory cutoff for ATSC 1.0 broadcasts by arguing that: “(1) ATSC 3.0 makes a free service expensive and simple service complicated; (2) broadcasters may elect to degrade (or not improve) broadcasting in favor of non-broadcast services, such as gambling, pay television services, and private data delivery services; and (3) consumers, primarily those in rural areas underserved in terms of content and connectivity, may be the most harmed by a transition to ATSC 3.0.”

During that meeting, Weigel also “discussed Internet connectivity requirements to receive ATSC 3.0 DRM-encrypted channels” and shared its testing of “low-cost’ converter devices across four television markets. Weigel observed that when these devices weren’t connected to the Internet, EAS messages were not delivered. “In ATSC 1.0, there are no Internet connectivity requirements for EAS,” the broadcaster noted.

That study was strongly criticized by the ATSC 3.0 Security Authority (A3SA) in a June 26 letter that stressed “A3SA-suppported devices are designed to be fully compatible with the Commission’s Emergency Alert System (EAS) and to ensure that emergency alerts are reliably delivered to viewers. That is how the A3SA content protection framework was designed, and that is how it operates across the ATSC 3.0 ecosystem.”

In its FCC filing, Digital Alert Systems took no position DRM issues and praised Weigel for raising “an important and legitimate concern in that viewers must be able to receive essential emergency information over the air, including when broadband service is unavailable, unreliable, unaffordable, or disrupted by the very emergency for which public warning is needed.”

But the July 2 letter stressed that “the issues identified [by Weigel]...appear to relate more to the particular device configurations and options in those two particular products, rather than issues with ATSC 3.0, DRM, or broadcast technologies.”

The letter also attempted to “clarify the technical record insofar that a specific observed converter-device behavior is not read more broadly than the available evidence supports. The referenced ex parte presentation appears to document a particular result involving two converter devices, certain DRM-protected services, and certain offline test conditions. That result does not, by itself, establish that ATSC 3.0 inherently requires Internet connectivity for emergency alerting, that content protection necessarily interferes with EAS, or that a mandatory 19.3 Mbps `Broadcast PLP’ is the technical answer to the behavior described.”

Additional details can be found in the original filing, which is available here.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.—Jericho Receivers, a subsidiary of All 6G, this week launched its Software-Defined Atomic Clock (SDAC), which intelligently fuses multiple independent time references, including the ATSC 3.0 broadcast platform, to deliver atomic-clock-grade timing that remains accurate even when Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals are jammed, spoofed or unavailable.

“The Software-Defined Atomic Clock represents a major leap forward in timing technology,” said Dean Goodman, CEO of Jericho Receivers' parent company, All 6G. “When the primary timing source is lost, conventional systems enter holdover and begin to drift. There has long been a need for a true complement to satellite signals. Our software-defined approach fuses the best available sources—satellite, broadcast, terrestrial and network—into one resilient, atomic-clock-grade solution. This is precisely the kind of innovation All 6G was founded to deliver: bridging decades of broadcast expertise with the secure, resilient infrastructure required for 5G, 6G and beyond.”

“By leveraging the ATSC 3.0 Broadcast as a core terrestrial timing source, Jericho’s Software-Defined Atomic Clock directly supports the resilient national PNT infrastructure that Chairman [Brendan] Carr and the FCC have highlighted as essential,” Goodman added. “We are proud to deliver a made-in-America solution that strengthens timing security for critical networks while accelerating the broader adoption of ATSC 3.0 capabilities.”

Traditional systems that rely on a holdover mode during satellite outages in which the device keeps its own internal time, making time drift inevitable. Unlike those alternatives, the Jericho SDAC continuously cross-references GNSS, terrestrial ATSC 3.0/BPS signals and network-based precision time protocols. This multi-source architecture provides robust, real-time resilience for mission-critical applications.

“ATSC 3.0 was designed from the ground up to support advanced applications far beyond traditional video delivery, including precise time transfer and positioning through the Broadcast Positioning System,” said Madeleine Noland, president of ATSC. “We are thrilled to see Jericho Receivers’ software-defined atomic clock harness the power of the ATSC 3.0 standard as a critical terrestrial complement. This deployment underscores broadcasting’s vital role in building a more resilient national timing infrastructure.”

The Jericho SDAC combines:

• Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) for primary high-precision timing.
• ATSC 3.0 terrestrial broadcasts, including the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS), as a powerful GPS-independent complement.
• Network precision time references and protocols for seamless integration with modern IP infrastructure.

The architecture of the device ensures continuous, high-accuracy synchronization in challenging environments and eliminates the countdown to failure inherent in traditional holdover modes. Designed and manufactured entirely in the United States in accordance with All 6G’s strict no-Chinese-chip policy, the SDAC is well-suited for 5G/6G networks, data centers, power grids, financial systems, defense applications and other critical infrastructure that require assured positioning, navigation and timing (PNT).

The Jericho SDAC is now available for evaluation and deployment.

More information is available on the company’s website.

OSLO, Norway—Appear ASA has announced that it is supporting Rede Legislativa de Rádio e TV’s contribution workflow for Brazil’s TV 3.0 activities as part of the country experimental transmissions of the new standard, which are locally branded as DTV+.

The deployment uses Appear’s X5 to transport the broadcaster’s signal from Brasília to the TV 3.0 core infrastructure in São Paulo and are part of the Rede Legislativa trials designed to shape the next phase of Brazilian television.

Brazil’s TV 3.0 program has gathered momentum since the technology was formally adopted in August 2025. In 2026, the Chamber of Deputies hosted experimental demonstrations of DTV+ and the Mais BR public-channel platform, while Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC) confirmed its role in the first public presentation of the TV 3.0 platform. Earlier this year, EBC and the Chamber were authorised to use test stations in Brasília and São Paulo for continuous TV 3.0 transmissions.

In the Rede Legislativa workflow, Appear’s X5 uses HEVC compression and Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) to carry the signal over the public internet from Brasília to São Paulo. The architecture is designed to deliver the content simultaneously to two CDNs operated by the EBC and ALESP (Legislative Assembly of the State of São Paulo).

The project highlights how proven IP contribution technologies can support the operational requirements of Brazil’s emerging TV 3.0 services.

For Rede Legislativa, the deployment provides a practical and cost-efficient way to connect existing broadcast operations into a new delivery environment without requiring a bespoke TV 3.0 transmission platform.

“Brazil’s move towards TV 3.0 is creating new requirements not only in transmission, but also in the contribution workflows that feed it,” said Luis Perez, sales director LATAM at Appear. “In this project, our hardware-accelerated SRT technology enables Rede Legislativa to transport high-quality signals securely and reliably from Brasília to São Paulo over the public internet. It demonstrates how broadcasters can use new efficient technologies, such as SRT, to support the next wave of television services in Brazil with the low latency, high density and resilience needed for modern production workflows.”

“The trial has given us an efficient and reliable way to connect Brasília to the TV 3.0 core infrastructure in São Paulo,” added Luiz Flávio Menezes, engineer, Chamber of Deputies, Brazilian National Congress. “Appear’s X Platform has helped us validate a practical contribution architecture for DTV+, preserving quality while simplifying operations as we evaluate how next-generation television services can be best delivered in Brazil.”

POUSO ALEGRE, Brazil—GatesAir has opened GatesAir Brasil, a new office and operations center here in the state of Minas Gerais in the southeastern region of the country.

The facility establishes a presence for the company in Brazil for the first time in more than a decade and adds in-country assembly, service, repair and customer support capabilities for GatesAir television and radio transmission products. Now open, the facility will also support customer activities throughout the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA) region.

Located within Brazil’s “Electronics Valley” region between São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, the new operation strengthens GatesAir’s ability to serve Brazilian broadcasters with faster delivery, localized technical support and expedited repair services. The move also allows GatesAir to assemble products in Brazil, creating operational efficiencies that will make its solutions more accessible to broadcasters across the country.

“Brazil is a cornerstone market for GatesAir and an important part of our long-term growth strategy across Central and Latin America,” GatesAir CEO Barbara Spicek said. “This investment strengthens our regional presence while bringing us closer to customers at a critical point in the industry’s evolution. With DTV+ creating new opportunities for broadcasters, GatesAir is uniquely positioned to support this transition through both innovation and experience.”

The investment comes at a pivotal moment for Brazil’s broadcast industry as it advances plans for DTV+, its enhanced implementation of the ATSC 3.0 standard. GatesAir is now shipping Maxiva transmitters for Brazil’s new 300-MHz broadcast spectrum allocation, leveraging GatesAir’s experience and expertise in ATSC 3.0 systems development. The country’s DTV+ transition is expected to drive substantial infrastructure investment over the coming years as broadcasters prepare to deploy advanced services and applications.

“Opening our new Brazil operation represents a significant strategic investment in one of the world’s most important broadcast markets,” said Antonio Satta, country manager for Brazil at GatesAir. “By establishing local assembly, service and repair capabilities, we can deliver meaningful economic advantages to broadcasters while providing the responsiveness and proximity they expect from a trusted technology partner. We are positioning ourselves alongside our customers as they prepare for the DTV+ transition, and our local presence ensures broadcasters have direct access to the expertise, products and support they need throughout this transformation.”

The facility will include dedicated service and repair resources to accelerate maintenance activities and spare parts availability. GatesAir customers will benefit from localized technical support, installation assistance, commissioning services and direct access to GatesAir engineering expertise.

As part of the expansion, GatesAir will also establish a regional AirWatch365 monitoring hub within the facility. Introduced globally at the 2026 NAB Show in April, AirWatch365 provides broadcasters with continuous monitoring, analytics and operational visibility across transmission infrastructure. The local monitoring capability will further enhance service responsiveness and system oversight for the company’s Brazilian customers.

WASHINGTON—When the FCC gave the green light for ATSC 3.0 in 2017, the focus was on improving television broadcasting by combining IP with RF to bring a new range of consumer applications, better reception and enhanced picture and audio quality. While there were discussions of datacasting and enterprise solutions at the time, the idea that the standard—also branded as “NextGen TV”—had enormous potential beyond traditional television was still nascent.

Nine years later, any doubt that ATSC 3.0 could impact U.S. communications infrastructure has been erased. That reality took center stage at this week’s annual ATSC NextGen Broadcast Conference here, with three of the six sessions focused entirely on applications outside the traditional broadcast environment.

Nevertheless, the standard remains in a state of policy limbo. Broadcasters are actively petitioning the FCC to set a definitive sunset date for ATSC 1.0 so stations can drop the burden of simulcasting and unleash the full potential of ATSC 3.0.

ATSC President Madeleine Noland aptly characterized this state of transition in her opening speech.

“The current U.S. situation, as one broadcaster in this room put it, feels kind of like 'the worst of both worlds' as we straddle between a 25-year-old technology with ATSC 1.0 and the tremendous opportunities in front of us with ATSC 3.0,” she said.

Maintaining Perspective
Although NextGen TV sets have been on the consumer market since late 2020—with about 18 million units sold, according to the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)—widespread consumer adoption and enthusiasm have lagged. Noland looked to history to contextualize the current conundrum.

“We have to put these things in perspective—the issues we face today are similar to the issues of yesterday,” Noland said. “But perhaps more urgent, as technology and consumer habits are evolving at an ever-increasing pace, we don't quite have the luxury of a decade-plus to get things right in this media landscape.”

Despite sluggish hardware adoption, Noland touted the operational progress broadcasters have made with the standard.

“My estimate is that 1.3 million people in the United States today are enjoying High Dynamic Range (HDR) over the air for free for the first time; over half a million are enjoying Dolby Atmos; 1.2 million have access to interactive services, and over a half a million of those can use ‘Start Over TV,’” she said. “This is today, for free, in the United States over the air for the first time ever. So these numbers are growing, and growing fast.”

Noland also hailed the increased international attention on ATSC 3.0 in light of Brazil's adoption of the physical layer of 3.0 last summer.

“For many years, when we talked about ATSC, we naturally led with better television, better picture quality, better audio, better reception, better emergency information, more interactive viewer experiences,” she said. “And those benefits remain absolutely central to the transition now underway in the United States and Brazil and other countries.

“But around the world, governments, regulators, broadcasters and technology companies are increasingly recognizing something even bigger—ATSC 3.0 is not just a television system; it is a flexible IP-based broadcast communications platform capable of delivering many kinds of data services and public interest applications efficiently, securely and at scale,” she added. “In some countries, that broader capability is becoming the starting point of the conversation, whether it’s educational content delivery, resilient emergency communications, automotive applications, software distribution, positioning technology, smart city infrastructure or direct-to-mobile service.”

Shifting the Bipartisan Conversation
In a fireside chat with Noland, National Association of Broadcasters President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt praised the technology's momentum but offered a cautious perspective on the timeline for an FCC regulatory decision. In February, the NAB asked the commission to mandate an ATSC 1.0 sunset in the top 75 markets by the end of 2028, with the remaining markets following by the end of 2030.

“We understand that at any particular moment the FCC has a lot of competing priorities, and we need to ensure that the nationwide deployment of ATSC 3.0 is at the very top of that list,” LeGeyt said. “Shifting the conversation from whether ATSC 3.0 is going to be the standard of the future to how we are going to get there is tactical, given the Washington environment we are in.”

LeGeyt also emphasized the rare bipartisan support the standard has maintained on Capitol Hill.

“In a very polarized Washington environment, ATSC 3.0 doesn’t register Republican or Democrat; it registers local,” he said. “And that’s why you've got such positive remarks—maybe emphasizing different features of the technology—from each of the commissioners, as well as the Chairman…this is a transition that's going to need to transcend politics."

BPS Spinoff
LeGeyt used the event to announce the NAB’s launch of Merkhet Solutions, an independent company focused on the commercial deployment of the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS). BPS utilizes the NextGen TV standard to deliver precise terrestrial timing and location signals over existing broadcast towers, functioning as a vital backup to satellite-based GPS.

“BPS represents a powerful intersection of innovation, public safety, and opportunity for broadcasters,” LeGeyt said in a statement. “Launching Merkhet Solutions is the next step in commercializing this technology and ensuring it reaches the critical infrastructure operators who need it most, while continuing to create meaningful long-term opportunities for local stations.”

Speaking to attendees, LeGeyt added that BPS offers an opportunity to solve a massive public policy vulnerability while generating an entirely new revenue stream to help accelerate the 3.0 transition.

“We made the determination that for BPS to recognize its full potential—that we at NAB certainly believe that it has, and the NAB member companies on our board of directors believe that it has—not only to solve this important public policy issue, but also as a potential revenue stream for broadcasters, and as an accelerant to ATSC 3.0,” he said.

Sam Matheny, who previously led the NAB’s internal BPS initiatives, has been named CEO of the spinoff.

“BPS solves a problem we can no longer afford to ignore: an entire economy and national security posture resting on a single, contested signal from space,” Matheny said. “We built BPS at NAB because broadcast infrastructure is uniquely suited to deliver assured terrestrial timing at scale. We’re launching Merkhet Solutions because the time to operationalize this technology is now.”

Matheny updated the audience on real-world testing of the system in the Washington, D.C., area.

“We are at an actual critical infrastructure site—that was one of the requirements,” Matheny explained. “Our partner is Dominion Energy. We are at one of the largest power substations on the East Coast and we have put our leader-follower, self-synchronizing network in place with them.”

Plans will initially focus on regional rollouts. “Let’s do more relationships like we have with Dominion Energy, where we can hear directly from critical infrastructure partners on how they want to use it…and how we can best provide BPS as a complement to their GPS,” Matheny said.

Dr. Andrew Hansen, a prominent expert in navigation and timing who was instrumental in developing three global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), was profuse in his praise of BPS, calling the initial testing data "stunning."

“I am jealous—I’ve lived in standards my entire professional career, and 3.0 is a good one,” Hansen remarked. “GPS was a gift to the world; the idea that you can synchronize time around the world to ones of nanoseconds shook physical principles. The idea that we can now do this to ones of nanoseconds with BPS layered on ATSC 3.0 is remarkable.”

Improving the Viewer Experience
While enterprise infrastructure dominated the headlines, the “Better TV” session focused on local enhancements, including interactive applications, content curation and localized accessibility features.

Jason Quinn, director of engineering at New Mexico PBS, highlighted how the technology solves deep structural communication issues in rural, tribal areas. Covering the 27,000-square-mile Navajo Nation, the network is working with partners Ateme and Heartland Video Systems to deploy real-time AI translations and multi-language captioning.

“A lot of unique challenges that communities are facing have nothing to do with broadcast television, but have everything to do with the transfer of information,” Quinn said. Recent over-the-air tests successfully broadcast simultaneous Spanish and Vietnamese AI-translated caption tracks alongside standard English.

On the commercial datacasting side, Joe Fabiano, chief technology officer of EdgeBeam Wireless—a joint venture backed by E.W. Scripps, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair—updated attendees on the JV’s tech pipeline.

“We’re helping ATSC advance the standards to bring full IP networking, routing, and peering capabilities into the standard,” Fabiano said, noting that EdgeBeam’s ultimate goal is to blend seamlessly into background consumer ecosystems. “We’re not creating hardware and platforms for the purposes of becoming a hardware manufacturer. We're doing it for the purposes of bridging, so that we disappear into consumer electronics.”

The Race Against Wireless Competitors
The transition isn’t without immediate external competitive threats. During a panel focused on Advanced Emergency Information (AEI), So Vang, vice president of emerging technology at Sinclair subsidiary ONE Media 3.0, issued a blunt warning regarding impending features from the commercial wireless sector.

“We’re talking about keeping broadcasters relevant,” Vang cautioned. “If wireless alerting is going to do exactly what AEI is doing, we better step up and do it…The wireless industry is moving ahead. They will very likely roll out features like AEI—not with full interactivity, but at least with the ability to get a photo or a map to the handset. There’s a live FCC proceeding on that.”

Edward Czarnecki, vice president of global and government affairs at Digital Alert Systems, reminded the room that broadcasters possess a distinct structural advantage. Unlike wireless carriers, which hold blanket legal indemnification from emergency alert liabilities, broadcasters operate under strict statutory local obligations and hold far superior delivery capacity.

“AEI is an informational service, not an alert service,” Czarnecki noted. “We can do a lot more with languages, accessibility and multimedia than the wireless industry can because of our bandwidth and the versatility of the app environment.”

Chicken-and-Egg Redux
NAB’s LeGeyt compared the current 3.0 landscape to the classic “chicken-and-egg” hardware vs. content dilemma that defined the original digital transition decades ago—only this time, the stakes are exponentially higher.

“In order for consumers to see the value proposition of the ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV experience, we need to be implementing and deploying new features that are going to make this really attractive,” LeGeyt said. “And that goes beyond just a great picture. It's all the features that, frankly, may have been an innovation story 10 years ago, but really are just table stakes to compete in this media landscape today.”

The ATSC concluded the day by announcing the recipients of its two most coveted awards. Mark Aitken was named recipient of the Mark Richer Industry Leadership Medal and Julia Kenyon of the CTA received the 2026 Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award.

WASHINGTON—Advanced HDR by Technicolor announced its participation in the Pearl TV NextGen TV Converter Box Program.

Unveiled at the 2026 CES Show, the program aims to support the development of affordable, ATSC 3.0-enabled converter boxes for the U.S. market.

To help advance the program, Advanced HDR by Technicolor said it is adjusting its intellectual property (IP) offering to ensure affordable viewing experiences can be delivered without compromising picture quality.

In addition, Advanced HDR by Technicolor said it is helping lower the cost of devices through a single-stream transmission architecture that carries dynamic range metadata at standard definition bandwidth. Since the vast majority of TV viewers do not require UHD features to enhance their viewing experience, the capability to add high dynamic range (HDR) to Full HD video resolutions through Advanced HDR by Technicolor gives viewers the best possible video quality at the lowest possible converter box cost.

It also helps broadcasters avoid the infrastructure investment required to transmit parallel SDR and HDR streams for different display capabilities, while device manufacturers (including TV, tablet and mobile phone makers) can meet HDR compliance at lower bill-of-materials cost.

As a result, end users automatically receive picture quality scaled to the capability of any display, regardless of whether they own a standard definition (SD), high-definition (HD), or ultra-high definition (UHD) device. This helps to deliver on NextGen TVs promise of further improved viewing experiences while at the same time continuing to support legacy SDR video streams at the best possible quality.

“The unique combination of single stream distribution and dynamic management of HDR and SDR provided by the Advanced HDR by Technicolor solution creates an economically beneficial situation across the ecosystem,” said Rick Dumont, head of business development for Advanced HDR by Technicolor. “We optimize the NextGen TV viewing experience for consumers with HDR or SDR displays, delivering premium video quality in full HD HDR. With Advanced HDR by Technicolor being designed for a low memory footprint implementation, it also relieves part of the tremendous pressure that consumer device makers are under with today's memory device shortages that drive up memory pricing.

For a converter box program targeting price-sensitive households, the combination of backward compatibility and transmission efficiency also means that HDR can be included as a baseline feature rather than an upgrade offered for those who can afford to pay for premium services.

"Getting NextGen TV into every American home starts with making the converter box affordable, and that takes industry leaders willing to step up. Advanced HDR by Technicolor's commitment to special IP pricing does exactly that, lowering the barrier for manufacturers and accelerating the transition. We're grateful that they've joined the growing coalition turning this device from a concept into a reality for store shelves and ultimately for consumers throughout the U.S,” said Pearl TV managing director Anne Schelle.

WASHINGTON—The National Association of Broadcasters has launched Merkhet Solutions, an independent company focused on commercial deployment of the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS).

BPS is a terrestrial timing and positioning technology that uses the NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) broadcast standard to deliver precise time and location signals over the existing network of U.S. broadcast towers.

First conceived by the technology team at NAB in 2021, the patented terrestrial, GPS-independent timing and positioning technology is designed to leverage the high-power, geographically diverse broadcast infrastructure already covering the United States.

"BPS represents a powerful intersection of innovation, public safety and opportunity for broadcasters,” NAB President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt said. “Launching Merkhet Solutions is the next step in commercializing this technology and ensuring it reaches the critical infrastructure operators who need it most, while continuing to create meaningful long-term opportunities for local stations."

BPS has been designed to address the more than $1 billion-per-day economic and national security risk posed by overreliance on GPS. To push forward the commercial deployment of BPS, Merkhet Solutions is engaging across critical infrastructure sectors, including energy, data centers, telecommunications and financial services where a loss of precision time can trigger grid instability, outages and lost trades.

“BPS solves a problem we can no longer afford to ignore: an entire economy and national security posture resting on a single, contested signal from space,” said Merkhet Solutions CEO Sam Matheny. “We built BPS at NAB because broadcast infrastructure is uniquely suited to deliver assured terrestrial timing at scale. We're launching Merkhet Solutions because the time to operationalize this technology is now."

Under Matheny’s leadership at NAB, BPS advanced rapidly from research concept to real-world deployment.

NAB demonstrated the first BPS prototype to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) in 2022, followed by the first live broadcast demonstration in 2023. In 2024, NAB entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Nexstar Media Group.

In 2025, NIST concluded in a peer-reviewed paper presented at the Institute of Navigation International Technical Meeting that BPS was “comparable to or better than GNSS” for time transfer stability and a “viable complementary PNT solution.” Later that year, the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded NAB a contract to deploy a BPS field trial with critical infrastructure partner Dominion Energy.

BPS is designed as a terrestrial complement to GPS, providing operators with an additional resilient source of timing and positioning that can be used alongside GPS or relied upon when satellite-based services are disrupted by jamming, spoofing, cyberattacks or natural events. The federal government recognized the need for terrestrial complements to GPS through the National Timing Resilience and Security Act and Executive Order 13905.

NAB said Merkhet Solutions intends to serve customers across all critical infrastructure sectors, with an emphasis on the lifeline sectors of energy, telecommunications, data centers and financial services, where timing precision is mission-critical and GPS vulnerability is an unacceptable risk.

Learn more at the Merkhet Solutions website.

“We’ve been here before” stands out among the profound rhetoric that poured into the FCC as it revived its rulemaking exploration of NextGen TV. Those words, from a filing by cable-TV industry groups, captured the frustrating dilemma as regulators try to figure out what to do about the retransmission of ATSC 3.0 broadcast TV signals via cable systems and other multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs).

More than 1,600 comments (including formal submissions, replies to other parties and ex parte letters) have deluged the Federal Communications Commission since October, when it issued its docket on “Authorizing Permissive Use of the ‘Next Generation’ Broadcast Television Standard,” a spokesperson told TV Tech. The arguments came from “broadcasters, MVPDs, equipment manufacturers and retailer groups, consumer groups/advocates, accessibility groups, policy groups, technology/software providers, content producers, other interested parties and individual consumers,” the spokesperson said.

Few Innovative Ideas
This vast array of opinions refrains the familiar arguments of broadcasters vs. cable operators—with substantial input from equipment and software and content suppliers allied with one side or the other. As is increasingly common in such proceedings, there is also an extensive cadre of public-interest organizations and a dollop of Silicon Valley and wireless communications ventures with an appetite for spectrum.

Relatively few innovative ideas seemed to emerge from the reams of formal filings or in conversations with TV Tech, although analysts offered perspectives on what’s ahead.

The FCC hasn’t set a deadline to resolve the ATSC 3.0 retransmission issue. The agency’s only response to a query about a possible timetable: “This is an active proceeding.”

Independent analysts do not expect a quick resolution. As one inside observer said, “The ball is in FCC Chairman [Brendan] Carr’s court.” Another FCC watcher opined that NextGen TV is not a high priority, despite the agency’s public statements.

To complicate the deliberations, the NextGen TV migration also includes uncertainty about if, when or how to turn off the current ATSC 1.0 signals, which do have must-carry requirements. A slew of other factors, such as the absence of a tuner subsidy (as was available in the digital transition nearly two decades ago), add to the complexity—and are familiar themes in the current examination.

When it opened its latest rulemaking, the FCC said it was seeking “to support and accelerate the nation’s ongoing transition to NextGen TV (also known as ATSC 3.0),” which it claims “represents the future of broadcasting and promises to modernize the nation’s free and local over-the-air television service.”

NAB, ATSC Confront Multiple Challenges
In its filing, the National Association of Broadcasters contends the dissent about must-carry and other familiar issues repeats a “problem [that] is circular.” Stations won’t transmit until carriage is assured and receivers are available, and hardware makers won’t make equipment until rules are in place for distributing the enhanced content, NAB asserted.

Moreover, there is the question about the migration from ATSC 1.0 to 3.0.

“Broadcasters cannot offer the full benefits of Next Gen TV service until they can stop simulcasting in ATSC 1.0,” according to NAB’s filing—but there is widespread concern about the problems that would surface if simulcasting ended without viewers able to receive ATSC 3.0 signals.

NAB urged the FCC to adopt a “date-certain ATSC 1.0 sunset” and to “ensure continued MVPD carriage of stations’ primary ATSC 3.0 signals and associated program-related features.”

In its initial comments to the FCC, NAB insisted “extending must-carry to ATSC 3.0 is essential to an efficient and timely transition.” Broadcasters contend stations should be allowed “to assert mandatory carriage rights for their ATSC 3.0 signals.”

“Broadcasters are not looking to expand must-carry obligations but preserve the same framework that applies today as broadcast technology evolves,” NAB said. “As stations transition to ATSC 3.0, must-carry should continue to attach to a station’s primary programming stream regardless of transmission standard…Technical standards are already in place to support MVPD carriage of ATSC 3.0 signals,” pointing to an ATSC Recommended Practice on Delivery of ATSC 3.0 Services for Redistribution.

Alison Martin, NAB’s vice president of innovation and strategy, said ATSC 3.0 broadcast streams contain content-related data that is essential for viewers and should be subject to must-carry rules. Weather reports, emergency evacuation routes, accessibility information and similar local data must be part of the retransmission package, she said, alluding to the support broadcasters have received from social service agencies.

Martin acknowledged that some of the data ventures that broadcasters envision for ATSC 3.0 fit into what the FCC’s Carr calls “the broadcast internet,” which NAB contends is totally separate from the must-carry issues involved with traditional video programming. She said licensees see services such as BitPath, the wireless platform built on ATSC 3.0 architecture developed by Sinclair and Nexstar Media Group, as an extension of broadcasters’ capacity for data delivery.

“They look at it as a supplement for private wireless networks, so must-carry is not necessary,” she said.

That said, cable retransmission is “the most important thing” to assure broadcasters “are able to innovate” and develop enhancements such as “more immersive audio” and sports enhancements, according to Martin.

The Advanced Television Systems Committee added its endorsement to NAB’s arguments.

Although the group insists that its focus is strictly on technical issues, “any regulatory framework must preserve local broadcasters’ ability to innovate, serve their communities, and fully use ATSC 3.0’s capabilities,” ATSC Vice President of Standards Development Luiz Fausto emphasized.

“The absence of clear rules governing the treatment of ATSC 3.0 services in retransmission scenarios could create uncertainty,” Fausto said. “Conversely, a framework that recognizes the technical realities of ATSC 3.0, including its IP-based architecture and support for new services, can help broadcasters and distribution partners plan investments with greater confidence.”

He stressed: “Cable retransmission is part of a larger transition. ATSC 3.0’s value lies in enabling local broadcasters to use a flexible, scalable, IP-based platform to reach viewers and communities in new ways.”

Opposition From Cable, CE Makers
The “been here before” sneer came from NCTA–The Internet & Television Association on behalf of a cadre of cable TV and broadband providers and their collaborators.

In its filing, the group took aim at NAB’s claim that the cable industry opposes broadcasters’ use of new technologies. “We simply believe that broadcasters’ transition to a new standard should not come at the expense of MVPDs, equipment manufacturers, and consumers, with no guarantee of meaningful benefits,” NCTA said.

“Requiring cable operators to carry ATSC 3.0 signals—despite the substantial costs involved and the uncertain consumer value—would further intensify the serious constitutional concerns associated with the must-carry regime,” NCTA Senior Vice President of Strategic Communications Brian Dietz told TV Tech. “Allowing broadcasters to discontinue ATSC 1.0 transmissions at this stage of the current market-based transition would impose real costs on consumers without any assurance of meaningful benefits.”

The Consumer Technology Association and its equipment-making allies take a similar stance. CTA contends the marketplace is working and a 3.0 tuner mandate is unnecessary. It would be “misguided” to impose a mandate “before broadcasters have adopted and promoted NextGen TV on a nationwide basis, and thus before there is adequate indication of consumer interest or demand,” the group argued.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the agency’s sole Democrat, said the new rules would trigger “additional thorny questions” over matters such as “encryption technologies [i.e.] digital rights management.”

She voiced concerns about whether audiences “will be able to continue to enjoy free, over-the-air television as they do today.”

“Technology should not be a bottleneck to innovation,” Gomez said, noting that the “significant costs of the transition” will extend to consumers who must pay for new “equipment to…receive the new signal over the air or potentially pay higher prices for new televisions.”

Does Wall Street Care?
Blair Levin, a former FCC chief of staff and longtime telecom policy expert, identified several barriers to the must-carry requirements for NextGen TV.

“The value to consumers is completely different” from the original DTV transition nearly two decades ago, Levin said. “The streaming networks, which didn’t exist then, are a much bigger factor than alternative content at the time of the earlier transition.

“There will be a point when the MVPDs say ‘It’s over,’” Levin predicted, suggesting that the necessity to retransmit broadcast content may become irrelevant.

Levin, now a policy and regulation adviser at New Street Research, headed the team that wrote the U.S. National Broadband Plan (2009-2010) and was deeply involved in the 1996 Telecommunications Act while at the FCC.

Several barriers will impede the must-carry efforts, Levin told TV Tech, especially the lack of a tuner mandate and a specified turn-off date for the current ATSC 1.0 signals. The transition also lacks momentum because there is no pressure from Congress or the White House, he noted.

Would Wall Street care about such a break with historical models?

“Not really,” Levin said, noting that investors now care more about actions “that affect wireless carriers and Silicon Valley,” citing increasing efforts to open up different spectrum bands to auction for nonbroadcast purposes.

From his Washington perspective, Levin noted, “NAB has been unable to elevate this on Carr’s agenda.” He acknowledged that broadcasters have traditionally been big defenders of the First Amendment, but said NextGen TV does not fit into that category.

Focus on Other Opportunities
Rick Ducey, managing director at BIA Advisory Services, expressed optimism about TV stations finding a role in the emerging environment.

“I think broadcasters would still offer enhanced services over-the-air even if MVPDs wouldn’t provide the service enhancements,” Ducey said. “That might both hasten video subscriber drops from MVPDs and drive more OTA viewing.

“Broadcasters are leveraging ATSC 3.0 to create an enhanced consumer OTA experience, and [they] would love to see that experience also offered via MVPD retransmission of must-carry if necessary.”

As for the contentious stances of the major camps in this debate, “Each group has reasons for their positions,” Ducey explained, citing the “new expenses (and new competition) for MVPDs” when NextGen TV services are launched.

Equipment makers are wary of new expenses for an unproven market and don’t like the government telling them what their bill of materials should be, he acknowledged.

Ducey also pointed to concerns raised by the role of “tax-and-waste” groups such as Americans for Tax Reform, Taxpayers Protection Alliance, Citizens Against Government Waste and American Action Forum as new advocates of the FCC’s effort to create industrial policy.

Wall Street is paying attention to the NextGen TV situation, Ducey said.

“They’ve been listening to ATSC 3.0 plans, forecasts, expectations, and market signals for years,” he said, noting that investors are “waiting to see what happens as we get closer.”

Non-media ventures for data delivery provide “very promising signals that there may yet be an emerging and scalable market for broadcasters,” Ducey said, citing ventures such as EdgeBeam Wireless. That joint venture, involving E.W. Scripps, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair, plans to use ATSC 3.0 technology for multipoint data delivery.

Meanwhile, the must-carry diatribes continue with no decision date in sight.

The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) will hold its annual NextGen Broadcast Conference at National Association of Broadcasters headquarters in Washington, D.C., next week.

The two day conference, June 2-3, will explore advances in datacasting, emergency communications, Broadcast Positioning System (BPS) technologies, hybrid broadcast-broadband architectures, cloud-native workflows, AI-enabled operations, and converged ATSC 3.0/5G Broadcast services.

The conference will also recognize individuals whose leadership and technical excellence continue to shape the future of broadcasting, ATSC said. Following tradition, the organization will unveil the winner of the 2026 Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award, which recognizes an individual representative of the membership whose technical and leadership contributions to ATSC have been invaluable and exemplary.

Mark Aitken, president of ONE Media Technologies, senior vice president of advanced technology for Sinclair and the recipient of the Mark Richer Industry Leadership Medal, will also be recognized.

“It will be a great honor to bestow the Mark Richer Industry Leadership Medal to Mark Aitken of ONE Media/Sinclair, recognizing the many achievements he has done to champion ATSC technologies throughout the world,” ATSC President Madeleine Noland said.

“The NextGen Broadcast Conference offers the opportunity to reconnect, exchange ideas, and continue building the future of broadcasting together,” Noland said. “The conversations taking place among engineers, broadcasters, policymakers, researchers, and innovators will help define how broadcasting serves viewers, communities, industries, and nations in the years ahead.”

Click here for more information.

“LPTV has discovered a path for the future; it is time for full power to find a path of its own. Then again, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. —‘SuperFrank” Copsidas, Chairman and Founder, LPTV Broadcasters Association

To the editor of TV Tech:

This is in response to Mark Aitken’s op-ed posted on May 14, Op-Ed: Stop the False Choice—5G Broadcast Can Ride Inside ATSC 3.0, and We Can Deploy Now.

There is no false choice. Mark Aitken’s public acknowledgment of 5G Broadcast’s real strengths—its native alignment with mobile ecosystems, familiar tooling, and clear potential for reaching everyday phones—is refreshing. Still, the situation for Mark and the dedicated team at Sinclair/ONE Media is understandable.

They have invested years of sincere engineering effort into ATSC 3.0, and watching it struggle for relevance in a mobile-first world must be exhausting. The Op-Ed reads less like a confident vision and more like a heartfelt plea to keep the dream alive through increasingly complex workarounds. When so much has been invested, letting go is painful. But good intentions do not make the hybrid proposal practical.

The Time-Slicing Compromise Is a Sad Technical Patch
It is unfortunate to see talented engineers spotlighting three delicate scheduling “knobs”—CAS muting cycles, 5 ms frame alignments, and bootstrap timing promises—as if they represent breakthrough innovation. In reality, this is a fragile hack: two mismatched waveforms awkwardly sharing spectrum, complete with guard times, drift compensation, and coordination overhead that reduce efficiency and introduce real operational risks.

The small-scale Castanet pilots are admirable as lab efforts, but the use of ATSC 3.0 in Castanet is essentially a bandaid solution until 5G Broadcast is fully licensed and available. Presenting this as ready for broad deployment feels like wishful thinking born from necessity rather than strength. Much creativity is being spent gluing incompatible systems together instead of pursuing cleaner solutions.

The “Chips in Phones” Claim Deserves Gentle Honesty
The repeated emphasis that ATSC 3.0 mobile receivers are ready today comes across as more hopeful than realistic. Saankhya/Tejas demodulators exist in niche Indian reference designs, yet mainstream consumer smartphones remain untouched. Full receiver integration—antennas, RF front-ends, power management, and usable software—stays confined to controlled demos, not products people actually buy and carry.

Meanwhile, 5G Broadcast benefits from riding inside the cellular modems already present in billions of phones. The community continues to hold onto “we built some tablets” stories while the broader ecosystem has moved on.

The India D2M Hope Feels Like a Distant Lifeline
Reliance on India’s government-backed trials to generate global momentum and open the stubborn U.S. market for ATSC 3.0 is understandable. India’s unique policy environment and genuine need for low-cost solutions are real. What the Op-Ed does not mention, however, is that India’s largest wireless carrier, Jio, is actively involved in 5G Broadcast trials nationwide together with Prasar Bharati, India’s public broadcaster. Jio’s 5G Broadcast trial in Delhi, for example, is testing delivery to smartphones for both broadcast TV and public warning notifications.

Expecting India’s ATSC 3.0 efforts to magically overcome America’s carrier-controlled ecosystem, regulatory gridlock, and consumer apathy toward broadcast tuners is more poignant than persuasive. It reads like a last best hope rather than a credible strategy and does not fully reflect what is actually happening in India or Brazil.

The Phased Plan Reflects Deep Investment, Not Momentum
The three-phase roadmap—scale today’s limited ATSC 3.0 datacasting, publish yet another coexistence profile, then hope India delivers devices—feels less like bold progress and more like a holding pattern to protect existing infrastructure. After all these years, broadcasters are still being asked to wait for meaningful mobile datacasting wins.

In the end, Mark’s sincerity and the solid technical merits ATSC 3.0 offers for home and portable reception are not in doubt. But it is unfortunate to watch talented people defend such convoluted hybrids and optimistic projections when the mobile world has already chosen its direction.

True progress in broadcast datacasting will come from technologies that meet consumers where they are—inside their everyday phones—rather than asking them to embrace yesterday’s compromises. The ATSC community deserves better than fighting these rearguard actions. They deserve a graceful evolution.

The “5G Broadcast vs. ATSC 3.0” conversation is often framed as a binary choice: embrace 3GPP and abandon ATSC 3.0 or defend ATSC 3.0 as if mobile-first delivery is someone else’s problem. That framing is outdated — and it is needlessly slowing deployment.

ATSC 3.0 was designed from the beginning as an IP-native, one-to-many platform capable of delivering a wide variety of services to fixed, portable, and mobile receivers. In that sense, it is already the better “broadcast-IP” foundation. Meanwhile, 3GPP contributes a familiar mobile services vocabulary and a powerful toolchain for building applications and workflows that the wireless ecosystem understands.

We do not have to choose. We can put them together — now — because there is a documented, repeatable way to time-multiplex LTE-based 5G Broadcast payload windows inside an ATSC 3.0 RF channel while keeping primary ATSC 3.0 services intact.

ATSC 3.0 Was Built for Flexible IP Services, Including Mobile
ATSC 3.0 is not a “prettier TV” standard. It provides a service delivery architecture designed to support multiple service types and multiple receiver classes. That flexibility allows broadcasters to deliver — in the same RF channel — combinations of video, audio, files, software updates, map data, public safety objects, and enterprise payloads, with robustness tuned per service.

This matters because the datacasting opportunity is not limited to the living-room screen. The winning market is cross-device: vehicles, tablets, gateways, industrial IoT, digital signage, and yes, phones — wherever one-to-many economics and resilience beat unicast.

So, when someone says, “we need 5G Broadcast to get into the datacasting world,” the right response is: ATSC 3.0 already provides the broadcast downlink, and it was designed to carry IP services to fixed, portable, and mobile receivers at scale better than any other broadcast standard.

The path ahead is straightforward if one wishes: share a single RF channel in time. During one window, transmit a valid ATSC 3.0 frame. During another window, transmit the LTE-based 5G Broadcast waveform. Receivers on both sides see a predictable cadence. Coexistence is time sliced — not theoretical.

The sidebar below details the three engineering parameters that govern this scheduling — the challenge is coordination, not physics.

The Device Reality: ‘Chips in Phones’ for ATSC 3.0 Exist Today
A lot of the current rhetoric is framed as a race: which technology will reach commercial handheld devices first? That question misses something important: ATSC 3.0 demodulator chipsets optimized for handheld/mobile receivers exist today, including implementations coming out of the Saankhya Labs lineage (now Tejas Networks). They are designed to output IP streams and to fit within the size and power constraints of mobile and portable devices.

At ONE Media, we have worked across multiple vendors to design and build phones and tablets with what we shorthand as “chips in phones.” That phrase does not mean “a chip alone.” It means the full reception system: demodulator, RF front-end components (antenna, filter, LNA, matching), integration, and the software stack required to make reception a product feature — not a lab demo.

This is why the right question is not merely “will a 5G Broadcast modem appear in a system-on chip?” A baseband capability is not the same as a complete, properly enabled reception subsystem for broadcast bands. The phrase that matters is still “chips in phones” — meaning a whole receiver and antenna system that actually works.

What Really Holds Back the U.S —And Why India Can Unlock It
In the United States, getting any new receive feature into mainstream mobile devices is multifaceted. Three factors matter most:

A business proposition that drives commercial success (clear use cases, measurable value, repeatable revenue).

A business reason for mobile network operators (MNOs) to allow and support it. In practice, nothing significant lands in a U.S. carrier handset portfolio without their direction.

Sufficient success in the business proposition to drive a “bring your own device” pathway —where properly enabled devices enter the market via retail and enterprise channels, not only carrier certification.

This is exactly where the third condition—a BYOD pathway built on market-proven devices — makes India’s Direct-to-Mobile (D2M) trajectory so important. Success at real scale in a major market creates supply chain momentum: reference designs, manufacturing volume, and confidence that can spill into other regions — including the U.S. — via BYOD and enterprise procurement. If India normalizes “chips in phones” for ATSC 3.0-based D2M, it becomes much harder to argue that U.S. markets cannot follow.

A Constructive Plan to Get the Show on the Road
Some 5G Broadcast proponents privately admit their push is partly a hedge: "What if 5G Broadcast gets into phones first?" Hedging is rational—but it shouldn't freeze the deployed broadcast ecosystem while chasing a lengthy regulatory process: new waveform authorizations, service rule updates, contentious policy debates.

The subtext is often that broadcasters should adopt a new waveform while shedding the public interest obligations that historically justified broadcast spectrum. That's a non-starter. Expanding into datacasting should extend broadcasting's public-interest value — not escape it. Instead of debating which logo wins, align on a three-phase deployment plan that gives everyone wins:

• Phase 1 (now): Ship ATSC 3.0 datacasting outcomes at scale
  Launch IP data services using existing ATSC 3.0 deployments. Pick two or three high-value use cases (software/firmware updates, map and data refresh, edge caching for streaming, public safety objects) and deliver them with clear APIs, security primitives, and measurable SLAs. Build the business case in-market. This is exactly what Edgebeam is doing — today!
• Phase 2 (next): Publish a coexistence profile for “ATSC bearer + 5G Broadcast windows”
  Define the scheduling profile (cycle lengths, allowable jitter budgets, configuration guardrails) and publish a simple interop test plan so transmitters, analyzers, and receivers can validate behavior consistently. This is how you turn “clever” into “deployable.”
• Phase 3 (later): Expand handheld device pathways where they truly add value
  Use India-led scale and proven business outcomes to expand “chips in phones” adoption, including BYOD and enterprise channels. Where MNO support is required, approach it with a demonstrated business case and a clear public-interest story — not hypotheticals.

Conclusion
The industry does not need another standards feud. It needs deployment, results, and visible wins. ATSC 3.0 was designed to carry IP services to fixed, portable, and mobile receivers — and mobile-grade ATSC 3.0 receiver subsystems exist today. At the same time, the technical path to carry LTE-based 5G Broadcast windows inside an ATSC 3.0 RF channel is now documented and repeatable.

So let’s stop debating hypotheticals, publish the coexistence profile, modernize the infrastructure where needed, and ship.

Mark Aitken is senior vice president at Sinclair Broadcast Group and President of ONE Media.

At the NAB Show in Las Vegas last month, Pearl TV, the consortium of broadcasters, manufacturers and industry advocates showcased prototypes of new converter boxes that would allow consumers to upgrade to ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGen TV) without having to purchase a new TV or one of the more expensive converter/DVR boxes currently available.

TV Tech Content Director Tom Butts recently discussed the status of the new campaign and reaction at NAB Show with Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle. Here is an edited transcript.

TV Tech: Can you give us an update on what Pearl and the ATSC were showing in terms of NextGen TV advances at the NAB Show?
Anne Schelle: Pearl was focused on the converter box program and meeting with SOC companies that we invited to come to the show, as well as some of the current box makers and others that would be part of the ecosystem. The FCC also had an opportunity to come by and learn about the program. So there were great conversations, and it's just continuing to move the program along in terms of the mechanics, with the special pricing conversations, with the ecosystem that would be involved with making the box, the testing, certification, all of those business parts of the program.

TVT: What's the biggest challenge right now that you face? Is it time or technology?
AS: We’re waiting on a signal from the FCC, which we're hopeful is coming soon. We were also having conversations about just updating the whole [3.0] system, the transmission vendors and everybody that's involved in selling equipment to support a transition to the boxes themselves. And the more time lags on this, resources get reallocated, investments get reallocated. So we've been expressing the urgency to the FCC.

TVT: Will you need government support to bring it to a sub-$60 price level?
AS: We're following the NTIA model [the basis for the ATSC 1.0 converter box program established in the 2000s], where we're establishing specifications, testing rigor around elements that don't exist today for other devices—specifically around sensitivity and recepetibility—and then the program would allow for a certification logo that makes us a very distinct category of a box.

Given its distinction, part of the program is to go out and broadly negotiate lower building material costs, whether that's in IP or in components, and we've been successful on that route. In essence, we're helping to establish a pre-, lower-cost box, or presubsidized in the sense that the industry is doing it, the players (as the component parts), are doing it, knowing that this device is a bridge device. It's very much needed to enable the consumers who can't afford to buy a television to have access to something readily available in the marketplace.

So by coalescing around a program, we're able to sort of recreate what occurred [with the NTIA program], if you look at that pricing point too, that is based on research that might change over time, and overall rises and seed pricing due to supply chain and other global events. But what we're coming in with is essentially almost lower than the NTIA program did back in the day without a subsidy, the economics being such that we're able to deliver something a consumer would be willing to purchase, which is what our study showed. The other part about our study was what really needs to be on this very affordable box, and how do consumers think about features vs. cost vs. value in over the air.

In terms of government funding, that's not available, so I don't know why we would be asking that.

TVT: What kind of feedback have you gotten from broadcasters?
AS: Well, this is broadcast-led, so they're very supportive of this. At the end of the day, we need a signal from the FCC, because consumers will go purchase this box that we've made very affordable if they know that they need to go purchase it. There is no global transition that's ever really happened until there is a transition end date and concurrently an update to standards, so we need that.

We’re getting ready for that by developing and answering the question of the affordable device for the consumer that does not want to change out their television and otherwise wants. That's why we did the [Magid] study to see what their willingness would be to go purchase this device and at what price point. And what we heard was overwhelmingly over 81% saying yes, they would purchase and the price points were $60 and below.

TVT: So is your goal to have this in place and get it moving as soon as you get the word from the FCC?
AS: We’re developing all the program mechanics. We did all the research, and now we have an understanding of the messaging and how the consumer feels about it. We're working with early development set-top box makers to understand what are the components and what are the feature sets that are doable at these price points, and does that match up with willingness from consumers to buy it? The answer is yes, and that's our specification that was announced.

We have a utilization of the current connected TV umbrella logo. All of these require agreements and mechanisms and processes to be able to onboard a set-top box maker for them to understand what the specifications are, to go through the certification to ultimately get the logo, for that logo to have some teeth to it.

So we make sure that the logo, if it's misused, can be revoked, and at the same time, that logo is what these set-top box makers would take to the IP holders, as well as the component makers that we've negotiated with to get that favorable pricing for this device category.

So we're putting in all of the program mechanics and working with three manufacturers [ADTH, Skyworth, and Zinwell] through that process to harden that and ensure that we've got the right systems in place so that once we have the go light, we're able to effectively turn this on. We have not focused fully yet on the go-to-market strategy, other than to say that we do have a website that we currently know works and consumers go to. That would probably be our initial funnel, alongside promotional marketing that the station groups would undertake, but that whole program is really reliant on timelines.

TVT: Pearl TV has joined others in asking for a sunset year, a date of 2028, for the top markets, followed by remaining markets by 2030. How would you characterize your conversations with the FCC in terms of this plan… what kind of feedback have you gotten from them, and do you believe that this is going to help them reach a final decision?
AS: We're looking for something in that range, specifically for a go date, on an update to the receiver rules that could happen, and within three years, the majority of receivers could be upgraded. I think the idea still stands around moving top markets and then looking to smaller markets but the exact timing is really up to the commission.

Pearl has been focused on helping the industry establish a way to find an affordable device path for consumers. We met with the FCC and there's high interest in it that I think helps in terms of getting a favorable rulemaking from the commission.

TVT: The Consumer Technology Association has been very vocal in their opposition to a tuner mandate. Do you believe their concern is justified? In other words, do you see the possibility of a tuner mandate on the horizon?
AS: We are asking for a receiver upgrade. I don't think you have a transition without it. And I think every past transition has proved that this is not the first time that the commission has taken that path, and again, globally, I don't know how you move forward without that.

We're in a situation where the marketplace took it as far as it could, and this is what's needed in order to really fully realize a full transition. So that's basically my answer to that.

TVT: Do you believe retailers have done a good job promoting NextGen TV? Do you think that they'll be ready to market these new boxes?
AS: Again, when there's a signal for a full transition—just like in the last go round, nobody stepped in to really market until that happened, because you have something to organize around, both retailers, CTA and broadcasters. So you can't take one without the other. Retailers are pay to play and they're organized around the manufacturers telling them what to do.

So you can't really fault their involvement, yet. You can just look at history, the last DTV transition, the minute it got organized—between a transition end date and upgrade to the receiver requirements—you had everybody step in with some terrific marketing.

TVT: Will you put these boxes on the market before the FCC makes a decision on the deadline?
AS: We're working on the development with the three main manufacturers and hoping we can get something out by the end of the year, [but] we are facing some headwinds in regards to the supply chain, and that's no surprise. There's memory shortages out there and price hikes, plastic has gone up 20%.

So it's a timing question for us because without the volume guarantee, it's hard for us to be able to come out with a box, and so it just depends.

We’re agnostic to the chip, to the OS, we really leave that up to the box manufacturer. We just have this price ceiling, and they're working right now to figure that out, and getting pretty creative and looking at lowering memory and using various OS systems that take up less memory. I think you're going to see that in everything going forward for a couple years.

[The initiative] is really similar to NTIA. It's just commercially implemented and commercially executed.

A federal court of appeals last week upheld a jury’s finding that LG Electronics infringed on certain Constellation Designs patents in its NextGen TVs and affirmed the jury’s $1.68 million award for past damages as well as a $6.75 per TV royalty for future set sales.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued its ruling April 28 after considering the findings of a jury trial before Judge J. Rodney Gilstrap of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. That court found LG willfully infringed upon certain Constellation Designs patents.

The appeals court affirmed some of the lower court’s findings, vacated others related to “optimization claims” and sent the case back to the original district court to re-evaluate the case with the optimization claims removed or reconsidered under the guidance of the appeals court.

Regarding penalties, the appeals court found LG willfully infringed on Constellation’s patents. Frequently, willful infringement can lead to greater damages, but the appeals court made no such recommendation.

LG Electronics announced it would stop selling televisions with NextGen TV support in September 2023, following its loss of the patent dispute with Constellation Designs. Currently, Sony, Samsung, Hisense, Panasonic, TCL and RCA offer NextGen TVs in the United States. Vendors offering NextGen TV set-top boxes include ZapperBox, ADTH, Zinwell, SiliconDust and GTMedia offer NextGen TV set-top boxes or dongles.

An LG spokesman said the company does not comment on “such legal matters.” As of this writing, Constellation Designs has not responded to a request for comment. Other requests for comment are out but have not yet received a response.

The ATSC 3 Signing Authority said last month that nearly 40 NextGen TV models from Hisense, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and TDL, account for the “vast majority” of the 18.5 million A3SA-enabled TVs sold to date.

“We have to keep in mind that this happens in the C.E. space,” said Anne Schelle, managing director of the Pearl TV business organization representing many of the country’s largest broadcast groups. “That said, the other thing to note is these patents do expire in 2028.”

“From our perspective, the market from the development side of NextGen is moving along,” she said. “We are still continuing to work on the converter box program, and if you look at the overall trend, you can’t blow this out of proportion.”

"When you look at the timing of a Report and Order [advancing the transition from 1.0 to 3.0], there is plenty of time to get devices out there regardless of whatever the outcome is."

The appeals court ruling is available online.

BRISTOL, UK—Ocean Blue Software, a developer of software for Smart TVs, has launched ATSC 3.0 Inspector, a purpose-built tool designed to provide clear visibility into ATSC 3.0 broadcast streams and simplify analysis, debugging, and validation.

As ATSC 3.0 adoption accelerates, engineers working across the smart TV ecosystem face increasing complexity when interpreting and validating broadcast data. The ATSC 3.0 Inspector addresses this challenge by

The ATSC 3.0 Inspector is designed to give engineering teams deeper insight into the structure and behaviour of ATSC 3.0 streams, enabling faster issue identification and more efficient development workflows, according to the company.

Key capabilities include:

• Detailed inspection of ATSC 3.0 broadcast components
• Clear presentation of complex data structures
• Rapid identification of errors and inconsistencies
• Improved debugging and validation efficiency

By making broadcast data easier to understand and navigate, the tool helps reduce development time and minimise integration challenges, Ocean Blue said.

The ATSC 3.0 Inspector has been developed to support a wide range of organizations working in the broadcast eco-system across the smart TV value chain, including:

• Smart TV manufacturers and OEMs want to validate device behaviour
• Broadcasters and operators looking to ensure service integrity
• Semiconductor and platform providers test integrations and compliance

By enabling faster analysis and more accurate diagnostics, Ocean Blue Software helps teams move from issue identification to resolution more efficiently.

“ATSC 3.0 introduces significant advances in broadcast technology, but also increases the complexity of analysing and validating streams,” said Andy Carr, Chief Product Officer, Ocean Blue Software. “The ATSC 3.0 Inspector is designed to give engineers clear, actionable insight, helping them resolve issues faster and accelerate smart TV development.”

ATSC 3.0 Inspector is available now.

Sinclair/ONE Media’s kiosk in the ATSC booth at the 2026 NAB Show said it simply and succinctly: “ATSC 1.0 Must Go!”

Sunsetting the original digital TV standard on a certain date (or dates) is essential to the future success of the broadcast industry, ATSC 3.0 proponents say.

While 3.0 channel-sharing has served its purpose, neither broadcasters nor the public can truly realize the full benefit of NextGen TV without an end to 1.0. In other words, as things stand, broadcast spectrum cannot be used to its full potential.

Laurence Zimmerman, a wireless industry veteran, agrees. On April 15 as the broadcast industry was traveling to Las Vegas for its annual gathering, Zimmerman’s company, Landover Saturn 5 LLC, filed a petition with the FCC seeking a rulemaking “to permit the repurposing of UHF Channels 28-36 (554-608 MHz) into a contiguous nationwide block of low-band spectrum for flexible 5G and future 6G use.”

In the petition, Landover proposes serving as a “neutral Sponsor” coordinating broadcaster participation, managing spectrum clearing, repacking broadcasters below channel 28 and “implementing the monetization” of the repurposed spectrum—for a cut of the proceeds.

The company says it can generate more than twice as much money for the federal government –some $15 billion—as the FCC’s Auction 1001.

Whether or not Landover’s proposal has merit is for the commission to decide. In the end, it may derail the efforts of U.S. broadcasters to make better use of their spectrum via 3.0. Ironically, it would enable 5G and 6G wireless providers to leverage the spectral efficiency of 3.0 to clear the desired 50MHz block of TV spectrum and as a consequence inhibit broadcasters’ full ability to develop a new, recurring revenue stream as wireless data service providers.

Regardless of the petition’s datacasting implications, however, the proposal identifies ATSC 3.0 channel sharing as one of two key lynchpins (the other being relocation) for clearing the spectrum without forcing broadcasters to give up their local voice. As the petition puts it: “Broadcasters retain their market presence and program distribution rights by transitioning to shared ATSC 3.0 capacity below Channel 28, at no cost to Broadcasters.

“This allows them to continue delivering their full broadcast signal while simultaneously aligning with industry-wide movement toward streaming distribution. In other words, Broadcasters will convert under-monetized spectrum into immediate enterprise value without forfeiting brand identity, local programming obligations, retransmission eligibility or the growing opportunities that ATSC 3.0 offers for data, multicast, and digital-first delivery.”

NextGen TV proponents have told the commission for some time that continued, indefinite 1.0 and 3.0 transmission is a path to nowhere. As a Gray Media senior executive has put it, the current approach delivers the “worst of both worlds” for broadcasters and viewers alike.

Perhaps the Landover petition will underscore for FCC Commissioners why there’s little room to move forward—whether that’s for licensed broadcasters or a third-party disrupter with a new point of view—when the vast majority of TV spectrum in a market is devoted to transmitting via 1.0.

While individual broadcasters may or may not favor Landover’s petition, Sinclair’s NAB message and the petitioner’s appear to have something in common: “ATSC 1.0 Must Go!”

Brazil’s announcement in August 2025 that it was adopting the physical layer of ATSC 3.0 represented a significant step for international uptake of the U.S.-based broadcast standard.

Bringing it to a nation of more than 212 million people — where 80% of the population watches over-the-air television — creates a multitude of opportunities to advance ATSC 3.0, which combines broadcast with internet protocol.

The standard, which consists of “best-of-breed” technologies, will reside within Brazil’s new DTV+ (aka “TV 3.0”) protocol, due to begin pilot tests in time for the 2026 FIFA World Cup in June.

Regulators and broadcasters hope “football fever” around the world’s largest sporting event will spur consumers to purchase new sets that support TV 3.0.

This was among many topics discussed by broadcast representatives from Brazil, India, South Korea and the Caribbean in Monday’s “NextGen TV and TV 3.0: A Global Conversation on the Future of Broadcasting” panel.

FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty opened the conference, addressing the importance of broadcasters’ public-interest commitments.

She tied those obligations to the opportunities afforded by ATSC 3.0, which has been deployed to about 75% of the U.S. population.

While broadcasters see increased competition in an expanding television universe, Trusty noted the industry’s “unique place in the media ecosystem.” She said it’s “critical” for the FCC to ensure that broadcasters not only survive in today’s competitive environment, but thrive.

“In a marketplace where competition and technologies are evolving, the FCC needs to get its policies right for broadcasters and the communities they serve — from ownership regulation, to the principles guiding the ATSC 3.0 transition, to continually reevaluating its regulations to ensure their benefits truly outweigh their burdens,” she said.

“If the commission achieves that goal, broadcasters will have both the ability and the right incentives to keep serving the public interest, which I see as the best way of advancing those objectives.”

Frederico de Siqueira Filho, Brazil’s minister of communications, described the importance of broadcasting in the country’s culture.

“For decades, broadcasting has played a central role in Brazil. It’s not just media or entertainment, it’s a pillar of democracy, a tool for social inclusion, familial resilience and the primary source of information,” he said.

“Free-to-air television continues to be the most universal communication service in the country, reaching households across our regions, income levels and geographies. As we move into a new technology era, our objective is clear: to preserve these core values while unlocking entirely new capabilities. And TV 3.0 is how we intend to do that.”

Octavio Pieranti, commissioner at Brazilian regulator ANATEL, discussed new proposals to help ensure that TV 3.0 maintains equal footing with streaming services on smart TVs sold in the country.

These include mandating a button on TV remotes dedicated to the standard, part of a group of rules referred to as the “Prominence of TV,” according to Wilson Diniz Wellisch, secretary of broadcasting services from the Ministry of Communications in Brazil.

“The remote control on new TVs must have a specific button that can access DTV+,” he said. “The main app of DTV+ must be at the first position of the app lists on the setup of the TV.”

ATSC President Madeleine Noland, who led the discussion, described Brazil’s progress with TV 3.0 as remarkable.

“We’re seeing momentum across the Caribbean, India and North America … Against that global backdrop, Brazil’s adoption of ATSC 3.0 as the foundation for DTV+ represents one of the most significant developments in next-generation products.”

© 2026 NAB

LAS VEGAS—The growing international reach of ATSC 3.0, the next-generation broadcast technology developed by members of ATSC, The Broadcast Standards Association, will be on full display during the upcoming 2026 NAB Show.

“Beyond better, free over-the-air television, ATSC 3.0 can deliver an expansive array of new services and opportunities for broadcasters – from precise Broadcast Positioning System services to datacasting services for new enterprise customers and highly-targeted and informative emergency messages for TV audiences,” said Madeleine Noland, ATSC’s president. “We’re very encouraged by the strong interest from a variety of countries and broadcasters worldwide, and by the potential of ATSC 3.0 as a leading communications system capable of reaching millions of people and devices at once,”

ATSC 3.0 will be the subject of some 30 informational sessions and panels during the NAB Show, including a series of sessions offered in the ATSC booth (LVCC Central Hall 1655) that begins on Sunday. Speakers from Sinclair, Pearl TV, Magid, EdgeBeam Wireless, HCL Tech, Ryarc, USSI, Google, Apple, Grab TV, and Monsen Engineering will be on stage in the ATSC booth for Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. A detailed schedule and comprehensive listing of ATSC 3.0 exhibitors is available on ATSC’s “Guide to ATSC 3.0 at the Show,” which is made possible by Rohde & Schwarz.

Nearly 40 ATSC members are exhibiting at the 2026 NAB Show, including a dozen companies and organizations showing technology and services inside the ATSC booth. Live ATSC 3.0 signals from Las Vegas broadcasters will be brought into the booth by antenna reception expert Televes.

Key ATSC exhibits in booth 1655 in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center include:

• AT&T Business demonstrating enhanced connectivity and engagement with ATSC 3.0, enabling instant and reliable communications at venues and in high-traffic environments.
• HCLTech enabling broadcasters to streamline ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 operations with a cloud-ready model and unified control plane centralizing monitoring and workflows.
• Pearl TV showcasing low-cost NEXTGEN TV converter prototypes developed with industry partners and announcing the program’s specifications, requirements, and consumer benefits; A3SA introducing new receivers for consumers and broadcasters that are verified to seamlessly work with A3SA content protection, including offerings from MyVelo, Zapperbox, and Airwavz; and Run3TV highlighting the interactive application platform built natively for ATSC 3.0, now deployed by key broadcasters.
• Sinclair showing ATSC 3.0 content delivered simultaneously across TV, tablet, and mobile devices, all with the same high-quality pictures and sound.

Key ATSC exhibits in booth 1655 in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center include:

• Advanced HDR by Technicolor demonstrating how it enables the Standard Dynamic Range to High Dynamic Range transition in ATSC 3.0 and streaming by live dynamic conversion and a single stream SDR/HDR format.
• DTVKit showcasing its standards‑based, royalty‑free ATSC 3.0 solution integrated on an Android White Label Reference Set‑Top Box, developed in partnership with leading set-top manufacturer EKT.
• EdgeBeam Wireless leveraging ATSC 3.0 as a last-mile, one-to-many data distribution network—delivering enterprise data capacity efficiently and cost-effectively.
• Mirakulo featuring AstroTV NEXT, an all-in-one platform for live TV, OTT, hybrid interactivity, metrics and dynamic ad insertion. Built for ATSC 3.0 & Brazilian DTV+.
• Silicondust showing how to bring ATSC 1.0 channels to ATSC 3.0 BEST (Broadcast Enabled Streaming Channels) with Silicondust AVSend, the turnkey no-upfront-cost solution.
• Tolka featuring ATSC 3.0 mobile devices, conditional access, affordable receivers, network tuners, and solutions for datacasting and original equipment manufacturers.
• Triveni Digital showing its complete delivery platform for ATSC 3.0 and TV 3.0, including broadcast chain, stream analysis and monitoring, broadcast chain orchestration, redundancy, and translator solutions.
• VBox Communications highlighting expertise in digital TV, delivering live broadcast services (DVB-T/T2, DVB-C, DVB-S2, ISDB-T, ATSC 1.0 / 3.0) to IP streams with years of product development and manufacturing experience.

The free ATSC 3.0 Guide to the 2026 NAB Show is available here.

LAS VEGAS—Complaints from viewers unable to access free over-the-air ATSC 3.0 broadcast signals are giving the standard (aka “NextGen TV”) a black eye in the view of many consumers and the ATSC is using the NAB Show to address those concerns.

As broadcasters gather in Las Vegas for the 2026 NAB Show, April 19-22, the Security Authority (A3SA), member of the broadcast standards group reiterated the importance of securing ATSC 3.0 over-the-air broadcasts and said that the “vast majority” of the 40 or so NextGen TV sets available on the market are fully capable of accessing decrypted broadcast content.

The announcement comes after the Pearl TV consortium announced the launch of a campaign to develop new low-cost $60 or under NextGen TV devices in an effort to kickstart the transition from ATSC 1.0 to 3.0.

In addition to prototype boxes from DTH, Skyworth, and Zinwell, the A3SA will showcase new and existing upgrade receivers from Airwavz, MyVelo TV, and Zapperbox, to demonstrate secure and reliable delivery of ATSC 3.0 broadcast content while delivering new recording and in-home distribution options for consumers and broadcasters. Attendees can check them out at the ATSC Booth in the Central Hall (C1655)

A3SA Managing Director Joe St. Jean explained the importance of securing 3.0 broadcast signals in an age of ever more sophisticated piracy technologies that have long been a mainstay of streaming companies.

“Free, over-the-air television remains one of the most important and accessible platforms for delivering news, sports, and entertainment to American households,” he said. “Content security is a key enabler of that future, giving content owners the confidence to continue making high-value programming available on broadcast TV. We know that content piracy is a real threat and imposes multi-billion dollar revenue losses on the sports industry, particularly.

“It’s a fact that premium sports and live programming increasingly require content protection as a condition of distribution platforms and that broadcasters are competing directly with streaming platforms that have long used content protection,” St. Jean added. “ Without protection, high-value programming will migrate to subscription-based platforms. And content protection helps preserve free over-the-air television as a competitive platform for premium content.

“We’re also pleased to note that A3SA recently commissioned a focused review, conducted by a certified public accounting firm, of A3SA-enabled televisions in the market today. We confirmed that nearly 40 NextGen TV models from Hisense, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, and TCL, comprising the vast majority of the 18.5 millions A3SA-enabled televisions sold, are fully capable of decrypting protected content, with or without an Internet connection, ensuring that consumers can reliably access the full benefits of next-generation broadcast services.”

New Receiver Innovations on Display:

• Airwavz.tv will showcase the TvXplorer Suite with decryption capabilities for A3SA-protected content. A broadcaster professional analysis tool, the TvXplorer suite’s support for A3SA’s technology protects premium content while enabling seamless delivery to authorized users. TvXplorer delivers trusted protection at scale with enterprise-level security and authentication, ensuring content stays protected from source to screen.
  
• MyVelo TV, a next-generation broadcast-first platform provider, introduces the MyVelo TV Premiere, designed to seamlessly unify free NextGen TV, streaming apps, and premium picture performance into a single experience. Built for how people actually watch TV, MyVelo TV supports all major HDR formats, including Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HLG, and Advanced HDR by Technicolor.
  
• The ZapperBox Whole-Home Gateway is available in quad-tuner, dual-tuner, single-tuner, and mini configurations to extend ATSC 3.0 signals throughout the home. Zapperbox will show a new hardware model—the first NextGen TV quad-tuner whole home gateway with Zapper Mini receivers for secondary rooms. ZapperBox will also showcase a new software release with Advanced HDR by Technicolor for dual-tuner and quad-tuner receivers.

LAS VEGAS—Pearl TV, a consortium of broadcasters, manufacturers and service providers promoting ATSC 3.0 has announced the launch of a new program to seed the market for NextGen TV with low-cost converter boxes priced $60 and under.

Since the transition began in the late 2010s, broadcasters have struggled to gain traction, primarily because ATSC 3.0 lacks backward compatibility with the existing ATSC 1.0 standard.

According to the Consumer Technology Association's most recent figures, as of late 2024, approximately 10 million TV sets that support 3.0 have been shipped to the U.S. since they hit the market in late 2020, with an additional half a million to a million converter boxes shipped. A number of those boxes purchased by early adopters, however, lacked the capability to handle DRM-encoded programming, leading to a barrage of criticism about copy protection.

Additionally, there is no insight as to how many of the 3.0 TV sets are actually used for over the air reception. The FCC is currently considering steps to accelerate the transition to 3.0, including mandating the inclusion of 3.0 tuners in TV sets sold in the U.S. CTA, which unsuccessfully opposed such a mandate during the transition to 1.0 two decades ago, also opposes the new requirement.

According to the ATSC, more than 75% of U.S. households are within receiving distance of a 3.0 signal and CTA says more than 20 million U.S. households use an antenna on at least one household television to watch local channels.

The ATSC announced its intention to launch the program when it showed prototypes of the boxes during the 2026 International CES in January. Those prototypes from ADTH, Skyworth, and Zinwell will again be on display in the ATSC booth in Central Hall (C1655) at the 2026 NAB Show, April 19-22 in Las Vegas.

Pearl noted that this is a new product category — distinct from existing retail ATSC 3.0 set-top receivers and smart TVs — with its own branding under the NextGen TV umbrella. It will include special pricing considerations from participating IP license holders and component manufacturers and broadcaster promotion of the availability of converter boxes to help drive volume from launch.

“This effort brings together broadcasters who are transmitting in ATSC 3.0 with high-volume consumer electronics companies who see the potential to sell low-cost receivers with a simple purpose – easily and affordably making the jump to NextGen TV with a simple converter box that will connect to a display via HDMI, just like other accessory components. At the NAB Show in Las Vegas, we’re officially launching the NextGen TV Converter Box Program and inviting qualified electronics companies to join with broadcasters to offer a new range of receivers,” said Anne Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV.

“Of approximately 23 million over-the-air households in the U.S., we estimate that at least 15 million will be looking for exactly this kind of easy-to-use device,” Schelle added. “The NextGen TV Converter Box is built to serve that market: a compact, easy-to-use HDMI accessory that delivers the NextGen TV experience on any existing display, at a suggested retail price of $60 or less. We know that not every consumer will want to buy a new TV, which is why the NextGen TV Converter Box Program is so critical for a successful transition from ATSC 1.0 to ATSC 3.0. A device that qualifies under our Converter Box Program will not include an integrated display or a digital video recorder and will have no more than one tuner. This keeps the design lean, the bill of materials manageable, and the $60 price point achievable.

The Fine Print
The NextGen TV Converter Box Program is open to all qualified device manufacturers on a fair and non-discriminatory basis. Pearl TV does not favor any chipset, operating system, software stack, or supply chain approach. Manufacturers are free to propose the technical implementation they believe best meets the program's specifications and economics.

The NextGen TV Converter Box connects between an antenna and a television via HDMI, delivering the over-the-air viewing experience. The core device requirements include:

• Full ATSC 3.0 and ATSC 1.0 reception, supporting both broadcast standards
• 4K-capable HEVC video decoding with High Dynamic Range (HDR) support;
• Dolby surround audio;
• Features support for emergency alerts, closed captioning, audio descriptions, dialog enhancement, and parental controls;
• Over-the-Air delivered electronic program guide;
• Simple, consumer-first user interface;
• No internet connection required.

Additionally, device manufacturers may wish to offer more fully-featured receivers that include broadband connectivity for access to additional programming options.

Devices in the NextGen TV Converter Box Program must meet NextGen TV Converter Box certification requirements that will include applicable standards from the Consumer Technology Association and the ATSC 3.0 Security Authority (A3SA), as well as new radiofrequency (RF) sensitivity and user interface standards.

Pearl TV says it "will work with participating manufacturers to support the certification process to ensure every device delivers a consistent, quality experience that upholds the NextGen TV brand promise."

Detailed draft technical specifications are provided to qualified manufacturers under a non-disclosure agreement. Interested manufacturers should contact converterboxprogram@pearltv.com

PRINCETON, N.J.—Triveni Digital today announced that it has added ISDB-Tb capability for its StreamScope MT-70 MPEG analyzer platform. Designed specifically for Brazilian broadcasters, the solution provides comprehensive monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities for ISDB-Tb services while supporting the country’s transition to TV 3.0 (also known as DTV+), according to the company.

Triveni will showcase StreamScope MT-70 with support for ISDB-tb and TV 3.0 at the 2026 NAB Show, April 19-22, in Las Vegas in ATSC booth C1655.

In 2025, Brazil announced adoption of the physical layer of the ATSC 3.0 protocol for TV 3.0, its next generation broadcast standard.

“As Brazil transitions to TV 3.0, broadcasters need reliable, end-to-end visibility across both legacy and next-generation broadcast television services,” said Mark Simpson, president and CEO at Triveni Digital. “With StreamScope MT-70 ISDB-Tb, we’re extending our proven monitoring and analysis capabilities and empowering Brazilian broadcasters to deliver exceptional quality, quickly resolve issues, and confidently manage the complexities of operating in a dual-standard environment.”

The new version of StreamScope MT-70 seamlessly integrates with Triveni’s StreamScope Enterprise centralized quality assurance system, enabling broadcasters to monitor and analyze quality across their entire broadcast operation—from ISDB-Tb to TV 3.0 services. This unified approach is critical as Brazil enters a lengthy simulcast period where both standards will coexist on air, Triveni said.

Built with Brazil-specific support for SBTVD ABNT NBR 15603 tables and descriptors, StreamScope MT-70 ensures accurate validation and deep visibility into regional broadcast requirements. The solution is available in multiple deployment options, including rack-mount systems, software, and in the cloud, giving broadcasters the flexibility to deploy it based on their operational needs.

Pearl TV’s over-the-air converter box survey, released last month, reveals the existence of a long-suspected viewer class.

As the industry awaits a rulemaking from the Federal Communications Commission it hopes will bring certainty to the end of ATSC 1.0 to make way for a full rollout of 3.0, Pearl TV appears to be attempting to reassure regulators with research showing over-the-air TV viewers are willing to spring for an inexpensive converter box to ensure post-transition reception.

The research, conducted by Magid and released in the “Pearl TV Over-The-Air Converter Box: Consumer Key Findings” report, asked 600 adults 25-65 years old who watch a minimum of two hours of OTA TV per week what they thought about the prospect of shelling out a few dollars for a one-time purchase of a converter “to maintain free access to local TV content without recurring monthly fees.”

Spoiler alert: Four out of five respondents would buy a converter box with basic features. That should give some peace of mind to the commission if it chooses to set a date or dates certain for a 1.0 sunset as NAB has petitioned rather than continue with a voluntary transition, albeit with fewer regulatory restrictions.

While highly pertinent to the transition discussion, the thing that caught my eye was the report identifying the “emergence of the ‘Omni-Viewer’ segment” of OTA TV fans.

Who are omni-viewers? The “tech-savvy group… who intentionally blend free local broadcasting with digital streaming,” the report said.

“Nearly two-thirds of antenna users also subscribe to streaming services, demonstrating that, for these consumers, broadcast television is complementing, rather than being replaced by, modern digital platforms,” it said.

I’ve long suspected this class of TV viewer exists. After all, I am one. I’ve also suspected TV broadcasters can take advantage of the existence of this set of viewers who are equally adept at streaming content via the internet and OTA TV. Here are three ways they can:

• Cement viewer loyalty and grow the OTA audience. Installing a rooftop antenna or one in the attic isn’t especially hard but neither is it particularly easy or convenient. (Was that really a brown recluse spider I saw in the roof rafters as I squirmed on my back across the ceiling joist?) But with OFDM-based ATSC 3.0, a simple indoor antenna may be all that’s needed for reliable reception. That may be enough for omni-viewers to spread the word to their friends and family.

• Enhance the viewing experience with interactivity. Broadcasters already have some experience leveraging both OTA and streaming delivery of television, à la Broadcast Enhanced Streaming Channels and RUN3TV-based program start over. How else might they enhance TV viewing and benefit economically? Targeted ads, QR code-triggered shopping carts and others not-yet imagined or at least made public?

• Hyper-local news and advertising content. Who needs the expense and headache of local SFNs and deploying LDM solutions if it’s possible to deliver specific, targeted news and commercials to neighborhoods, districts and other defined zones? Even to individual omni-viewers?

Bottom line: The omni-viewer has arrived. Broadcasters need to begin acting like it.

Email Phil Kurz at tvtechphil@gmail.com.

WASHINGTON—In a sign that momentum for setting a firm transition date for NextGen TV/ATSC 3.0 may be building, a large group of 91 members of Congress sent a March 27 letter to the Federal Communications Commission highlighting the importance of NextGen TV and the need to set a firm date for the transition.

NAB president and CEO Curtis LeGeyt immediately praised the move in a statement that said the NAB “applauds the 91 members of the U.S. House of Representatives , led by the bipartisan co-chairs of the Congressional Broadcasters Caucus — Reps. Mark Alford (R-MO-04), Brendan Boyle (D-PA-02), Mike Flood (R-NE-01) and Darren Soto (D-FL-09) — for urging the Federal Communications Commission to take the next steps toward advancing the transition to ATSC 3.0 (NextGen TV). Their leadership reflects a clear understanding of the immense consumer benefits that a modernized broadcast infrastructure will deliver to communities across the country.”

The FCC has acknowledged the importance of the rollout of the next generation broadcast standard by seeking comment from various players on how it can streamline rules to speed along the transition. While FCC Chair has repeatedly highlighted the importance of NextGen TV but he has not committed publicly to setting a firm date when current ATSC 1.0 signals would sunset.

The NAB and a wide variety of broadcast groups and larger station owners have urged the FCC to set a cutoff date of 2028 for many markets and 2030 for all markets. But some smaller and mid-sized station groups, many LPTV station owners and the Consumer Technology Association have opposed a government mandated sunset and ATSC 3.0 tuner mandates.

In their March 27 letter, lawmakers highlighted the benefits of ATSC 3.0 in terms of better image quality, advanced emergency alerts, interactivity, hyperlocalized content and the development of a terrestrial alternative to GPS.

“We now urge the Commission to take the next steps to bring this transition to completion and unlock the full range of benefits enabled by the Next Gen TV platform,” the letter noted. “It is of utmost importance that local broadcast stations throughout the country are able to serve our constituents not only with the improved pictures, sounds, and interactive features that Next Gen TV provides, but also with expanded local news capabilities, advanced emergency alerting, and the ability to deliver hyper-localized content that is the fabric of our local communities.”

“Yet while local markets continue to launch, the lack of a firm transition timeline threatens the broad availability of these benefits to rural and urban markets alike and slows market momentum,” the letter warned. “Broadcasters and device manufacturers alike need regulatory certainty to make long-term investments and fully realize the potential of this technology. Manufacturers may hesitate to scale device production while consumer demand for Next Gen remains limited, yet broadcasters cannot spark that demand until they regain access to their full channel capacity and can showcase the full capabilities of ATSC 3.0.”

“By establishing a clear path forward, the Commission can help overcome these natural market hesitations and ensure that free, over-the-air television continues to thrive and evolve to meet viewers’ needs, rather than risk gradual erosion through inaction,” the letter concluded. “A clear signal from the FCC that the transition is moving forward will unlock greater manufacturer investment in the consumer device marketplace – a win-win that fosters competition and ensures that viewers benefit from a vibrant marketplace of affordable, Next Gen TV-ready products. A firm transition date would catalyze the entire ecosystem, focusing technical development, accelerating deployment, and creating a predictable path forward.”

The full letter and a list of signatories can be found here.

PRINCETON, N.J.—Triveni Digital will feature its comprehensive portfolio of NextGen TV and TV 3.0 solutions, demonstrating how broadcasters can operationalize ATSC 3.0 to unlock new revenue-generating services, during the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Triveni Digital offers solutions that allow broadcasters to deliver advanced NextGen TV applications, ranging from emergency communications to dynamic advertising, enabling them to turn 3.0 into a revenue-generating platform for long-term growth.

“As the broadcast industry prepares for the next phase of growth, ATSC 3.0 is laying the foundation for new business models that will shape its future, and Brazil’s adoption of the standard is pushing the boundaries of technical and business innovation even further,” said Mark Simpson, president and CEO at Triveni Digital.

“At the 2026 NAB Show, we’ll demonstrate how our complete portfolio of ATSC 1.0, ATSC 3.0, ISDB-Tb and TV 3.0 solutions — backed by world-class local support — help broadcasters transition to NextGen TV seamlessly and unlock additional revenue.”

At the show, Triveni will highlight expanded support for Brazil’s TV 3.0 standard, also referred to as DTV+, within its StreamScope analyzer and GuideBuilder XM platform. Triveni products fully support the TV 3.0 variation of ATSC 3.0, ensuring broadcasters can efficiently validate and manage advanced DTV+ services. Triveni will also showcase an ISDB-Tb variant for its StreamScope MPEG analyzer, providing Brazilian broadcasters with a comprehensive quality assurance solution for both legacy and new over-the-air delivery standards during the transition. The company will demonstrate its end-to-end, highly integrated and fully redundant NextGen TV solution for the U.S. broadcast market, featuring its broadcast chain products. Triveni’s offering includes GuideBuilder XM for signaling, the StreamScope XM analyzer for QoS and monetization, Broadcast Gateway for scheduling and STLP generation, and Station Manager for managing and coordinating complex configuration changes across ATSC 1.0 and 3.0 services, including third-party ecosystem equipment.

As ATSC 3.0 becomes a central component of broadcasters’ business strategies, the complexity of delivering advanced services continues to grow. Triveni’s NextGen TV solutions simplify deployments and ongoing operations, enabling broadcasters to manage ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 services while laying the foundation for new applications and revenue streams.

At the 2026 NAB Show, Triveni will showcase its advanced ATSC 3.0 emergency communications portfolio, including its SkyScraper XM data broadcasting system. Triveni is partnering with Digital Alert Systems and Device Solutions to enable robust emergency paging and public warning capabilities leveraging broadcast infrastructure. The company’s approach supports ATSC 1.0 and is fully ATSC 3.0-ready, allowing broadcasters and public agencies to deploy resilient, future-proof emergency communication systems.

In collaboration with Brazilian technology provider Mirakulo, Triveni will demonstrate a joint dynamic advertising delivery platform for ATSC 3.0 and Brazil’s TV 3.0 over-the-air ecosystems. The system enables targeted ad selection and playback at the TV receiver based on criteria, such as viewer location and viewing habits. The solution is a significant advancement in broadcast advertising. Mirakulo’s AstroTV NEXT platform powers the solution, which enables addressable advertising through dynamic ad insertion delivered via broadband connectivity, allowing personalized ads to be seamlessly delivered to compatible receivers.

Triveni Digital senior vice president of emergent technology development Mark Corl will participate in the “Broadcast Positioning System: Experts Gather to Discuss Current State” BEIT session, Sunday, April 18, at 4 p.m.

See Triveni Digital at the 2026 NAB Show ATSC booth, C1655

WASHINGTON—A new national study of over-the-air television viewers finds strong interest in an affordable NextGen TV converter box, with 81% of respondents saying they would purchase a converter box to maintain access to their free local broadcast TV stations.

The findings are from a new survey commissioned by Pearl TV that was conducted in January 2026 by Magid among 600 adults ages 25–64 who use an antenna on at least one television in their home and at least two hours per week.

The survey was conducted as the TV station groups backing Pearl TV are ramping up efforts to bring more affordable TV converter boxes to the market. Pearl TV is currently working with several manufacturers to develop a range of low-cost NextGen TV converter boxes, including ADTH, Bitrouter, Skyworth, and Zinwell. Also involved with the converter box project is TV viewing data expert Titan TV, which is consulting on best practices for presentation of program guide data.

The new research indicates that the antenna audience is not only loyal — it is evolving and growing with a new generation of multi-platform viewers.

“This research confirms that over-the-air viewers are diverse, modern and highly engaged,” said Anne Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV. “Local broadcasting is not being replaced — it’s being integrated into broader viewing habits. A converter option ensures these growing audiences can continue receiving trustedlocal news, sports and emergency information as broadcast technology evolves.”

The study did not provide estimates of the total percentage of TV homes that use antennas but in early 2024 Nielsen estimated that about 18% of TV homes have at least one TV that is capable of receiving over-the-air broadcasts.

While all respondents to the survey watch local channels via antenna, nearly two-thirds also subscribe to streaming services, and many use cable or virtual platforms as well. Rather than replacing local broadcast channels, these services are complementing it, the researchers said.

The result is a rising segment of what Pearl TV calls “Omni-Viewers” — consumers who intentionally combine free local broadcasting with digital and subscription platforms.

“This report highlights the evolution of the American consumer and the local television landscape, “ explained Bill Hague, executive vice president at Magid. “We have been researching the benefits of NextGen TV with U.S. consumers with Pearl TV for more than 10 years and one key finding of this study is that the younger end of the adult 25–64-year-old sample was most interested in the converter box.”

The survey also highlighted strong interest in local programming with these findings:

• 92% say they would miss their antenna access if it were no longer available.
• 70% rely on local TV stations for news.
• Nearly two-thirds depend on local TV weathercasts.
• Half watch local sports and national newscasts via an antenna to tune to local TV broadcasters.
• Antenna households span all ages and income levels. The converter box concept shows particularly strong appeal among adults 25–44, those with families, and with higher-income households — demonstrating that over-the-air television is not a legacy-only platform but rather one embraced by digitally fluent consumers who value both flexibility and reliability.
• Viewers cite financial accessibility, access to local news and emergency information, and live sports as primary reasons they value broadcast television.

In terms of interest in NextGen TV converter boxes, the survey found:

• 81% would purchase a converter box.
• 64% would select a low-cost box to maintain access to local channels, which reflects a practical willingness to invest in maintain free local TV service.
• 14% said they were purchase a NextGen TV-capable TV to maintain access.
• 86% (net) would purchase either a TV or a box.
• 18% would go without access to local TV.

Top motivations for purchase of a converter box included the fact that it was a one-time purchase with no monthly fees; it works with current TV and antenna setup; and it provides reliable reception, even when internet service is unavailable.

A summary of the study is available here.

While U.S. television broadcasters await a Federal Communications Commission rulemaking on the completion of the transition from DTV to NextGen TV, the organization responsible for ATSC 3.0 has been hard at work on ways to maximize the standard’s grasp.

Case in point is 5G Broadcast. While some broadcasters, particularly a group of LPTV stations, have expressed support for 5G Broadcast, an ATSC technical group has been working to develop technical guidance on how ATSC 3.0 broadcasters can interleave 5G Broadcast waveforms in their 3.0 over-the-air signal.

While the 3.0 standard was created with a bootstrap to enable this sort of thing, the latest work of the standards body advances this capability from theory to practical implementation, complete with testing to prove the real-world use case.

That work, along with other ATSC work on Broadcast-to-Everything (B2X) and a bridge architecture to enable some B2X use cases to be implemented with backward-compatible ATSC 3.0 extensions, is the subject of this Q&A.

In this interview, Luiz Fausto, vice president of standards development at the Advanced Television Standards Committee, discusses these developments.

(An edited transcript.)

TV Tech: What was the thinking behind the proposal to ensure it’s possible to interleave 5G Broadcast with ATSC 3.0?

Luiz Fausto: ATSC 3.0 was designed from the outset to be flexible and extensible. Its physical layer implements basic mechanisms for coexistence and forward compatibility, enabling ATSC 3.0 transmissions to be discontinuous and, if/when needed, to share time on the same RF channel with other waveforms.

Until now, this feature had not been explored in depth in the field. Once this proposal was made by some ATSC members, the capability was readily available and no normative changes to ATSC 3.0 were required.

Instead, our experts tested this interleaving approach and produced detailed documentation to provide clear guidance on implementing it in a practical, receiver-aware manner. This information was included in an amendment to ATSC Recommended Practice A/327, which provides guidelines for the ATSC 3.0 physical layer protocol. This amendment is currently under membership ballot and is expected to be published soon.

TVT: Which technology group did the work? When did the work start? When will ATSC members vote on it?

LF: This work emerged from ATSC TG3 (Technology Group on ATSC 3.0) / S32 (Specialist Group on the Physical Layer). Discussions on this topic began in S32 in 2024 and progressed through testing, contributions and drafting into an amendment to ATSC Recommended Practice A/327.

Process-wise, the amendment has been approved in a TG3 ballot and is currently under an ATSC membership ballot through March 10. Upon approval in the membership ballot, it will be published.

TVT: Was there representation from the wireless community on the technical group? If so, who?

LF: Some ATSC members, including one deeply involved in the wireless community, proposed that ATSC test and, if necessary, clarifying the use of interleaving between ATSC 3.0 and 5G Broadcast, and participated throughout the process.

Other participants also contributed through testing, review and discussion across the broader ATSC membership—consistent with ATSC’s multi-industry model, which includes organizations from broadcast, professional equipment, consumer electronics and semiconductors, among others.

ATSC 3.0 is a wireless system capable of delivering data to any number of receivers simultaneously under any specified conditions. Its IP-based transport, along with its flexibility and extensibility, makes it suitable for integrating with and complementing other wireless systems, such as those used in unicast telecommunications. At ATSC TG3/S32, we have the privilege of working with a great number of world-class wireless technology experts.

TVT: Can you please clarify whether this work is part of the work involved in enabling Broadcast-to-Everything (B2X)? Is the work on what’s is known as the bridge architecture involved, and is there a relationship between interleaving 5G Broadcast and the bridge architecture?

LF: The bridge architecture, which we call BR architecture, is under development in another specialist group, TG3/S44 (Specialist Group on Broadcast-to-Everything). This group is developing the new, nonbackward-compatible system (B2X), further optimized for broadcast/multicast applications beyond fixed television reception and for deeper integration with other IP networks, such as 3GPP networks.

Because introducing a nonbackward-compatible system is a long process and because ATSC 3.0 is already IP-based, flexible and extensible, some of the new use cases envisioned for B2X can be implemented to some extent with backward-compatible ATSC 3.0 extensions.

That is exactly what the bridge architecture provides. B2X and BR share the same Broadcast Core Network architecture. Although B2X and BR enable greater integration with IP networks in general and 3GPP systems in particular for B2X, they are not directly related to the LTE-based 5G Broadcast.

TVT: Does work like this promote harmony with 3GPP standards and protocols? If so, why is that relevant?

LF: Yes, both the time-domain channel sharing documented in S32 and the new developments in S44 contribute to integrating ATSC technologies with 3GPP technologies.

Network integration is a natural trend in the current evolution of technology. Wi-Fi, an IEEE standard, and 3GPP standards, such as 4G and 5G, have converged in many respects over time. Terrestrial and non-terrestrial mobile systems, specifically satellite, and technologies are also converging toward greater integration.

ATSC 3.0 was designed with technology convergence and integration as a guiding principle. Interleaving it with other technologies is an example of many integrations already possible. The ongoing work under S44 to develop the B2X system and the BR architecture, along with their shared Broadcast Core Network architecture, will take this path even further.

Different systems, technologies, and networks can complement each other, combining their strengths. Market demand often drives integration and convergence. Having technologies developed across multiple, separate standards developing organizations (SDOs) is not an obstacle to integration or convergence. Each SDO has its own field of expertise, which is necessary because there is no “one-size-fits-all” technology. As long as the technologies are based on publicly available standards, there are opportunities for integration and convergence.

This approach increasingly provides consumers with seamless connectivity, with devices using the best system, technology and network for each use case, while the underlying technical aspects remain largely transparent to the end user.

TVT: What are the takeaways for readers?

LF: One of the most important takeaways is the significant headroom built into ATSC 3.0 by design. ATSC 3.0’s physical layer and signaling were designed for extensibility and forward compatibility, enabling the industry to explore new operational models—such as time-domain sharing—without destabilizing the core standard.

At the same time, ATSC continues to innovate beyond today’s deployments, extending the value of ATSC technology to broader IP-centric and broadcast-to-everything use cases—while maintaining a deliberate roadmap that protects existing investments and enables future growth.

While broadcasters eagerly await an FCC rulemaking they hope brings clarity to a sunset of ATSC 1.0, the TV industry continues incremental progress on ATSC 3.0 with new technology, business and marketing developments that will play important parts on the NextGen TV stage at the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

(Editor’s Note: This article was written prior to the Federal Communications Commission rulemaking [MB Docket No. 16-142] reply comment deadline of Feb. 18.)

Among them are the latest developments on the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS), various enhancements to the standard, addressable multicast service, datacasting business progress and the latest on the headway ATSC 3.0 is making outside the United States. These and other 3.0 developments, however, are overshadowed by any FCC movement on its pending Notice of Proposed Rulemaking aimed at the transition to NextGen TV and sunsetting the existing ATSC 1.0 digital television service.

“I think what we need to see happen is a clear sunset date,” said Robert Folliard, senior vice president for government relations and distribution at Gray Media. “Everybody knows from their own personal lives that without a deadline, nothing ever happens. I think consumer electronics, manufacturers, broadcasters, everyone needs a clear road map for us to get this done.”

Leave No Viewer Behind
Perhaps the thorniest issue obstructing bringing today’s DTV to a date-certain conclusion is 3.0’s lack of backward compatibility with 1.0. For an industry that’s built upon serving the public with free news, sports and entertainment—and relies on the ad and retrans revenue they generate—a flash cut stranding over-the-air viewers is simply out of the question.

In January at CES 2026, Pearl TV announced an effort to take on this issue with its Converter Box Initiative, a program that aims to make affordable converter devices with a target price below $60 available to viewers for their existing TVs. At the 2026 NAB Show, the business group representing seven major TV station groups will discuss the progress it’s made on the initiative since then.

“Right now, we’re pulling together the tenets of the program, which provide for set-top box makers to participate where we’ve negotiated special discounts on aspects that would otherwise commercially be higher priced without this negotiation,” Pearl TV managing director Anne Schelle said.

While such lower-cost converters may not include the full attributes of the standard available on a NextGen TV, they will ensure viewers can maintain their over-the-air service and receive “the better audio and video capabilities” of 3.0, she said.

Converter boxes meeting the program’s specifications will qualify manufacturers for special component discounts Pearl TV is negotiating that will help to keep the price down by guaranteeing volume. “Guaranteed volume means everything in the supply chain to drive lower costs,” she said.

At the show, Pearl TV will release details of the devices’ specifications, as well as the findings of a qualitative study conducted by Magid Associates to test the $60 price target against feature trade-offs, Schelle said.

Delivering a lower-cost converter today would be a challenge given the AI server-
driven demand for DDR5 RAM and the associated price spike. However, by the time final FCC 3.0 transition rules are set and implemented, it’s likely memory costs will go back down, she said.

The availability of lower-cost converters addresses one of three main questions the FCC raised in its NPRM, Folliard said. “I think if we as broadcasters were to go to the FCC and say, ‘Give us a sunset date, thank you,’ the answer is going to be ‘no.’

“But if we go in, which is what we’re doing, saying, ‘We’re going to produce a low-cost converter device that makes sure consumers are not left behind,” he said. “We’ve done consumer research that finds over-the-air antenna users today say, ‘Yeah, I would pay that price. That’s a bargain.’ We’ve addressed the DRM concerns that are out there and solved the signal signing concerns that are out there, if we can tick off each of those items, I think it’s a different story.”

Tech Developments
NAB Show traditionally gives vendors the chance to roll out their latest advancements. The same is true of those focused on 3.0 technology with exhibits in their own booths, the ATSC booth in the Central Hall (C1655), the Pilot Pavilion and elsewhere.

At the time of this writing, many of these exhibit details are unclear. However, as in year’s past, the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) is producing a tearsheet that will be available at the show to inform attendees the location of vendor booths with 3.0 technology, the times and locations of 3.0-related presentations and “all the fun stuff, the happy hours and the cool events,” said ATSC President Madeleine Noland.

ATSC’s new vice president of standards development, Luis Fausto, and Noland will present an update on ATSC 3.0 during the SBE Ennes workshop on April 22.

Sinclair will highlight its work on development of “Broadcast-to-Everything” (B2X) in the ATSC booth. “That work is essential for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which is opening up the total available market to our IP platform,” said Mark Aitken, president of ONE Media and senior vice president of Advanced Technology at Sinclair.

Work is underway at ONE Media Technologies and more broadly by ATSC to align the standard with all of the 3GPP platforms and services. Among those is enabling IP multicast via 3.0 with addressable data flows, something datacasting clients can rely upon to ensure their valuable data is only received by those to whom they intend to send it.

“The work going on right now is a bridging technology that will bring us all the way to physical layer addressing, which changes the nature of the waveform itself,” said Aitken, adding that proof-of-concept deployments are expected in the second half of the year.

ATSC 3.0 Network Design
Advancing ATSC 3.0 network design is among the projects going on at the standards organization and will likely be a topic of discussion at its NAB Show booth. “We’re working on Recommended Practices for network design,” ATSC’s Noland said.

“How many transmitters do you need? What kind of robustness do you need? We have some of that work done in A/327 already, but this is a little bit of a bigger project where you’re really thinking about, ‘How can you set up your ModCods and your towers to achieve a given goal,’” she said.

Gray Media intends to tout its efforts to leverage the 3.0 over-the-top back channel to ensure robust OTA reception.

“One of the key things we have heard loud and clear from consumers is that the 1.0 signal is not great,” Gray’s Folliard said. “It’s not robust; it’s not reliable. If you can give me a way to get a more reliable signal that I don’t lose when the wind blows, that alone may be the biggest underappreciated consumer benefit of the 3.0 signal.”

Gray has been working with ATSC and others on updating the 3.0 standard to allow what the station group is calling “recovery channels,” he said. “If you are getting an over-the-air signal and it’s all fine, and then you temporarily lose it—maybe because of the digital cliff effect—what will happen is you’ll be able to get the signal automatically via the internet.”

Calling these recovery channels a “game changer” for OTA television, Folliard said the update to the standard will enable broadcasters to deliver “a perfectly stable and reliable OTA signal to viewers.”

Much work still needs to be done, and “much of what we have done is still theoretical,” he said. “Nonetheless, it is incredibly promising and another example of why we need to push the 3.0 transition forward.”

NAB Show will also give broadcasters the chance to learn the latest advances in BPS, including what’s going on with the U.S. Department of Transportation-funded BPS testing and a realignment of NAB tech leadership to focus on the ATSC 3.0-based backup to GPS. Several papers will be presented on BPS as well as demonstrations in the NAB Pilot booth and vendor booths.

EdgeBeam Wireless, the 3.0 datacasting-focused joint venture of E.W. Scripps, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair formed in January 2025 and announced later that year, will be at the NAB Show with two goals in mind: supporting its partners and talking to other broadcasters that could help it extend its 3.0 footprint, EdgeBeam CEO Conrad Clemson said.

Expanding the Ecosystem
“From the time I got here [June 2025] up until a couple of months ago, we would look at both the breadth and depth of our ATSC 3 deployments and say, ‘Wow, look at all the places we are. Isn’t this great?’” Clemson said. “Now we have a different conversation: ‘We’re trying to get an opportunity up here, and I don’t have coverage or I don’t have the depth of coverage I need.’”

NAB Show is “a great time” for EdgeBeam to start the process of expanding its coverage ecosystem, he said.

The show will also see a large contingent of broadcasters from other countries on hand to support or investigate the standard. Fresh off success in Brazil, where the ATSC 3.0 physical layer and other components of the standard were selected for that nation’s new DTV+ (formerly known as TV 3.0) standard, the ATSC organization will focus its efforts on the Americas and India, said Noland.

“We’re putting our resources there because our feeling is that in the Americas, there’s more of a clear path,” she said.

All of these 3.0 developments will occur against the backdrop of the FCC rulemaking that many broadcasters hope will bring clarity to an ATSC 1.0 sunset. For his part, Aitken is encouraged by recent Truth Social posts from President Donald Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr in support of Nexstar’s acquisition of Tegna, which he said demonstrate the government’s understanding of the vital role local TV broadcasters play in their communities.

“The relevance of local markets, the relevance of what we do in those local markets is increasingly understood,” he said. “Our uniqueness is distinguished by the roles we play there. We’ve now got this platform [3.0] to make a new business and strengthen our ability to serve our local communities. But we are resource-constrained [by the channel-sharing 3.0 rollout].

“There has to be some deference given to ensure the success of that service because an authorized service that cannot be received is not a service. It’s a policy failure.”

WASHINGTON—The NextGen TV transition could be “stranded indefinitely in a regime of regulatory uncertainty and half-measures” without 3.0 tuner mandates, must carry provisions and a sunset date for 1.0 broadcasts, the NAB has told the Federal Communications Commission.

The reply comments by the NAB were made in an ongoing proceeding by the FCC to assess and develop a regulatory framework for the rollout of NextGen TV. That proceeding has produced wide ranging arguments about tuner mandates, must carry provisions, digital rights management and sunset dates for the current ATSC 1.0 broadcasts.

“The record developed here confirms that the Commission’s central task is no longer to debate whether NextGen TV is worth pursuing – stakeholders across the ecosystem recognize that it is – but to decide whether the transition will be allowed to succeed through an orderly, coordinated framework, or instead be stranded indefinitely in a regime of regulatory uncertainty and half-measures, all to the detriment of the viewing public,” the NAB said.

The creation of an “orderly, coordinated framework,” the group added, will require four “core actions” that the FCC needs to adopt if the transition is going to be successful and provide consumers with continued access to free, over-the-air broadcasting.

The four areas are: “(1) establish clear, date-certain sunsets for ATSC 1.0 that provide the focal point necessary for marketplace coordination; (2) modernize the receiver standard so consumers can continue to access broadcast service reliably and consistently as the transition proceeds; (3) ensure continued MVPD carriage of ATSC 3.0 signals and associated advanced features so viewers are not deprived of NextGen TV capabilities through distribution bottlenecks; and (4) protect broadcasters’ ability to deliver high-value programming in a video marketplace where content protection and modern technical capabilities are increasingly prerequisites to obtaining and sustaining premium content.”

The NAB also stressed that “the record also makes plain that the Commission has broad support for taking these steps now. Broadcasters, technology providers, and public-interest stakeholders converge on a simple reality: a voluntary framework has reached the limits of what it can accomplish, and further progress depends on regulatory certainty and coordinated action.”

“Against that record of support, opponents’ submissions are notable for what they do not provide: a workable alternative path to completing the transition,” the NAB added. “Instead, the principal opponents offer a familiar mix of classic delay advocacy: resisting receiver modernization, resisting regulatory certainty, resisting any step that would move the transition from pilot to scale, all while recasting the Further Notice as a forum for collateral disputes and speculative anxieties. In short, these opponents reject any modernization that would impose even minimal effort or adjustment on their part. That is not a serious transition plan. In reality, it is an effort to keep free, over-the-air broadcasting tethered to legacy constraints while other segments of the video marketplace move forward unencumbered and without having to worry about broadcasting as a viable competitor.”

“[T]he Commission should establish a firm sunset for ATSC 1.0, eliminate the regulatory constraints that indefinitely prolong simulcasting and “substantially similar” operation, and modernize the receiver framework so that consumers can continue to access free, over-the-air broadcasting reliably as the transition proceeds,” the NAB concluded. “The Commission should also reject efforts to derail this proceeding with collateral disputes and overstated legal theories that offer no workable alternative transition plan.”

The full filing is available here.

Consumer Technology Association President and CEO Gary Shapiro and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr’s wide-ranging conversation Jan. 8 at CES in Las Vegas gave broadcasters a lot to think about when it comes to their future. It also prompted a couple of my own thoughts.

(If you missed it, C-SPAN carried the conversation, which is available here.)

The future of local TV, general support for ATSC 3.0 at the commission, possible readjustment of the network-affiliate relationship and spectrum use and policy were among the highlights. Here, let’s focus on another: the public-interest obligation of broadcasters.

Setting the stage for discussing the public-interest obligation, Carr reminded the audience of the privilege of having a broadcast license and what that means to broadcasters when it comes to retransmission consent and ultimately must-carry dollars.

“[Broadcasting is] a very, very unique distribution medium…because the government is picking a winner and loser,” he said. “You get a license; you get this microphone; you get to speak; you don’t necessarily get to conduct yourself the same way you would if you run a podcast or a soapbox or a cable channel.”

For broadcasters who don’t like that obligation, Carr offered a couple of solutions: turn in your license and transition to a cable channel, start a podcast, become a YouTube channel or bid on your spectrum in an auction, “maybe let[ting] everyone have a fair and free shot at purchasing that spectrum without the public-interest obligation,” he said.

However, at the risk of revealing my naiveté, how many local TV broadcasters truly are clamoring to shed their public-interest obligation? On the whole, when have local TV stations not lived up to this obligation? Certainly not during tornadoes, hurricanes, incoming missile attacks (remember the Hawaii false alarm?), earthquakes and other emergencies.

On the contrary, unprompted by regulators. the TV industry has attempted to up its game in these situations with Advanced Emergency Alerting & Information (AEI&A), a built-in feature of the ATSC 3.0 standard. However, AEI&A—just like other 3.0 enhancements—can’t fully come to fruition until the industry can move forward on sunsetting 1.0.

Nor have they failed to serve the interests of the public each morning, noon and night when it comes to local news. Carr himself acknowledged in his comments that, given the decline of daily newspapers, local newscasts offer “the last of the real ‘gumshoe reporting.’”

My second observation is the 1934 Communications Act didn’t simply mandate
a public interest obligation. There’s also the “convenience and necessity” portion of the phrase.

It seems to me to be counter to the spirit of TV broadcasters’ obligation to serve the “public interest, convenience and necessity” if the TV sets that the public watches are unable to provide the greatest convenience (think personalization and interactivity) and necessity (think AEI&A evacuation maps in flooding) that local TV broadcasters can deliver.

WASHINGTON—The National Association of Broadcasters in December realigned its technology-focused leadership to advance development and deployment of the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS), which can complement and backup the Global Positioning System that is increasingly recognized as a potential single point of failure for delivery of precise timing and positioning data critical to national security.

NAB shifted Sam Matheny, former executive vice president for technology and chief technology officer, to his new role as executive vice president for BPS. At the same time, it transitioned Tariq Mondal from his role as vice president of advanced technology to vice president of BPS. Clearly, BPS is a major thrust for NAB and the industry alike.

In this Q&A, Matheny discusses the strategic personnel realignment, U.S. Transportation Department-funded BPS testing, whether BPS may turn out to be the killer app for ATSC 3.0 and other BPS-related issues.

(An edited transcript.)

TV Tech: Last month, NAB announced a strategic realignment of senior technology leadership focused on BPS. Why has NAB made this move?

Sam Matheny: NAB made this move to accelerate development of the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS) and to put dedicated senior leadership behind an initiative that has clear public safety, critical infrastructure and national security implications. BPS has progressed from concept and early demonstrations into a phase where sustained focus, coordination and execution matter. This realignment allows NAB to concentrate technical leadership on advancing BPS while continuing to support broadcasters as they deploy and invest in NextGen TV infrastructure.

TVT: Last year, the Department of Transportation awarded a $744,000 contract to NAB to move forward with BPS field testing. How has that factored in?

SM: The DOT award in August was another validation that BPS is aligned with broader federal efforts to strengthen resilience for position, navigation and timing services. It signaled the continued shift from discussion to real-world evaluation, but importantly, it was part of a larger series of events. In January of 2025, BPS’s time transfer stability was declared “comparable to or better than GNSS [Global Navigation Satellite System]” and a “viable complementary PNT [Positioning, Navigation and Timing] solution” by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in a peer-reviewed paper presented at the Institute of Navigation (ION) International Technical Meeting. These events, coupled with other indicators, helped drive NAB’s decision to align leadership around BPS so the organization can support field testing, data collection and engagement with government and industry partners in a more focused and sustained way.

TVT: For readers who aren’t familiar with BPS, briefly bring them up to speed.

SM: BPS, a technology invented and developed by NAB, uses NextGen TV broadcast signals to deliver resilient, terrestrial-based timing and location services. One can think of BPS as the terrestrial equivalent of GPS. It is designed to complement GPS. It can provide a backup when satellite signals are disrupted, jammed or spoofed, but it can also be integrated to work with GPS as a hybrid solution. Because BPS leverages high-power broadcast infrastructure that already exists across the country, it has the potential to scale nationally and provide a reliable layer of resilience for public safety, critical infrastructure and other essential services. Other nations that are deploying ATSC 3.0 have also expressed interest in BPS.

TVT: Tell us about the new testing funded by the DOT contract. What will you be looking at?

SM: The field trial supported by the DOT contract is focused on evaluating BPS performance in real-world environments rather than controlled demonstrations. The work is intended to assess how BPS can support critical infrastructure operations when GPS is unavailable or degraded, as well as how the system performs in terms of reliability, coverage and operational integration. NAB has partnered with Dominion Energy with a focus on energy grid resiliency. This testing is a key step in understanding how BPS could function at scale.

TVT: Can you tell us a little more about partnering with Dominion Energy and the broader role of BPS for U.S. industry?

SM: Electric utilities rely heavily on precise timing to operate safely, manage load and maintain grid stability. Power enters the grid from multiple sources and has to be time-aligned for effective distribution. Precision time also plays a huge role in fault detection and helps grid operators identify and fix problems quickly should they occur. Partnering with Dominion Energy allows NAB to evaluate how BPS could help sustain timing and synchronization for electric grid operations during GPS disruptions. More broadly, BPS is being evaluated as a terrestrial complement to GPS that could support a wide range of industries that depend on precise timing, including energy, cellular communications, data centers, financial systems and transportation, where even short disruptions can have significant consequences.

TVT: Is BPS the killer app for ATSC 3.0 that could accelerate deployment by giving the federal government a national security incentive?

SM: BPS is a strong example of how NextGen TV infrastructure can enable services that go well beyond video and entertainment. While ATSC 3.0 supports many new consumer and business applications, the ability to deliver GPS-level resilient timing and positioning highlights its potential role in public safety and national resilience. That broader value proposition reinforces the importance of completing the transition to NextGen TV and ensuring the underlying broadcast infrastructure is fully deployed nationwide.

TVT: Is precise timing or precise positioning the initial priority for BPS? Why?

SM: The near-term priority is accurate, traceable time delivery. Many critical infrastructure systems depend on accurate timing to function properly, and timing disruptions can cascade quickly across networks and services. A 2019 study by NIST estimated the economic impact of a loss of GPS at $1 billion per day. BPS is designed to provide resilient timing as a foundational capability, while positioning and additional services will continue to be developed and refined over time.

TVT: Some in the industry have expressed concerns about the geographic distance between towers affecting positioning. What are your views?

SM: A minimum of three geographically diverse transmissions is needed to perform the multilateration required to determine location, with more towers being better and providing greater accuracy. Our analysis estimates that a typical (median) location in the contiguous U.S., BPS signals from 17 NextGen TV stations might be received at 1.5-meter antenna height. This analysis excluded stations within a kilometer of one another and used only the highest power station from each cluster of stations. So we believe that BPS can provide a useful service for position and navigation. We’re also excited that professors and graduate students at the University of Alabama have begun studying the position and navigation possibilities of BPS and will present early findings at the Workshop on Synchronization and Timing in May.

TVT: At the 2025 NAB Show, there were presentations on the leader-follower architecture and clock configurations for BPS. Can you tell us a bit about what’s being considered?

SM: BPS is designed to be an independent self-synchronizing network that doesn’t rely on the Internet, cellular networks or other connectivity. We’ve designed it as a mesh network where stations listen to one another in a leader-follower configuration. This design is similar to how EAS works. A leader station has a direct connection to UTC traceable time and is equipped with a cesium clock for long holdover, so system integrity can be maintained for months even if there is a total loss of connectivity to traceable time. Follower stations receive time from leader stations and have less expensive rubidium clocks that offer some holdover protection. The result is a network where each station is listening to multiple other stations, and we can monitor individual station health at our network operations center (NOC). A “health bit” is part of the system and can be transmitted if a station is known or suspected to be impaired for maintenance or other reasons, so that it will be ignored until it is healthy again.

TVT: Transmitting BPS addresses the vulnerability of relying solely on GPS, but what is happening on the receiver side?

SM: Reliance on a single timing solution, GPS, is why our nation is at so much risk. GPS has become an invisible utility that has evolved into a single point of failure for critical infrastructure and day-to-day consumer applications. BPS is the terrestrial equivalent of GPS and has been declared to be a “viable complementary PNT solution” by scientists at NIST. We are working with timing solution vendors that want to integrate BPS into their products to offer multiple sources of reliable time in a single product. This lays the foundation for hybrid solutions where BPS and GPS can be used together, not just BPS as a backup. A hybrid approach also offers the ability to use BPS to monitor the health of GPS and detect if there is jamming or spoofing taking place.

TVT: Is there anything else you would like to add?

SM: BPS demonstrates how broadcasters are using their existing infrastructure to support national resilience in new and meaningful ways. This work reflects a broader shift toward viewing broadcast networks as critical infrastructure. NAB is focused on validating that role through real-world testing, partnerships and collaboration with government and industry.

LAS VEGAS—The challenge of attending CES is its size. The convention utilizes all of the enormous Las Vegas Convention Center as well as several other facilities, so often getting from one vendor appointment to another is an exercise in logistics and physical endurance. This was not as much of a problem for me this year as I was focused on what was happening in ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGen TV).

Not that CES wasn’t enormous—it certainly was—but the ATSC booth was located in the new Grand Lobby of the LVCC and that seemed to be where all of the NextGen TV information was. While I didn’t see every vendor at the show, I cannot recall seeing an ATSC 3.0 or NextGen TV reference anywhere on the various floors.

I spent time listening to presentations about the latest and greatest television displays. My consistent question after the presentation was the same: “Does this set include a NextGen TV receiver?” To their credit, I didn’t have anyone say “no,” but I also didn’t hear anyone say “yes”—mostly because I think they didn’t know what I was asking for. The one exception was Sony, which doesn’t even exhibit televisions as a product at CES anymore; they knew the vast majority of their sets are NextGen TV-ready. So after a long day on the floor I went back to the ATSC booth and found out the latest.

The Quest for Cheap Converter Boxes
The biggest news is the work that Pearl TV is doing with its partners iWedia and Skyworth on the creation of a low-cost, plain “vanilla” converter box—think of the coupon-eligible converter boxes of the original DTV conversion two decades ago. Anne Schelle, Managing Director of Pearl TV, says that by creating a model with tailored specifications, it qualifies the units for discount pricing from the IP owners and the chip set manufacturers.

I say “plain vanilla,” but in truth, the final specifications are still being worked out and it is a bit of a balancing act. The idea is to bring the box to market at $60 or less, which presents some interesting challenges. According to Miguel Rivera, Skyworth’s Director of Business Development for North America, the explosion of AI infrastructure has created a supply chain issue on components such as DDR memory chips.

So there are still details to be worked out and according to both Schelle and Rivera they are analyzing what consumers really need and want to get the best trade off of features for price.

Understanding what consumers want is critical for the success of the project. Pearl is working with Magid Associates to analyze consumer data to help ensure that this device ticks the right boxes. Ultimately what will be delivered is a converter box with an antenna input and an HDMI output that will allow any display to present NextGen TV to the viewer.

Target: 50K Boxes for Retails By the End of 2026
One area where this converter box will outperform the original DTV converter boxes is that there are already many successful implementations of ATSC 3.0 tuners in the market so much of the refinement has already been accomplished.

Additionally, Skyworth and their software partner iWedia already have considerable experience since Skyworth is providing the tuners for TV 3.0 in Brazil and Mexico as well as being licensed to provide the receivers for televisions marketed under the Panasonic and Phillips brands. This level of experience should ensure that these new converters function properly.

According to Rivera and Zivko Radonjic, business development manager for iWedia, this CES was technically the first demonstration of a prototype for the project. The target is to have a working demo by the end of the summer when the complete list of specifications is better defined and an initial run of approximately 50,000 units by year end. Schelle expects that promotion of NextGen TV and the units will begin around that same time frame. Of course all of this is dependent on supply chain stability.

I asked Schelle what metric Pearl would use to measure the success of the venture. She offered that success would be “incremental.” Pearl’s belief is that by delivering a working model of an affordable converter, other manufacturers would step up to the plate and deliver similar units under their own branding.

Several times during the conversation, the need to sunset ATSC 1.0 was mentioned so I asked what Pearl would see as the best 1.0 sunset rulemaking. Robert Folliard, Gray Television’s senior vice president of government relations and distribution, offered that broadcasters need a hard date from the FCC as soon as they are comfortable. Neither Schelle nor Folliard believe that maintaining the current status was tenable for much longer.

Given that Pearl was using the DTV CECB (coupon-eligible converter box) model to develop this new device, I asked if they were considering presenting this program to Congress to generate support similar to the coupon program. While the answer wasn’t immediate, it was “yes,” but only as an idea and it wouldn’t be the deciding factor on whether or not to proceed.

A ‘Soft’ Market for NextGen TV
When asked about how satisfied she is with how the consumer electronics manufacturers are approaching NextGen TV, Schelle admitted that the market is certainly soft and that the business model has changed. Folliard also spoke about how set manufacturers have created their own walled gardens and are hoping to get broadcasters to pay to be discoverable within their Home Screen environment.

I postulated that I wouldn’t be surprised if the large manufacturers didn’t adopt the cellular model and give away televisions if the consumer signs up for a multi-year subscription plan. Schelle said he was happy to hear that, since they had been having similar discussions.

While the affordable converter box was the most interesting ATSC 3.0 development I looked at, I have to give an honorable mention to Zapper Mini. One of the challenges that I see to any renaissance of OTA television is the idea that every set in the house has to have an antenna cable drop.

The Mini uses a regular Zapperbox as a gateway and then uses WiFi or Ethernet to connect Mini’s to the gateway. You can put these on every television in the house with the gateway connected to a single antenna. It is an interesting technology that I am looking forward to trying in my home.

Introduction: When Video Compression Meets Physical Layer Innovation
As consumer television sizes continue to expand toward 100 inches and beyond, the demand for improved video experiences that fully showcase the capabilities of modern displays is also increased. Viewers expect images that are crisp, immersive, and lifelike, qualities that go well beyond what legacy High Definition (HD) broadcasting was designed to deliver.

Broadcasters have a unique opportunity to meet this growing expectation by offering cinema-grade Ultra High Definition (UHD) content enhanced with High Dynamic Range (HDR), wide color gamut (WCG), and high frame rates (HFR). Importantly, they can satisfy consumers’ desire for the highest possible visual quality while continuing to uphold the public service mission of universal accessibility.

The convergence of layered video coding and flexible physical-layer design represents a major architectural advance in this direction. Historically, video compression (codec design) and radio transmission (physical layer configuration) were treated as largely independent domains. This separation often forced broadcasters to adopt a single technical compromise, leaving users at the extremes, those with poor reception and those with premium displays, underserved.

Modern standards, however, such as ATSC 3.0 (NextGen TV), blur this separation. The physical layer now permits independently configured Physical Layer Pipes (PLPs), while advanced codecs like Versatile Video Coding (VVC / H.266) are designed to support native scalable bitstreams. When engineered properly, these two domains create emergent capabilities that neither can deliver alone: graceful degradation across receiver conditions, simultaneous baseline universality and premium peak quality, and spectrum-efficient delivery without requiring for simulcast.

Why the Pairing Matters: Addressing Heterogeneity
Both layered codecs and PLP-style physical layers are different technical answers to the same practical problem: how to deliver the best possible user experience across highly heterogeneous receivers and propagation environments. Video codecs must accommodate varying display sizes, decoder complexity, and available throughput; physical layers must accommodate variable propagation, antenna gains, and receiver sensitivity.

Layered architectures allow broadcasters to stop choosing a single, one-size-fits-all compromise and instead deliver differentiated service tiers simultaneously, allowing each receiver to extract the best representation its device capabilities and reception conditions can reliably support.

Understanding Layered Video Coding: From Monolithic to Modular Bitstreams
Traditional broadcast encoders produce a monolithic bitstream: every coded bit contributes to a single target representation, and losing a critical portion of that stream often renders the entire picture unusable. This all-or-nothing behavior is poorly matched to wireless broadcast, where signal quality varies continuously across time and geography.

Layered (scalable) video coding restructures encoded data into a hierarchy of dependencies. A Base Layer (BL) is a complete, independently decodable representation, guaranteeing a minimum service level. One or more Enhancement Layers (ELs) then refine attributes such as spatial resolution, temporal resolution, Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR)/quality, or color/HDR characteristics.

Enhancement layers depend on lower layers, but lower layers do not require the enhancements. A decoder that receives only the base layer presents a complete, usable picture; a decoder that receives additional layers improves quality accordingly. VVC formalizes these capabilities, enabling spatial, temporal, SNR (quality), and color/HDR scalability. The VVC standard was finalized in July 2020, and its constraints for use in ATSC 3.0 are defined in the ATSC A/345 standard [1].

Physical Layer Pipes: Parallel Channels with Tunable Robustness
ATSC 3.0’s OFDM-based physical layer departs from the single-mode approach of legacy systems by enabling multiple PLPs inside one RF channel. Each PLP is an independently parameterized logical channel: modulation order (e.g., QPSK, 256-QAM), Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) code rate, interleaver depth, and pilot density are chosen per-PLP to define its robustness.

The transmitter multiplexes these PLPs into a single OFDM waveform. Receivers attempt demodulation of each PLP independently and decode whichever PLPs their instantaneous SNR permits. Because all PLPs are present on the air simultaneously, a receiver never "requests" a PLP, it simply demodulates those PLPs for which its link budget and channel conditions meet the configured thresholds.

A feature that complements PLPs is Layered Division Multiplexing (LDM). While PLPs can be multiplexed using Time or Frequency Division Multiplexing (TDM/FDM), LDM allows two PLPs (a Core and an Enhanced layer) to be transmitted on the same frequency and time, but at different power levels. This provides a significant SNR gain (typically 3–9 dB) for the Core layer, ensuring extremely robust reception for the base service in challenging environments like deep indoors or mobile scenarios [2].

Architectural Synthesis: Mapping Layers to Pipes
When scalable VVC bitstreams are mapped onto PLPs, two hierarchies align: content importance (base vs. enhancement) and transmission robustness (robust PLP → less robust PLP). The canonical mapping is a direct alignment of these two concepts, often leveraging LDM for the most critical base layer.

A receiver in a premium reception area demodulates all PLPs and recombines them into the highest quality picture. A receiver in a moderate area may demodulate the first two PLPs. Crucially, a receiver in a challenging indoor or mobile environment decodes only the robust base PLP and still presents a complete, usable picture. The broadcaster transmits all PLPs in the same RF band simultaneously; there is no per-receiver negotiation or dynamic retransmission.

Spectrum Efficiency: Why Layered Transmission Beats Simulcast
The primary operational and technical benefit of this synthesis is spectrum efficiency without the need for simulcast. In legacy practice, serving multiple quality tiers required broadcasters to either:

• Simulcast separate complete streams (e.g., one SD stream plus one HD stream), which multiplies the per-service payload and wastes capacity by repeatedly carrying overlapping content.
• Select a single operating point, which simplified operations but inevitably left many receivers either underserved or provided unnecessarily robust transmission for everyone.

Layered coding combined with PLPs replaces simulcast by partitioning a single content representation into a compact base layer plus incremental enhancement layers. The base layer contains the essential information necessary for a universal service; enhancement layers carry only the delta information needed for higher fidelity. Because the enhancement layers are incremental, the total transmitted payload to deliver multi-tier service is substantially lower than the sum of separate simulcast streams that would be required to offer the same service tiers.

The efficiency gain comes from data-level sharing (the base + deltas) rather than repeating complete representations. For example, transmitting a base 1080p stream plus a delta that upgrades to 2160p requires far fewer extra bits than transmitting two independent full-rate 1080p and 2160p streams. This reduction in redundant payload across quality tiers is the practical source of spectrum efficiency in layered broadcast workflows.

Technical Deep Dive: Synchronization and Dependency Management
Successful deployment requires careful alignment across codec packetization, IP transport, and PLP signaling:

• Codec/Packet Alignment: The VVC encoder must produce Network Abstraction Layer (NAL) units and layer boundaries that can be mapped into PLP packet payloads so that each PLP carries complete, independently decodable units for its assigned layer(s).
• Transport and Multiplexing: ATSC 3.0’s IP-centric transport (ROUTE/DASH/MMTP) carries PLP payloads. The Service Layer Signaling (SLS/LLS) informs receivers which PLPs map to which service layers and, critically, the dependency structure. Receivers must know that PLP-1 enhances the service in PLP-0 rather than representing an independent service.
• Timing and Buffering: The base layer must be presented on time even when enhancement data arrives late or intermittently. This implies specific encoder choices (e.g., BL frame lead time) and receiver buffer policies to permit enhancement merging without causing playback stalls.

Conclusion: A Genuinely Transformative Synthesis
The combination of layered video coding (VVC) and ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer Pipes represents a strong architectural alignment that directly addresses the fundamental challenge of broadcast heterogeneity. The primary operational and technical benefit, spectrum efficiency without simulcast, derives from transmitting a single layered representation (a shared base layer with incremental enhancement layers) rather than multiple independent streams.

Receivers decode the PLPs their channel conditions support, enabling graceful service adaptation across diverse reception environments. When intentionally engineered and deployed, this synthesis is positioned to deliver broader baseline coverage, significantly improved indoor and mobile performance (particularly when leveraging LDM), and premium UHD/HDR experiences for high-SNR receivers - all within a single, highly efficient RF transmission.

References[1] ATSC. ATSC Standard: VVC Video (A/345). Advanced Television Systems Committee, 2025. [2] ATSC. ATSC Standard: Physical Layer Protocol (A/322). Advanced Television Systems Committee, 2021.

LAS VEGAS—Advanced HDR by Technicolor has announced the integration of its technology into NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) receivers from BitRouter and Zinwell.

Manufactured by BitRouter, ZapperBox is a NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) and ATSC 1.0 receiver that delivers an optimized viewing experience in high dynamic range (HDR) while enabling the seamless transition from standard dynamic range (SDR) to HDR over free NextGen TV broadcasts.

“Features such as 4K and HDR have driven consumers to expect excellent image quality from their received video content. At the same time, video consumption has never been higher,” said Gopal Miglani, the founder and president of BitRouter. “The partnership between BitRouter and Advanced HDR by Technicolor along with others in the ecosystem is a strategic step that supports the growing availability of NextGen TV content in HDR and consumers’ ability to access that content through HDR-enabled, ATSC 3.0-ready TV receivers.”

The new capability is expected to be available in new quad tuners by the end of March; dual tuner devices will be updated for free at the same time, according to a Bitrouter spokesperson.

The Zinwell team is already working with Philips, one of the developers of Advanced HDR by Technicolor, to integrate the Advanced HDR by Technicolor solution to Zinwell’s conversion box powered by Amlogic system-on-chip. System optimization is also underway as well as testing to ensure compatibility with broadcaster workflows and various display devices. The company said its boxes will soon become available for purchase in the U.S.

“Consumers increasingly expect higher picture quality across platforms, while broadcasters are moving toward advanced video formats with the rollout of ATSC 3.0,” said Paul Wu, vice president of sales division III at Zinwell. “HDR has become a vital feature for delivering a premium viewing experience. The incorporation of the Advanced HDR by Technicolor solution enables Zinwell to meet evolving consumer demands.”

“Zinwell’s integration of Advanced HDR plays a significant role in these early days of ATSC 3.0 adoption,” said Rick Dumont, head of business development for Advanced HDR by Technicolor. “HDR-enabled conversion boxes, such as Zinwell’s product line, allow consumers with non ATSC 3.0 TVs to enjoy premium viewing experiences in HDR from an ATSC 3.0 broadcast. As the ecosystem makes the shift to ATSC 3.0, HDR capabilities continue to grow.”

“Device manufacturers across the industry are recognizing the impact that HDR has on consumer perception of video content,” Dumont added.

“ATSC 3.0 services continue to expand across America, generating the need for HDR-enabled conversion boxes and displays,” said Matthew Goldman, vice president of strategic and technical initiatives for Sinclair, Inc, which implements Advanced HDR by Technicolor in over 100 ATSC 3.0 channels across the US, as well as on Sinclair’s digital channels. “HDR offers an exciting picture improvement to television services, and Sinclair has deployed more HDR channels than every other broadcaster combined. This partnership between Zinwell and Advanced HDR by Technicolor is an important step for building an ecosystem where consumers can enjoy NEXTGEN TV content in HDR.”

LAS VEGAS—iWedia, a provider of connected TV device software solutions, is highlighting its ATSC 3.0 software stack, which has helped to distinguish the Panasonic Z95B as one of the year’s best OLED TVs, at CES 2026, Jan. 6-9.

Running on a leading system-on-a-chip (SOC) platform and integrated within Amazon’s Fire OS environment, the iWedia software stack integrated into the Panasonic Z95B enables seamless NextGen TV reception and hybrid broadcast-broadband performance.

“Our collaboration with Panasonic represents the strength of long-term partnership and shared focus on quality,” iWedia business development director Zivko Radonjic said. “The success of the Z95B demonstrates how aligning with the right partners simplifies technology adoption for manufacturers. As ATSC 3.0 continues to expand across the U.S., we’re ready to support the next generation of OEMs in achieving the same level of excellence.”

By combining Panasonic’s engineering heritage with iWedia’s deep broadcast expertise, iWedia’s partnership has created a reference for premium NextGen TV deployment in the U.S. market, it said.

The Panasonic Z95B’s flawless tuner integration and superior broadcast performance highlight iWedia’s commitment to delivering software that meets the industry’s highest standards for reliability, compliance and user satisfaction, the company said.

“Working with iWedia allowed us to achieve a flawless integration of advanced broadcast capabilities into our latest OLED platform,” Panasonic television business division director Ryutaro Otake said. “Together, we’ve raised the bar for what viewers can expect from premium televisions in the U.S., and we look forward to extending that success as NextGen TV adoption grows.”

iWedia is at CES, seeking to meet with other vendors looking to leverage its ATSC 3.0 solutions for their next connected TV project.

See iWedia at CES booth 17783 at Tech East in the Las Vegas Convention Center Central Hall.

More information is available on the company’s website.

LAUSANNE, Switzerland—iWedia, a provider of software for connected TV devices, and Skyworth, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of smart TVs and home entertainment devices, have announced their first official strategic partnership to support the U.S. ATSC 3.0 market with what the company calls “a robust and future-ready turnkey solution.”

This newly formalized collaboration brings together iWedia’s ATSC 3.0 software stack and Skyworth’s advanced, operator-grade hardware platforms, delivering a fully integrated solution designed for performance, scalability and long-term lifecycle support, the companies said. While the two companies have previously aligned on technical evaluations and platform compatibility, this partnership marks their first end-to-end commercial engagement for the U.S. market.

iWedia has announced previous agreements to integrate its 3.0 tech stack with DigiCap and Realtek and says it is in “full compliance with CTA and A3SA certification suites, offering a turnkey solution for OEMs and operators seeking fast, reliable market entry.”

Skyworth’s hardware expertise perfectly complements iWedia’s software reliability, delivering end-to-end stability, faster certification cycles, and professional lifecycle support, iWedia said. A spokesperson for iWedia,—which specializes in Android TV solutions—said the partnership will focus on auxiliary devices for NextGen TV rather than TV sets

“At iWedia, our commitment goes beyond delivering great software — it’s about building long-term partnerships that ensure our customers’ continuous success,” said Zivko Radonjic, Business Development Director at iWedia. “By combining our certified software with Skyworth’s proven manufacturing capabilities, we’re enabling the U.S. market to achieve greater product reliability and faster time-to-market.”

Leveraging Skyworth’s advanced manufacturing capacity and iWedia’s broadcast software engineering heritage, the collaboration represents a clear blueprint for how OEMs and service providers can embrace ATSC 3.0 while reducing operational complexity, iWedia said.

Miguel Rivera, Business Development for North America at Skyworth, added: “Successful ATSC 3.0 adoption in the U.S. depends on reliable execution, certification certainty and long-term support. Together, we deliver an integrated solution that partners can deploy with confidence, today and into the future.”

Pearl TV is demo-ing the jointly developed ATSC 3.0 turnkey solution at the ATSC exhibit booth in the Central Hall Grand Lobby of the LVCC during CES 2026, Jan. 6-9.

LAS VEGAS—Advanced HDR by Technicolor announced that seven public TV stations have deployed ATSC 3.0 and are enabled with Advanced HDR by Technicolor.

The stations include:

• Maryland Public Television (MPT), Baltimore
• WPTD, Dayton, Ohio
• WXXI, Rochester, NY
• PBS Reno, Reno, Nev.
• Nebraska Public Media, Omaha
• Nashville PBS
• KBTC, Tacoma, Wash.

Advanced HDR by Technicolor says deploying HDR is “a significant development for public TV stations, which were initially excluded from channel sharing agreements formed by commercial stations in major markets at the start of the ATSC 3.0 rollout.”

Overall, there are now more than 150 ATSC 3.0 channels/services broadcasting in Advanced HDR by Technicolor.

“The backward compatibility of Advanced HDR by Technicolor makes it possible for public broadcasters to improve picture quality without creating barriers to ensure equitable services,” said Ling Ling Sun, vice president of technology for Maryland Public Television. “The Advanced HDR by Technicolor solution is in complete alignment with the mission of public TV. From an operational standpoint, Advanced HDR by Technicolor does not require meaningfully more bandwidth or parallel transmissions. The technology enables Maryland Public Television to enhance over-the-air television, reengage our audience and reinforce the relevance of this free, universally accessible public media.”

Public TV stations are currently moving rapidly through a technological transformation. Nebraska Public Media launched the nation’s first Broadcast Enabled Streaming TV (BEST) channel, which is a Full HD (1080p) hybrid OTA & broadband transmission with Advanced HDR by Technicolor that consumers can find on connected TVs as a broadcast virtual channel or access on the internet. Nebraska Public Media also deployed a customized RUN3TV-based Broadcaster Application, on its BEST channel, which integrates linear programming, on-demand content and interactive services within a single IP native interface. Maryland Public Television is currently in the process of acquiring a license for the RUN3TV app.

“The Advanced HDR by Technicolor solution is a perfect match for public media. Through the single stream transmission of Advanced HDR by Technicolor, consumers with HDR-enabled TVs, HDR-enabled receivers or conversion boxes can enjoy public media content with the rich contrast and vibrant colors that high dynamic range capabilities deliver. Consumers with standard dynamic range (SDR) TVs receive high quality in SDR without disruption while accessing exactly the same transmission,” said Rick Dumont, head of business development for Advanced HDR by Technicolor.

The deployment of ATSC 3.0 with Advanced HDR by Technicolor is a critical infrastructure upgrade for public media, enabling public TV stations to deliver a hybrid OTA and over-the-top service, the company said.

“The Advanced HDR by Technicolor solution allows public broadcasters to continue meeting viewers where they are while sustaining free television in HDR over the long-term. It is clear that public TV stations are innovating quickly and shaping the future of TV,” Dumont concludes.

A lot has happened in the seven months since Conrad Clemson took the reins at EdgeBeam Wireless, the startup joint-venture company of E.W. Scripps, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair focused on monetizing ATSC 3.0-based datacasting. But few would know it—at least until now.

Since mid-June, the company’s CEO has quietly assembled key members of his executive team, including Chief Technology Officer Joe Fabiano, who helped drive development and international recognition of the ATSC 3.0 standard, and other names, perhaps less familiar to the television industry but equally experienced in their fields.

Last month, EdgeBeam went public with these and other key behind-the-scenes developments. Perhaps the most significant of all is that EdgeBeam has nailed down its first customer, Digital Mapping Group (DMG), a reseller of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) tools to utilities, governments and others requiring precise location services. DMG will resell EdgeBeam’s BMD-1000 dual-band, ATSC 3.0-cellular receiver as well as its data delivery services with sales to end users beginning in the first quarter of 2026.

At CES 2026 this month, the company is collaborating with Bosch, which is showcasing one of its concept cars showing a number of ATSC 3-based capabilities, like precision navigation, over-the-air updates and the ability to receive live video.

Also at the show, EdgeBeam is offering demos on its partnerships with RYARC for digital signage and Dejero for emergency communications as well as offering private demos of its software platform.

In the following interview, Clemson discusses the significance of the DMG deal and offers details on when he expects to announce other new EdgeBeam customers, and his determination to succeed with the company’s 3.0-based datacasting service regardless of how an ATSC 1.0 sunset plays out.

(An edited transcript.)

TVTech: EdgeBeam Wireless has recently announced two important steps: Digital Mapping Group as the service’s flagship customer and reseller and the company’s expanded leadership team. Let’s start with DMG. It delivers Global Navigation Satellite System solutions to utilities, governments and other entities. What is EdgeBeam’s role?

Conrad Clemson: If you are a golfer, you might be familiar with those watches that tell you how far you are from the hole. Every now and again, you’re standing on the golf course, and it says you’re 100 yards from the hole. You look and say: “I’m not 100 yards from the hole. What’s wrong with this thing?” Well, it turns out there are a lot of reasons why GPS is inaccurate.

Those wicked, fancy cesium clocks, they drift a little bit. Satellites move. The ionosphere can deflect signals. You put it all together, you can have a 5- or even a 10-meter error bar around your location. If we’re just playing golf, that’s fine. But if you’re building a building or flying a drone down a street in a city, it’s really important that you’ve got accurate GPS information.

There is a standard out there called RTK [Real Time Kinematic], which provides a stream of GPS correction. Our offering sources those GPS corrections and transmits them over our ATSC 3 network.

What’s really cool about that is we now have a dual-band receiver that receives that signal either over our ATSC 3 band or also transmitted over our MDN [Mobile Directory Number] cellular network. This allows our customers to have a very precise location with this dual-band capability where they can, generally speaking, take advantage of the broadcast nature and the high efficiency of ATSC 3, with the ability to be backed up on cellular.

We think that’s a very cool solution. It provides some real differentiation for our dealer network that we’re building out [with organizations] like the DMG guys.

TVT: When will DMG roll out this RTK service?

CC: We are expecting it in the first half of 2026 and possibly in the first quarter.

TVT: Munhwa Broadcasting Corp. in South Korea has been offering Real-Time Kinematic accuracy, leveraging cellular and 3.0, for a few years. Is the DMG-EdgeBeam deployment similar? I think Sinclair may have been involved with MBC’s RTK at some point. Is that correct?

CC: MBC has been a strong partner for EdgeBeam and EdgeBeam’s predecessor company, BitPath, for years. Certainly, the initial introductions were done through Sinclair. There is a relationship there.

MBC as a company has done a lot of work in this space in conjunction with a number of initiatives in Korea, and they really are our technology partner here in the U.S. to get this capability up and out into the marketplace.

We’re excited to work with them. They’ve been terrific partners—very high-quality, very quick and super to work with and they have great technical depth.

TVT: DMG will be reselling EdgeBeam’s BMD-1000 dual-band RTK receiver as well as, obviously, EdgeBeam data delivery. Do you have any sense of whether the ultimate end user—DMG’s customers—will even care how the RTK service data is transmitted?

CC: No, they just want it to work. What we’re doing is taking something that already exists and making it better and more economical. It is our belief that there are a lot of really interesting opportunities in the positioning space, and what you’re seeing us do is take steps into this space. We’ve gotten very good feedback from the high-precision market.

This is a great first step for us, and I think you’ll see an expanding EdgeBeam presence in what I would describe as RTK-based precision navigation opportunities. Our expectation is we will have a real opportunity to expand this.

TVT: Tell us a bit more about the EdgeBeam BMD-1000 receiver.

CC: It’s a dual-band receiver, and we’ll talk more about this as we come out and start to announce our broader solutions. But the idea is to bring together and marry both the cellular connection and an ATSC 3 connection to allow us to come out as a hybrid network operator. We think this is a really unique and encompassing strategy that we can deploy into the marketplace.

TVT: What does having the inaugural customer for nationwide RTK service mean more broadly for one-to-many 3.0-based datacasting and its appeal in other applications?

CC: Since I got here, everybody’s been saying: “Wow, this is really, really great. But when is it real? When can customers really start deploying?” The answer is now. This is a very critical milestone. We’re really crossing the chasm of pre-revenue to revenue. This is where we can come out and say: “We’re actually putting live commercial traffic onto an ATSC 3.0 network from a paying customer.” That’s a milestone you only cross once. We’re really excited about it, and DMG is a great partner to make that entry.

TVT: It seems that part of the equation for how much EdgeBeam can grow must be tied to how much 3.0 spectrum is available for datacasting. The FCC looks to be leaning toward allowing broadcasters to decide when to shut off ATSC 1.0 rather than mandating a certain date. How will that affect EdgeBeam’s success?

CC: We think we’ve got a plan to grow our top line as quickly as we can create the demand. We are full-steam ahead on that front, and nothing, nothing, is going to get in the way of that for us.

When it comes to what would we like to see out there? Look, we’d like to see a firm sunset date on 1.0. That’s certainly in our best interest.

If you’ve got a good prediction as to what’s going to happen next in Washington, let me know. I’ll place a bet on one of those future predictors out there. But honestly, I don’t know how that’s going to play out. We’re going to be successful either way.

We’re certainly hopeful that the FCC will recognize that enabling and empowering companies like EdgeBeam to do really innovative things around spectrum is something that’s in the best interest of the public, of the government and quite frankly of our country.

TVT: When do you expect to announce other new customers?

CC: You’ll hear about more customers—plural—in the first quarter.

In 2025, regulatory issues dominated the headlines in a ways not seen in decades, as an activist Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr pushed hard to advance the administration’s agenda,

While a number of stories related to late night TV and Jimmy Kimmel made the list, very few of the most popular regulatory stories on the TV Tech website, involved one time controversies. Most of these stories, particularly those relating to free speech, ownership rules, blackouts and the ATSC 3.0 transition, also provide essential background reading for the regulatory issues that will continue to reshape the industry in 2026.

Here are the 20 most popular stories touching on regulatory issues that were posted to the TV Tech website in 2025:

1. Disney Urged to Shut Down ABC to Avoid Political Turmoil

Analysts think Disney should stop broadcasting but keep the licenses.

2. DirecTV Says Costs for ATSC 3.0 Transition Would be ‘Onerous’

American Television Alliance tells FCC that these costs would produce ‘no benefits whatsoever’ for pay TV operator’s subscribers.

3. Carr Weighs in on Disney, YouTube Dispute

“People should have the right to watch the programming they paid for — including football” the FCC chair said in a X post.

4. ABC Takes `Jimmy Kimmel Live!' Off the Air Indefinitely

The network made the move after FCC Chair Carr attacked the late night show for "sick" comments about the killing of Charlie Kirk and threatened licenses of stations who aired it.

5. Nagravision, Broadpeak Partner on Sports Piracy Solution

Collaboration gives sports rights holders and broadcasters the ability to detect, identify, and disrupt piracy in real-time

6. LPTV Broadcasters: Costs of ATSC 3.0 Transition Could Force `Many’ Stations Out of Business

In an FCC filing opposing the NAB’s plans to sunset ATSC broadcasts, the LPTVBA said broadcasters should not be forced to convert to ATSC 3.0.

7. Nexstar's ABC Affiliates To Preempt `Jimmy Kimmel Live!'

Nexstar joined Sinclair not airing the show's return on ABC on Sept. 23 but says it continues to have "productive" talks with Disney about the future.

8. FCC Commissioner Gomez Blasts ABC for Suspending Jimmy Kimmel

She called ABC’s decision a “cowardly corporate capitulation” to threats from the FCC to suspend broadcast licenses that have no legal basis in “facts or the law”.

9. 50 State Broadcasting Associations Pass Resolution Backing ATSC 1.0 Sunset

Resolution supports FCC ‘establishing a clear, industry-wide date-certain transition plan for the full deployment of Next Gen TV (ATSC 3.0) as well as a sunset date for ATSC 1.0’.

10. U.S. Appeals Court Vacates FCC’s Top-Four Station Ownership Rule

NAB, FCC chair Brendan Carr applaud 8th Circuit’s ruling overturning FCC rules that station groups can’t own more than one of the four most-watched TV stations in a market

11. FCC Restores Accidentally Deleted ATSC 3.0 Rules

The agency has restored and recodified certain rules involving reporting requirements in a new Order.

12. Gray Media to Acquire Block Communications TV Stations for $80 Million

Deal is another example of how station groups are betting that FCC deregulation will open up a wave of deals and consolidation.

13. Pearl TV Doubles Down on ‘National Security Threat’ Posed by SiliconDust's 3.0 Tuners

In comments to the FCC, large broadcast station groups reiterated that the manufacturer uses a Huawei chip.

14. Weigel Broadcasting Pushes Back on Proposals for ATSC Sunset

In a meeting with FCC staff representatives of the broadcaster opposed the NAB’s plans for a “flash cut” from ATSC to ATSC 3.0.

15. FCC Approves Review of Broadcast Ownership Rules

NPRM to look at local television and radio ownership rules that limit the number of stations a single entity can own in a local market.

16. NBCUniversal Blasts Idea of Two-Tiered Station Ownership Rules

FCC filing said that there should not be two separate ownership caps for network O&Os and other TV station groups.

17. FCC to Vote on Accelerating ATSC 3.0 Transition at October Meeting

Commission will act on whether to propose shutting down 1.0 by 2030.

18. NAB: Ownership Caps Have Created a ‘True Emergency for TV Broadcasters’

‘The record shows that the need for TV broadcasters to gain scale now has become an emergency,’ the group told the FCC.

19. FCC to Lift Freeze on Applications for New LPTV, TV Translator Stations

The move is part of a phased process running into 2026 that will also lift the current freeze on major changes for Class A television, low power television and TV translator stations and permits.

20. ATSC 3.0: 'I Can't Imagine Anyone Defending Our Current Adoption Strategy'

The tasks of defining and socializing NextGen’s vision require a “break glass” resolve we haven’t seen or needed in a while.

In a year that saw many pivotal developments in the development of the NextGen TV broadcast standard, stories about major regulatory issues, deployments, new tech advances and other issues were some of the most popular stories on the TV Tech website.

Particularly popular were stories dealing with the costs of deployment, where stations are now offering ATSC 3.0/NextGen TV broadcasts, security and encryption, the ATSC 1.0 sunset, and a host of regulatory issues being considered by the Federal Communications Commission.

Below you will find links to the 20 most popular stories dealing with NextGen TV.

1. DirecTV Says Costs for ATSC 3.0 Transition Would be ‘Onerous’

American Television Alliance tells FCC that these costs would produce ‘no benefits whatsoever’ for pay TV operator’s subscribers.

2. ATSC 3.0 Deployments: Where and When Will NextGen TV be Available?

Our exclusive list of where ATSC 3.0 has been deployed shows that NextGen TV broadcasts are now available in about three quarters of the country.

3. LPTV Broadcasters: Costs of ATSC 3.0 Transition Could Force `Many’ Stations Out of Business

In an FCC filing opposing the NAB’s plans to sunset ATSC broadcasts, the LPTVBA said broadcasters should not be forced to convert to ATSC 3.0.

4. Point/Counterpoint: 5G Broadcast vs. NextGen TV

Industry veterans Preston Padden and Mark Aitken share their views on which standard should drive future of U.S. television.

5. 50 State Broadcasting Associations Pass Resolution Backing ATSC 1.0 Sunset

Resolution supports FCC ‘establishing a clear, industry-wide date-certain transition plan for the full deployment of Next Gen TV (ATSC 3.0) as well as a sunset date for ATSC 1.0’.

6. FCC Restores Accidentally Deleted ATSC 3.0 Rules

The agency has restored and recodified certain rules involving reporting requirements in a new Order.

7. Pearl TV Doubles Down on ‘National Security Threat’ Posed by SiliconDust's 3.0 Tuners

In comments to the FCC, large broadcast station groups reiterated that the manufacturer uses a Huawei chip.

8. Weigel Broadcasting Pushes Back on Proposals for ATSC Sunset

In a meeting with FCC staff representatives of the broadcaster opposed the NAB’s plans for a “flash cut” from ATSC to ATSC 3.0.

9. ATSC 3.0 Interop Puts NextGen TV’s Advanced Features in the Crosshairs

A rather exclusive group of 3.0 experts are testing the features to see if they break TVs.

10. FCC to Vote on Accelerating ATSC 3.0 Transition at October Meeting

Commission will act on whether to propose shutting down 1.0 by 2030.

11. ATSC 3.0: 'I Can't Imagine Anyone Defending Our Current Adoption Strategy'

The tasks of defining and socializing NextGen’s vision require a “break glass” resolve we haven’t seen or needed in a while.

12. SiliconDust Urges FCC to Do Away With DRM Rules for ATSC 3.0 Programming

As an alternative, adopting the same DRM as is used for free YouTube videos would be acceptable.

13. FCC Releases Draft Notice for NextGen TV Rules, ATSC 1.0 Sunset

Regulator tentatively decides stations should determine when to transition to 3.0 broadcasts; also seems willing to relax some rules to speed up the process.

14. FCC Approves NextGen TV Proposal to Give Broadcasters More Flexibility on When to Shut Down ATSC 1.0

Commission Notice of Proposed Rulemaking does not impose a firm cutoff date or mandate 3.0 tuners in new sets.

15. Mark Aitken: ATSC 3.0 to Mobile Comes Down to Control of the Device Ecosystem

Back from last month’s IBC, the ONE Media president discusses mobile, data and more.

16. Sinclair, Pearl TV to Roll Out ROXi’s Interactive Music Channel in 31 NextGen TV Markets

Channel is powered by FastStream Interactive television platform.

17. NAB Wins Federal Contract to Evaluate Broadcast Positioning System

As part of an effort to create resilient alternatives to GPS, the $744,000 DOT contract will fund field testing of a positioning system using NextGen TV broadcasts.

18. Silicondust Becomes An ATSC 3.0 Certificate Authority

The company will issue FullTrust certificates for broadcasters and AskTrust ones for private RF environments.

19. ADTH to Upgrade NextGen TV Receivers With Gateway Capabilities

Software upgrade will enable viewers to watch NextGen TV on their network-connected devices.

20. Sinclair CEO Ripley Meets with FCC Chair Carr in Push for Ownership Deregulation and NextGen TV Transition

The agency needs to move `expeditiously’ to approve the NAB’s proposed ATSC sunset Sinclair’s McFadden wrote in a letter describing the meeting.

BOSTON—EdgeBeam Wireless today announced its first sale of ATSC 3.0-based data delivery and receivers to Digital Mapping Group (DMG), a reseller of high-accuracy Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) tools to utilities, governments and others.

The joint venture company of E.W. Scripps, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair also said it has filled 15 key positions, including chief technology officer, chief product officer, vice president of eGPS and professional services and senior director of marketing.

“The significant traction we’ve established in 2H 2025—marked by landing lighthouse customers like DMG and building a world-class leadership team—signals our readiness to transition from a pre-revenue innovator to a market-scaling leader,” EdgeBeam CEO Conrad Clemson said. “In 2026, our entire focus shifts from the ‘land’ to ‘expand’ phase. We are now fully scaled and positioned to drive our one-to-many data distribution model across the U.S., accelerating the economical and resilient data path necessary for mission-critical industries to advance their own innovation.”

DMG and RTK
Portland, Ore.-based DMG will resell EdgeBeam’s ATSC 3.0-based datacasting and BMD-1000 receiver to support its GNSS Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) centimeter-accurate positioning service. The receiver, equipped with both 3.0 and cellular receivers—along with data transmitted via 3.0 and wireless cells— ensures resilient, high-accuracy location updates, which are particularly important in applications requiring precision, EdgeBeam said.

“For us, delivering centimeter-level positioning GNSS accuracy to our customers in the field is everything, but RTK GNSS requires a reliable data connection all day long,” said Eric Gakstatter, principal owner of Digital Mapping Group. “EdgeBeam’s new BMD-1000 is a competitive game-changer because of its dual-path reliability.”

“By leveraging the ATSC 3.0 broadcast signal, we gain resilient data delivery that ensures our customers receive critical positioning corrections instantly—even in crowded or remote locations. This allows us to guarantee the speed and reliability necessary for a range of industries including utilities, construction and local government,” Gakstatter said.

Executive Team
The company’s newly appointed leadership team includes Apoorva Jain as chief product officer and Joe Fabiano as CTO. Sasha Javid joined as vice president of eGPS and professional services and Jane D’Arcy as senior director of marketing. Clemson remains EdgeBeam CEO. Javid is a product innovator with expertise across telcom, networks, cloud, security and AI. Fabiano is an engineering leader and former Advanced Television Systems Committee chair who helped lead the TV industry’s transition to ATSC 3.0. Javid has experience in spectrum, wireless strategy and operational leadership. D’Arcy is a brand and go-to-market leader, EdgeBeam said.

The company is on track to hire more than 35 employees before the end of 2026 in engineering, sales and product positions, it said.

EdgeBeam will also do private demonstrations at CES, Jan. 6-8, 2026, in Las Vegas. Email Brandon Amoah to make an appointment.

More information is available on the company’s website.

With the Federal Communications Commission working on new rules for the deployment of NextGen TV, next year promises to be an important one for both the future of ATSC 3.0 in general and for the security protections that are a key component of the new broadcast standard.

“For us, content protection is table stakes in terms of broadcasters being able to compete in digital environments,” explained Ann Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV, a consortium of major station groups backing the NextGen TV rollout. “To compete with streaming and other digital media, we need the same tool kit, the same content protection, they have.”

While ATSC 1.0 lacked encryption and robust content security, the content-security features embedded in ATSC 3.0 are particularly important, as NextGen TV is being deployed when such protections are ubiquitous in the digital and streaming world, added Robert (Rob) Folliard, Gray Media’s senior vice president, government relations and distribution.

“DRM [digital rights management] is critical for high-value content from the NFL, MLB, the NBA and all the other leagues, because they lose billions of dollars each year from piracy,” he explained. “That is a problem for us—live sports drives the broadcast model, and we are the only video provider who doesn’t have it. The NFL doesn’t have to worry about it when they do a deal with Amazon or YouTube. If we don’t have content protection, that is going to be a strike against us in the next round of negotiations.”

New Rules, Old Issues
Many of the ongoing arguments and controversies over content security in the digital world can be found in the FCC’s electronic filing system, where more than 7,000 comments have been tallied in response to the agency’s plans to develop new NextGen TV rules.

While Pearl TV and larger broadcasters have supported the enhanced security and content protection offered by the 3.0 standard, some LPTV stations and smaller station owners have raised concerns about the high costs of implementing security solutions.

These filings have been particularly critical of the ATSC 3.0 Security Authority (A3SA), which was created by broadcast TV networks and station groups to manage the security framework for NextGen TV, including digital rights management and content-protection protocols.

The LPTV Broadcasters Association, for example, has argued that the expense of transitioning to 3.0 broadcasts would force stations out of business and that the costs of obtaining “signal-signing” certificates to verify the 3.0 broadcast signals are “excessive.”

Separately, thousands of filings from consumers and advocacy groups like Public Knowledge have also complained that encryption and signal-signing certificates undermine the public’s ability to access free broadcast signals.

“Introducing encryption and Digital Rights Management (DRM) undermines this foundation by transforming open access into conditional, license-controlled access,” Public Knowledge told the FCC. “DRM and the associated A3SA certification system would allow private entities to determine which manufacturers—and therefore which consumers—may access free over-the-air content, effectively privatizing what has always been a public medium,” as well as increasing the cost of devices, the group argued.

Schelle adamantly disputes those reactions, arguing that much of the opposition is either based on a fundamental misunderstanding of 3.0 security or that complaints come from groups simply opposed to ATSC 3.0.

The LPTV Broadcasters Association and “Weigel [Broadcasting] are not for NextGen TV, full stop,” she said. “‘SuperFrank’ [Copsidas, the founder of the LPTV Broadcasters Association] is in favor of 5G broadcasting. Weigel would prefer that we stay on 1.0…so, of course, they are going to…glom onto these issues and blow them up.”

Schelle and Joe St. Jean, managing director of A3SA, also stressed that opponents have misinterpreted his group’s workings and the role of security in the rollout of NextGen TV.

“When you hear about content protection, people often think that they are losing rights,” said St. Jean. “That is not the case here. We are not trying to box out consumers from viewing the content they could otherwise access…We want consumers to use DVR and home-networking functionality…This is a free environment and will continue to be free…Broadcasters are in the eyeball business, and we want consumers to view the content.”

More specifically, he said, it’s important to separate two security-related issues: the DRM solutions used to protect content and signal-signing certificates to authenticate broadcast signals.

“Content protection is described in the ATSC 3.0 spec, but it doesn’t describe implementation, which is what A3SA did,” St. Jean explained. “They created an implementation, and its use is optional. We are not looking to enforce content protection on folks or make money off it.”

For the A3SA implementation, they turned to Google’s Widevine DRM solution, which is used in tens of billions of devices for content protection, Schelle added. “It is enabled in all the TV manufacturers, it works in the unconnected mode,” she said. “It is already used to enable streaming on these TVs. It is not a big deal for device manufacturers.”

In the future, St. Jean added, they expect to begin offering multiple DRMs. “We are currently working with an affiliate group to figure out how to implement FairPlay for Apple devices,” he said.

St. Jean also said that there has been a lot of confusion around the issue of “signal-signing” certificates for 3.0 broadcasts. Signal signing is important, St. Jean and others explained, because it is designed to let viewers know that a signal is authentic and that hackers or pirates haven’t hijacked broadcast signals or emergency alerts. In many ways, the protection provided by signal-signing certificates is similar to the warning that consumers get online when they try to navigate to a suspicious website.

A3SA worked with Eonti and DigiCert to establish signal-signing certificates that will authenticate a broadcast signal. “We don’t make money from this,” he stressed. “All the revenue paid for the certificates goes to Eonti, who pays DigiCert. Our role is to work with broadcasters and device manufacturers to make sure they are able to accept signed signals and tell the difference between signed and unsigned signals.”

In response to complaints that those certificates were too expensive, Folliard said the industry has been working to provide more options and reduce costs. “Not everyone needs a full-service certificate for $950 [a year],” he said. “We’ve already cut that price down to $550, and we’re working to offer even additional lower-cost options.”

Folliard and others also explained that they hoped that more options would emerge as more companies begin offering 3.0-related security.

In November, for example, SiliconDust announced it is offering an Online Certificate Status Protocol solution, providing new security options and compliance to ensure TV stations meet all of the ATSC 3.0 standard’s signing-security requirements.

Schelle and Folliard praised the move. “We welcome all certificate providers,” Folliard said. “The more competition the better because that drives down prices.”

High Noon
Another major issue has been the so-called “high noon” for implementing signal signing. That deadline was originally scheduled for June 2025, but it has been indefinitely delayed.

“When I came on board at the A3SA, it was clear to me that the industry wasn’t ready to turn it on,” St. Jean said, because there wasn’t “consistent messaging on devices” and because “the consumer experience that you see out in the marketplace is a poor one.”

Currently, the timing for high noon is difficult to predict. Schelle and St. Jean said the initial decision to delay it was a collaborative process with the National Association of Broadcasters, the Consumer Technology Association, the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), A3SA and other stakeholders. They also stressed that any future deadline would come out of a similar collaborative process. “We won’t implement it until we have the right consumer experience,” St. Jean said.

Whether these changes will assuage the fears of LPTV stations and other smaller broadcasters remains an open question.

Kristina Bruni, the chair of the Advanced Television Broadcasting Alliance, said that while the group is still polling its LPTV station members regarding ATSC 3.0, she felt there was some confusion in the market about signal signing.

“I do not think that an LPTV operation that is going to transition to 3.0 is going to find that the signal-signing certificate will break the bank,” she said. “I feel that is a nonargument. Nobody is forcing them to go to 3.0 and if they do, the signal-signing certificate is also optional. It’s like when you are on a website and it doesn’t have the proper certificate. As a consumer, you can still choose to continue or not.”

Device Security
Another major question is the potential impact of content security and DRM on the ATSC 3.0 device market.

That issue exploded in 2025 in FCC filings related to SiliconDust’s HDHomeRun 3.0 receivers, which reportedly had problems decoding encrypted 3.0 signals. That prompted SiliconDust and thousands of consumers who own devices to argue that the FCC should not allow 3.0 broadcasts to be encrypted.

In response, Pearl TV told the FCC the problem was not encryption but that the fact that the HDHomeRun device uses a chipset manufactured by HiSilicon, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Huawei Technologies, a company “which the Commission has found to be ‘a national security threat.’”

No other manufacturer has had that problem, Foillard said.

SiliconDust “made a business decision to go with a Huawei chip that can’t support Widevine,” he said. “All the others will tell you supporting Widevine is not a big deal.”

SiliconDust has hotly disputed those claims, stressing that its devices are “NextGen TV-certified” and blaming A3SA’s implementation of Widevine for the problem. (Detailed coverage of this controversy can be found here.)

Other device manufacturers downplay the broader impact of the issue. “I don’t think it [security and DRM] has had a large impact on the device market,” said Alex Day, vice president of business development at Tolka Telecommunications, which provides a software platform that is used by ADTH and other manufacturers of 3.0 receivers.

Day expects lower-cost device options to come to market in 2026. Higher-end devices, gateways and gear with fully integrated Android TV capabilities should also launch, he said.

Gopal Miglani, president and founder of BitRouter, which aims to be the “TiVo of NextGen TV” with products like the ZapperBox receiver, said his company recently released its Unbound Gateway v3.4 software.

The software is “a significant milestone in bringing all the capabilities of the ATSC 1.0 DVR ecosystem to the ATSC 3.0 transition,” Miglani said in a blog post, with a multiroom DRM beta for gateway-connected devices. Software releases v3.5 and beyond will allow multiroom devices to control one another as real gateways, and 2026 will also see the creation of the first streaming app for a non-ZapperBox device.

Other industry players stressed the importance of the FCC setting a cutoff date for NextGen TV transition.

“There has not been a transition globally that has ever taken off until a date has been set,” Schelle said. The whole device market “really changes when the FCC sets a date.”

However, proposals for a 1.0 sunset face powerful opposition from the CTA and TV-set manufacturers. While the FCC has said it wants to speed the transition, the agency has not made any public moves to set firm dates or impose device mandates.

CINCINNATI—GatesAir has introduced Maxiva XTK, an update to its Maxiva XTE software-defined TV exciter. XTK is a new cost-efficient model primarily developed for the global ATSC 3.0 broadcast community and represents an engineering breakthrough for ATSC 3.0 processing power, thanks to a modern FPGA-based platform that reduces the costs of achieving efficient ATSC 3.0 broadcasting through the exciter, the company said.

Now shipping, the 1RU exciter is a fully productized version of GatesAir’s ATSC 3.0 modulation software introduced at NAB Show 2025. The Maxiva XTK comes standard within GatesAir’s latest high-efficiency TV transmitter models, including the UATK-OP and UATK low-power UHF series announced earlier this year. In its now-productized form, the XTK also extends ATSC 3.0 capability to GatesAir’s VATK-OP and VATK low-power VHF transmitters. Its backwards-compatible design ensures operability within previous-gen Maxiva UHF/VHF transmitters and many Harris legacy DTV transmitters.

Same as the XTK, the exciter’s software-defined architecture optimizes signal performance and accelerates the transition between digital standards through firmware updates in the field, according to the company.

Beyond ATSC 1.0 to ATSC 3.0 transitions, the Maxiva XTK’s support for the ISDB-Tb DTV standard makes it a highly valuable solution for Brazilian broadcasters now preparing for ATSC 3.0 transitions. The XTK also comes standard in GatesAir’s PMTX-1-UK outdoor transmission systems, now shipping globally and widely used in Brazil for its flexible installation options (including pole mounts) and weatherproof, low maintenance design.

“We see the XTK as the next step in GatesAir’s software-defined exciter innovation, building on the proven reliability and flexibility of our XTE platform,” said Steve Rossiter, TV Systems Applications Engineer at GatesAir. “Broadcasters now have a forward-looking solution that can be deployed across our latest Maxiva systems while remaining fully compatible with earlier-generation Maxiva transmitters and legacy systems. We designed the XTK to deliver the processing power, precision, and upgraded flexibility that today’s ATSC 3.0 networks demand.”

HUNT VALLEY, Md.—Sinclair and its wholly-owned subsidiary One Media Technologies have released a new report focused on how ATSC 3.0, the IP-based NextGen TV standard, delivers data more efficiently and in a more sustainable manner than other wireless transmission alternatives.

The report, “ATSC 3.0: Efficient, Scalable, Sustainable Wireless Capacity,” was penned by One Media Technologies strategic marketing advisor Josh Gordon with an introduction by Sinclair senior vice president and One Media Technologies president Mark Aitken.

“ATSC 3.0’s IP streams are now opening business and efficiency opportunities at broadcast stations as well as with the IP systems used by telecoms, streamers, CDNs, and data transport companies,” the report says.

While covering a lot of familiar ground for those involved with the standard, the report brings a good deal of context to the discussion, particularly in terms of how 3.0 and 5G together address some major problems with growing video consumption over unicast wireless networks. It examines how 3.0 can reduce 5G capacity spikes and thereby reduce the need for infrastructure buildout, additional electrical power and associated carbon emissions created to power new network cells as well as create massive savings in the capital expense otherwise needed to construct new 5G cell sites.

Hybrid 5G-Broadcast Examples
The report points to two examples of the benefits of a hybrid multicast-unicast data network. In the U.K., British Telecom has spent about $1 billion to create its Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery System (MAUD), which leverages existing terrestrial broadcast and satellite spectrum to augment 5G service and cut capacity peaks in half.

The report quotes a CSI magazine interview with BT director of engineering Ian Parr as saying: “We can expect MAUD technology to use up to 50% less bandwidth during peak events, reducing energy usage through the use of fewer caches, and network equipment scale. What is more, next generations of equipment will use even less power and drive down carbon emissions of media distributions.”

If current media consumption trends continue, with individuals accessing content via a solely unicast wireless network, it could cost the U.K. wireless industry as much as $20.8 billion to build out capacity to handle the traffic, making MAUD’s $1 billion price tag a bargain, the report says.

Similarly, India’s 5G wireless network “sometimes gets clogged” with video, the report says, pointing out that congestion will only get worse going forward as mobile content consumption is expected to double every three to four years. That’s why Prasar Bharati, the nation’s public broadcaster, has conducted two rounds of trials of 3.0-based Direct-to-Mobile (D2M). The D2M initiative is in keeping with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goals of using advanced digital technologies to advance the nation’s socioeconomic growth, it says.

According to the report, D2M could “shift 25-30%” of video traffic from 5G to enable operators to moderate their 5G network expansion.

Quoting a May 2025 article from The Economic Times of India, the report says: “India appears to be moving closer to a commercial roll-out of the direct-to-mobile (D2M) technology, having completed significant preparatory work.”

ATSC 3.0 Efficiency
The report begins with a discussion of the efficiency of the ATSC 3.0 physical layer. It discusses how closely 3.0’s different operating points (capacity vs. robustness) are aligned with the Shannon Limit—the maximum number of bits that can pass through a channel, pointing out that on this basis alone 3.0 is 28% more efficient than ATSC 1.0.

It also discusses how the High-Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) is four times more efficient than the MPEG-2 codec used for 1.0. Together, the physical layer efficiency and HEVC’s efficiency “deliver a 5x video efficiency increase over ATSC 1.0,” it says.

It then explores how even greater video efficiencies can be achieved with the standard. It points out that the Versatile Video Codec (VVC), which the Advanced Television Systems Committee standardized support for earlier in the year, is twice as efficient as HEVC. Further, efficiencies are possible through the use of Multiple Input Multiple Output technology, which is supported in ATSC 3.0 and is one of the centerpieces of Brazil’s TV 3.0 standard, which leverages many components of the ATSC 3.0 suite of standards.

The report is published as a PDF with links to multiple reference works, including guides, manuals, articles and videos, such a 30-minute video on the functionality of the 3.0 physical layer by Luke Fay of Sony Electronics, former chair of the ATSC committee that developed it.

The report concludes by reiterating how ATSC 3.0 enhances efficiency and sustainability. “Broadcasters that adopt ATSC 3.0 advance responsible stewardship of their broadcast spectrum by both raising the efficiency of TV delivery, and by adding efficiency to IP systems they integrate with. In short, ATSC 3.0 transforms the output of a terrestrial TV station into a series of multipurpose streams that can natively integrate with digital infrastructure.”

According to a One Media Technologies spokesperson, the report will be discussed during a Dec. 11 TVNewsCheck webinar.

Click here to download the report.

More information about the webinar is available online.

In late October, the FCC voted to give U.S. broadcasters more freedom in determining how to manage the transition to ATSC 3.0 and the shutdown of ATSC 1.0 services. Since broadcasters have a strong incentive not to disenfranchise existing viewers, this makes sense.

The proposed rules (the Fifth Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking or “5FNPRM”) are not clear on what steps, if any, the Federal Communications Commission will require from other partners, such as receiver manufacturers, to expedite the transition. It also raises questions about the current use of content protection (digital rights management) and whether that complies with broadcast requirements in the Communications Act.

While the proposed rules offer positive steps towards a transition to ATSC 3.0, they also highlight the challenges and risks to broadcasters in an ATSC 1.0 shutdown. With this in mind, I’ll look at some of the main topics in the 5FNPRM. The National Association of Broadcasters’ transition proposal has been widely covered, so I don’t plan to focus on it here.

Simulcast Changes/MPEG-4
The proposed rules would eliminate the requirement for a station transitioning to ATSC 3.0 to simulcast its programming on an ATSC 1.0 guest station. However, if a station voluntarily chooses to simulcast, then the ATSC 1.0 signal must cover the ATSC 3.0 station’s community of license and be located in the same DMA.

All “substantially similar” language has been deleted, which implies the ATSC 1.0 simulcast on the guest station could be in standard definition even if the ATSC 3.0 content is in high definition or better. This would allow more ATSC 1.0 guest stations on a single ATSC 1.0 host.

The proposed rules in the 5FNPRM add MPEG-4 video encoding as outlined in ATSC standard A/72 Part 1, but for multicast streams only. As I wrote in my September 2024 column, “Revisiting MPEG-4 for ATSC 1.0 Lighthouse Stations,” converting an HD stream from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 and adding an MPEG-2 simulcast in SD makes more efficient use of spectrum in some cases and would allow reception on older devices, which may not support better than SD resolution in any event.

Without the “substantially” similar rule, as we approach ATSC 1.0 shutdown, I suspect most stations will be happy with only an MPEG-2 simulcast of their HD stream. A better option to preserve quality would be to allow use of MPEG-4 on the primary as well as multicast streams. That would allow more HD content on the remaining ATSC 1.0 host stations.

Receiver Mandates
The proposed rules do not include any new rules for receive devices. The text of the order raises questions concerning ATSC 3.0 tuner requirements, including benefits and costs of adding an ATSC 3.0 tuner to TV receivers and allowing only an ATSC 3.0 tuner, no ATSC 1.0 tuner.

The Consumer Technology Association contends the marketplace is working and an ATSC 3.0 tuner mandate is unnecessary. NAB argues that manufacturers do not want to include ATSC 3.0 tuners until there is more consumer demand, and most consumers will not demand ATSC 3.0 until broadcasters “offer something they cannot get without it.” Until viewers have ATSC 3.0 receivers, broadcasters will have difficulty stopping or even reducing ATSC 1.0 services, thus limiting their ability to offer new and improved ATSC 3.0 services.

The FCC asked for public input on the timing of a tuner mandate if a mandate is adopted; warning labels on TV receivers that do not have ATSC 3.0 tuners; and NAB’s proposal to “make broadcast services available to a consumer in the same or fewer steps needed to access any other video content on the same device.” The CTA said the FCC does not have authority to mandate user interfaces and micromanaging them would be “bad policy.”

Content Protection
The FCC noted consumer complaints about the impact of digital rights management on reception of ATSC 3.0 signals.

“As this DRM encryption program has been deployed and stations have begun to encrypt 3.0 signals that previously aired without encryption, however, many viewers have been unable to watch certain 3.0 signals on equipment they purchased specifically for that purpose,” the commission said in its notice. “This has led to thousands of consumer comments in this docket opposing the use of encryption on free OTA broadcast signals, many filed by early adopters of ATSC 3.0 technology even before the Commission’s most recent Public Notice.”

The proposed rules do not include any mention of DRM, but the text asks for comments on several aspects of DRM. These include the costs and requirements of incorporating DRM and whether those factors are deterring market entry. The commission asks whether decryption keys/capabilities and related licenses are available on reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) terms.

The concept of DRM itself is questioned by consumer groups and others, alleging “that in practice “[t]he use of DRM, private device certification and internet return-path dependencies renders ATSC 3.0 transmissions legally and functionally distinct from traditional broadcasting.”

The FCC notes that the Communications Act defines “broadcasting” as “the dissemination of radio communications intended to be received by the public, directly or by the intermediary of relay stations.” One of the three criteria the FCC has used to determine a lack of this intent is “the programming is encrypted in a way that “makes it unusable by the public” and that is not “enjoyable without the aid of decoders.” The commission asks whether current ATSC 3.0 encryption administered by A3SA and implemented by broadcasters constitutes “broadcasting” within the meaning of the Communications Act.

In my reading of the commission’s full text on DRM, I have the impression the commission may not be opposed to DRM itself as much as the way the current encryption is handled. At this stage in the ATSC 3.0 transition, if the FCC decides the current A3SA implementation is not legal broadcasting, is it possible to change to another content protection scheme without breaking existing ATSC 3.0 receivers?

If content protection is not allowed, what impact will that have on the availability of popular content on free ATSC 3.0 channels? ATSC 3.0 offers the option of having some content protected and other programming in the clear. One possibility is the FCC would require at least one program stream to be unencrypted with more valuable content, such as live sports, ending up transmitted on a different, encrypted program stream.

Transitioning MVPDs
The 5FNPRM devotes several pages to how a transition to NextGen TV will impact MVPDs (distributors of broadcast content via cable, internet, satellite or other means to viewers). The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) created Recommended Practice A/370 “Conversion of ATSC 3.0 Services for Redistribution,” which describes how to convert ATSC 3.0 signals to an ATSC 1.0-compatible transport stream. The 5FNPRM raises questions about the costs of this conversion and the impact on small cable companies. A suggested alternative is for the broadcaster to provide an ATSC 1.0-compatible feed directly to the MVPD, but is this practical in all cases? ATSC 3.0 provides services, such as multilanguage audio and higher data rates, that are not compatible with many cable TV systems. For more details, refer to the 5FNPRM.

In my opinion, depending on the timing, many of the questions it raises may become moot as MVPDs move away from transport-based distribution to IP distribution, where, given sufficient bandwidth, transport of IP based ATSC 3.0 programming will be much easier.

Transition Risks
Transitioning to new standards is risky. Look how long it took to complete the analog shutdown after DTV broadcasting started. During that transition, broadcasters had a second channel, receivers were required to include DTV tuners and were widely available in all sizes before analog was shut down, and low-cost converter boxes were widely available with NTIA-mandated performance. So far, none of those conditions apply to the ATSC 3.0 transition.

How can broadcasters accelerate the transition? The FCC’s proposed simulcast rules appear to allow one ATSC 1.0 host to carry a dozen or more channels in MPEG-2 SD. The loss of quality might encourage people to invest in an ATSC 3.0 receiver, if they are widely available, or they may simply move most viewing to streaming services or the omnipresent FAST channels.

For technically-challenged viewers, adding a set-top box could be difficult. What is the best way to get ATSC 3.0 capability into the homes of ATSC 1.0 viewers? Given the advantages ATSC 3.0 provides, would it make sense for broadcasters to fund a receiver or simple set-top box option for consumers that need it? It may be necessary to set up a Geek Squad-like service to aid viewers having trouble with the conversion. Is that even possible?

CINCINNATI—Oklahoma Community Television (OCT) has selected GatesAir and Triveni Digital as key technology partners in an ATSC 3.0 deployment that establishes a cost-efficient networking model for low-power transmission sites through a convergence of RF and IP technology.

The successful proof-of-concept offers a basis for developing future means for a translator transition to ATSC 3.0, the companies said.

Developed by Jack Mills, general manager of OCT, a division of broadcast group Griffin Media, the networking innovation brings the SRT protocol directly into the RF infrastructure featuring GatesAir transmitters though interoperability with advanced signaling technology from Triveni Digital.

Commonly deployed in live production scenarios, SRT ensures secure and reliable transport of video and audio content with very low latency, with built-in protections to maintain performance across unpredictable IP networks. Broadcasters often deploy SRT over managed fiber connections to maintain broadcast-quality standards. For very distant locations lacking fiber connections, the expense of running lines is often cost-prohibitive.

Mills faced this challenge with at least one OCT translator and inspired him to engineer a solution. Following a thorough testing phase, Mills successfully deployed ATSC 3.0 services to two new GatesAir Maxiva UAXTE-100 translators installed in August. The first stage carries the NextGen TV broadcasts of five Oklahoma City network affiliates over a 90-mile distance.

The five-station feed originates from Nexstar Media Group-owned KAUT-TV’s ATSC 3.0 Lighthouse site to OCT’s translator site in Strong City, Okla., leveraging SRT transport over existing fiber and IP connections. The SRT signal is processed through equipment from DTV Innovations and transmitted locally through the UAXTE-100 on Channel 29.

The much greater challenge was preparing those same services for a second translator site in Elk City, Okla., with no existing microwave, fiber or wired connectivity. Mills favored an off-air RF hop from the Strong City site, which required a solution to regenerate ATSC 3.0 signals for broadcast over a different RF channel.

He ultimately found the Triveni ATSC 3.0 Translator to be a reliable, cost-efficient solution to decode and regenerate the signal for broadcast on Channel 26, reducing equipment costs. The ATSC 3.0 Translator receives and regenerates the signal, applies a unique DRM signature for legal broadcast rights management and hands it off to the GatesAir translator in Elk City, which delivers the ATSC 3.0 feed at 120 W.

“The United States has a very large installed base of approximately 5,000 LPTV and translators operating today. The recent interest in mandating ATSC 3.0 will force many broadcasters to make decisions with their translators: find an affordable way for translators to transmit in ATSC 3.0, or eventually go dark,” said Mills, who is also president of the National Television Association.

“In addition to the transmission, translator operators use microwave systems, some form of IP, fiber and OTA over mountainous terrain and very long distances to reach their translator sites. Our approach proves that affordable IP solutions and OTA can reliably feed ATSC 3.0 signals.”

Triveni ATSC 3.0 Translator integrates seamlessly with OCT’s existing filters, antennas and lines, Mills added, requiring no changes or additional investments in the RF infrastructure. Mills said he is actively exploring the deployment of auxiliary ATSC 3.0-ready services over the same two hops, including a Broadcast Positioning System (BPS) implementation for accuracy and timing.

More information is on the GatesAir and Triveni Digital websites.

PLYMOUTH, Wis.—A group of about 20 TV technology vendors supporting NextGen TV are wrapping up their ATSC 3.0 Interop here at Heartland Video Systems headquarters after spending the week identifying and resolving any problems implementation of various 3.0 advanced features might create for NextGen TV reception.

“ATSC 3.0 has a lot of knobs that you can turn and tweak to make it whatever you want it to be,” said HVS director of sales Joe Turbolski. “This interop is testing all of those knobs and making sure they all work properly.”

HVS, which has integrated about 90% of all non-Sinclair 3.0 deployments, is hosting the fall test following a similar interop this past spring at Sinclair’s Hunt Valley, Md., headquarters. Pearl TV and Sinclair/ONE Media are co-sponsoring the gathering.

A Panoply of Tests
At this week’s event, participants are working to ensure that a laundry list of advanced ATSC 3.0 features won’t break consumer NextGen TVs and receiver devices when implemented.

The interop is performing basic service testing for Real-Time Object delivery Over Unidirectional Transport (ROUTE) and MPEG Media Transport (MMT) as well as testing: audio accessibility; app-based services; the Run3TV framework; virtual (i.e. Broadcast IP/Broadcast Enhanced Streaming TV) channels; 3.0 translators; Broadcast Positioning System (BPS); datacasting; event stream; dynamic ad insertion; the physical layer; STL Transport Protocol; Enensys cloud redundancy; regional service availability table (RSAT) testing; recovery channel; CBCS digital rights management; and expiring certificates.

In many respects, modern TVs in general and NextGen TVs in particular are more similar to a computer than a traditional television, and the room where the interop took place reflects that fact. Seated at rows of tables where the interop is taking place, software engineers focus on the particular 3.0 feature set they traveled to HVS to test.

Six large-screen TVs receiving 3.0 OTA signals from three main exciters –one each from GatesAir, Rohde & Schwarz and Teamcast—and test equipment modulators—from Enensys, DekTec and LabMod—display a looping NFL clip, game show clip and other content as programmers run their code and tweak it as needed.

“We have enough test equipment to feed each of those six chains so six different RF channels are on at the same time,” said HVS ATSC 3.0 technologist Mike Schmidt.

In a separate room engineers from Sinclair and HVS were testing BPS as part of the interop. “Sinclair was kind enough to bring their entire BPS kit here so we could do some testing that was very enlightening,” Schmidt said. “The main focus was to make sure that TVs survived BPS being present.”

At the spring interop, BPS testing was confined to simply inserting it into a 3.0 signal. “But here they started to create delays on two paths,” said Schmidt, adding that inserting delays “may in a heavy-handed way” simulate more closely what may happen in practice, especially in a single frequency network (SFN).

“They did delay on one path and everything worked fine,” he said. “Then they did delay on two paths, and it broke some TVs. So, there are still some things that need to be worked out.”

Being There
Notably absent from the event were many consumer electronics companies pursuing the NextGen TV market; however, Schmidt noted that’s to be expected, given the timing of the interop. Most CE companies are busy preparing for CES in early January, he said.

But not having a physical presence isn’t preventing CE companies from benefiting from what the interop uncovers. Their engineers are communicating with those present for the interop in real time via Slack messenger, said Schmidt.

“We have a PCAP [packet capture], or IP data recording, and we make those available at the end of the interop for all of our findings from all of the tests,” he said.

Working from the notes they take from their Slack communications, the CE vendors can then access the PCAP data corresponding to a failure and play it back in the lab, determine if the failure can be replicated and then dig in to find a solution, Schmidt added.

The testing that happens at the interop is important because it focuses the attention of the players trying to advance NextGen TV on making improvements to the implementation of the various features 3.0 offers, he said.

But couldn’t all of these participants do the same thing sitting in their offices scattered across the globe?

“That’s a good question,” Schmidt said. “But human nature factors in. If you’re just off on your own, it’s harder to do and easier to move on to something else.

“If everyone’s concentrated in one place, looking at the same thing at the same time, we can just focus on getting it fixed.”

The interop wraps up today with a half-day session devoted to advancing new technology and looking at new ideas.

Fred Baumgartner’s op-ed ("ATSC 3.0: 'I Can't Imagine Anyone Defending Our Current Adoption Strategy") on the broadcast industry’s transition to ATSC 3.0 drew several responses, which we’re publishing here:

Thank you!!!! The article by Fred Baumgartner was 100% right on. I've been bracing to watch/experience OTA go the way of CD stores and what the music industry did to itself.

If those in control of ATSC 3.0 are paying attention, there is still time to save themselves.

Thank you!
George McLam

Wow, OMG! I find it a real relief that someone speaks the truth! I’ve been following the progress of ATSC 3.0 for years from a technical standpoint. I’ve marveled at the technical advantages that are offered by 3.0.

But at the same time I’ve also noted the commercial and political wrangling occurring in the background to see who makes the most money from this transition. Almost 100% of this is aimed at the poor or disadvantaged consumer who happens to depend on OTA TV.

I have both a technical and a business degree. I understand that money drives almost all transitions like 3.0. But there is right and wrong way to make money. Mr. Baumgartner sums up the divide that is now taking place in this industry. I’m 100% in agreement with his assessment. Rural consumers are still struggling through the move to Digital OTA TV and now they are getting ready to be hit by something that will likely drive them back to AM radio (while that lasts).

There is so much potential in ATSC 3.0 for consumers! Let’s not forget that is who 3.0 serves.

Regards,
Allen Hill

The following response was penned by Mark Aitken, senior vice president of technology for Sinclair Broadcast Group and president of ONE Media.

“I will give readers a few points to consider or ponder, reflecting on this piece. Fred’s critique is essentially that the industry has done the technical work (standards, initial rollout) but neglected the go-to‐market, consumer value, device ecosystem, and regulatory guardrails part.

My view is that, YES, we have done the technical work and are finishing and fine tuning the technology implementations (all being done on a voluntary basis). Have there been hiccups? Yes, but I would add that there are few (if any) issues of great import that have not been taken care of.

Additionally, we have not NEGLECTED the go-to-market etc. but are awaiting the regulatory clarity that is required to build up our businesses with the investments required to fulfill the mission of better TV. Sunset certainty for 1.0 is important, essential.

Fred emphasizes two unique values of over-the-air (OTA) broadcasting that NextGen should preserve, and Fred knows that we are largely in agreement:

Reliability in emergencies: OTA broadcasting “has never failed in any emergency” while internet delivery has.

Universal access & democratic value: because broadcast is freely accessible and not filtered by algorithms, it plays a unique role in an informed public sphere.

But on the last of these two (Universal access & democratic value), I am afraid Fred misses the mark. Free, unencumbered access to the 3.0 primary and related television services is important. But encryption is not an encumbrance to free over-the-air TV when properly implemented. It is there to ensure that the high value/high quality programming Fred speaks of is available on a free basis to OTA TV viewers, not as a hindrance. Because of the “ALL-IP” nature of NextGen, content protection (safeguarding piracy) is essential. To say “Encryption must go” is ensuring all the high-quality programming that Fred says SHOULD be part of the programming mix WON’T exist.

I can guarantee there will be multiple reasons for OTA viewers to step up to ATSC 3.0 NextGen Broadcast/TV. Fred has spoken of many. There are plenty of enhanced capabilities that unconnected viewers will find of great value. As Fred well knows, I have personally fought for the coming days of greatness of OTA TV for almost 30 years.

I am NOT about to give up now. I know the best days for broadcasting television are ahead because we will meet and exceed the needs and expectations of an increasingly choosy local television audience. What is being asked and expected of the FCC is simply to allow a set of playing rules that allow those best days to come.

Just giving you and your readers more to consider and think about.”

Fred replies:

The responses, especially the handful I received confidentially, gives me hope that enough of us are ready to take a clear-eyed look at where we are and begin the climb up the “slope of enlightenment.” That is Gartner’s “hype cycle’s” next step after the “trough of disillusionment.” We have all experienced “paradigm shifts” – those things that describe a profound change in a fundamental business model and perception of events – best seen in the rearview mirror.

IP OTA Broadcast can and should go way beyond linear and streaming. It is a new and unique media. More than a modest modulation and encoder improvement, NextGen can become very beneficial and profitable if it is competently exploited. Geotargeting advertising revenues alone more than justify the investment I’m asking for.

So far, we’ve promoted (hyped) what we could do, which seems limitless. Our many, often-conflicting visions of what we should do, and lack of a tangible forward-looking implementation to experience and build upon has painted us into a dark corner. I’ll address some of our options after I address Mark’s comments. I’ve admired Mark since I heard his voice from the back of the room some 30 years ago pushing COFDM over 8VSB. And David Smith who made NextGen development a priority for Sinclair. What implementation that has been accomplished points back to them.

Pause Encryption
Encryption is very divisive. At launch, abrupt, poorly communicated, and unexpected blanket encryption alienated and infuriated our first adopters, influencers and several manufacturers. Encryption fundamentally and inherently changes broadcasting into narrowcasting. That is its purpose.

In May 2024, I wrote a five-page primer on NextGen encryption’s impact as part of a series on the adoption of NextGen for The Spectrum Monitor (TSM). As hard as I tried, I could not make a case where the benefits of encryption outweighed the detriments. And frankly some of the justifications offered for OTA encryption are, I judge, absurd. Like Mark, I noted that encryption, if used, needed to be properly implemented. OTA encryption yearns for guardrails and invites regulation to counteract abuse. OTA encryption (Internet encryption is different) should be paused. Properly implemented OTA encryption can be selectively triggered later if the use case makes sense.

Go Directly to OTA TV Button
In normal times, technology adoption is a multidisciplinary process that involves many stakeholders. NextGen is an ecosystem, the largest part by far being the receivers/devices. I think it has taken us all by surprise that we now have TVs that make watching OTA TV difficult, annoying, and as I learned this last weekend, sometimes impossible.

During an Internet outage, our new “locked in the circle of death,” “smart TV” required removal from the wall, cycling power, then fighting the user interface to watch OTA football. Our $3,000 first run NextGen TV isn’t much better (see TSM April 2025). NAB has pertinent experience with a similar challenge. Some cars make OTA listening difficult and may leave out the AM half of radio altogether. Sound familiar? One wonders why AM radio “revitalization” is a thing with NAB and (outside of mentions in NAB’s FCC “sunset 1.0” petition filing) TV revitalization is not?

We must nurture receivers that support our new businesses. They need persistent memory and storage, adequate processing power, multiple tuners, supporting hooks, and a frictionless user experience, etc., that they do not now possess. These are neither expensive nor difficult items to implement. Our yet to be delivered, desirable NextGen broadcast product and our promotional support is the incentive for manufacturers to offer the products we need and our mutual customers want to buy. Think of color TV’s adoption plan.

AEA&I First Opens Many Doors
A lot of resources have been put into datacasting (see TSM August 2025), BPS, encryption… things with uncertain ROIs. Nothing has been invested in implementing Advanced Emergency Alerting and Informing, which does have a ROI. Nothing would drive 3.0 adoption, solidify the industry, make friends in so many places, open as many doors to innovation, enable so many business models, and create so much buzz as well-done AEA&I interactivity.

Many erroneously conflate AEA&I with EAS. EAS on TV has been notably superseded, become ineffective and always had a negative ROI. TV broadcasters will be able to free themselves of EAS in the NextGen. Developing demonstrable AEA&I is cheap – especially when compared to what has been spent elsewhere. Launching AEA&I would completely change the course of ATSC 3.0 adoption and the trajectory of NextGen development, not to mention how it empowers TV news. Even if you could care less about saving lives and property or social contracts, there is no magical thinking or hype in this paragraph.

Changing the Rules
I don’t have the same sense of victimization as Mark does when it comes to regulation. Mark knows well and has often effectively used the power of the STA (Special Temporary Authorization). I posit that the reason the FCC rules get in the way is that we haven’t shared any vision of an implementation nor have we asked, for example, for an unrestricted NextGen national demo “channel” in lieu of the pointless, redundant simulcasts we now have. I can’t imagine an FCC that wouldn’t support a well thought out adoption and transition plan that benefits the public… or at least grant STAs so we can show the world what NextGen can do and develop and beta-test the product.

If the adoption plan is to have a sympathetic government quickly and quietly shut down 1.0, forcing viewers to MVPDs, streaming, or yet to be productized “converters” and OTA TVs that support little more than OFDM and HEVC… the optics are not good. Recently I have been to several state broadcasters conventions and engineering seminars where NextGen isn’t even mentioned any more.

Our industry is the handful of group owners who cooperated to cover most of the nation with lighthouse stations and would most benefit. My request is that they kick in what little is necessary to productize NextGen and support a realistic and lovable adoption plan. Launching an impressive implementation of AEA&I is the equivalent of Steve Jobs flaunting the first iPhone.

Innovator’s Dilemma
Much of the industry will likely focus on sweeping up the last pennies in the parking lot of what they see as a dying business. Others have some vague fleeting, cautious sense that NextGen Broadcast might become something interesting, exciting, and profitable. I think we are ready for sessions at NAB and articles in TVT and “summits” on NextGen implementation issues replacing the hype, confusion, power plays and magical thinking.

If I were an “owner” under the pressure of constant cash flow growth, I might be more interested in cannibalizing the presumed corpse and see what non-broadcast use I can divert my assets to. Mature industries struggle and frequently fail to reinvent themselves. The leaders we admire and the investments that pay off are the ones that successfully pivot.

Ultimately, this is in the hands of the half dozen or so people who oversee today’s consolidated broadcasting. If they risk making the investment, the worst-case scenario is that they fail at empowering the few people with the right stuff to lead and make NextGen happen, and they collectively lose another few million dollars. At worst, this is a small mistake.

Personally, I think broadcasting is too important to fail. If we are not ready to implement NextGen, let us pause and not squander what we have. But I’d much rather see broadcasting become an even bigger and better piece of the media mix.

What do you think? Share us your thoughts by emailing us at tvtechnology@futurenet.com.

In less than two weeks during late September and early October, the Federal Communications Commission acted on two proposed rulemakings that could have an enormous impact on the future of broadcast television and radio in the United States for decades to come.

On Sept. 30, the commission voted unanimously to seek public comment on whether to retain, modify or eliminate several long-standing broadcast ownership regulations in light of the dramatic shifts in the modern media landscape. The notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) will look at local television and radio rules that limit the number of stations a single entity can own in a specific market, as well as the dual-network rule that prohibits a merger between any of the top four national broadcast TV networks (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC).

TV broadcast ownership rules currently restrict one station group from owning TV stations that reach more than 39% of U.S. TV households (the so-called “UHF discount” and duopoly rules allow for higher thresholds).

Free Live Sports and Trusted Journalism
For years, these restrictions have been under fire from broadcasters, who claim they prevent them from effectively competing with high-tech companies, particularly those that have launched streaming services now bidding for lucrative professional sports rights. In addition, groups like the National Association of Broadcasters have said outdated ownership rules threaten the integrity of local journalism.

A major catalyst for the review’s current direction was a July decision by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In that ruling, the court vacated the FCC’s “Top-Four Prohibition,” which had barred a single company from owning two of the top four television stations in the same market. Crucially, the court also asserted that the statutory mandate for the quadrennial review is inherently deregulatory in nature, a legal interpretation that will heavily influence the current proceeding.

The NPRM approved does not propose specific rule changes, but instead poses a broad range of questions to the public and industry stakeholders. The commission is seeking extensive input on how the proliferation of streaming services, online video platforms and other digital media should affect its analysis of competition, localism and viewpoint diversity—the traditional pillars of its ownership regulations.

“We intend to take a fresh approach to competition by examining the broader media marketplace, rather than treating broadcast radio and television as isolated markets,” FCC Chair Brendan Carr said. “Our primary goal is to promote investment in local broadcasters who provide trusted news and information vital to the communities they serve. We will also consider whether public safety, national security and other public interest goals should be part of this review process. If we determine that any rule no longer serves the public interest, we will fulfill our statutory duty to modify or eliminate those rules.”

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez acknowledged the challenges currently facing the broadcast industry but criticized the motives behind the industry’s calls for changes.

“The commission requires locally licensed broadcasters to serve their communities of license in the public interest,” said Gomez, the only FCC Democrat. “The key principles underlying this statement remain localism, viewpoint diversity and competition. Financial gains for corporate giants is not a basis to abandon our and broadcasters’ obligations to serve the public interest.”

Is This the End for ATSC 1.0?
One week later, the commission announced it would vote on a NPRM to consider sunsetting the ATSC 1.0 broadcast standard by 2030, based on a proposal made by the NAB earlier this year. The proposal would allow TV stations in the top 55 DMAs to terminate ATSC 1.0 by February 2028, with the entire industry transitioning two years later.

Even though its draft of the NPRM, released in advance of the Oct. 28 monthly meeting, raises more questions than answers about how the agency might act on key issues related to NextGen TV, it does provide some hints on how Carr is thinking about the subject.

The draft noted that the FCC has “tentatively” concluded that stations should be allowed to choose when to stop broadcasting via the ATSC 1.0 standard and begin broadcasting exclusively in 3.0. It also has “tentatively” concluded stations should be allowed to broadcast in both 1.0 and 3.0, as many are today, but with fewer restrictions and requirements on the 1.0 version of their signal. This would free up more spectrum for advanced ATSC 3.0 services.

The NAB, Pearl TV, state broadcasting associations and larger groups like Sinclair want the FCC to set a firm date for the shutoff of ATSC 1.0. Smaller broadcasters and many LPTV stations have opposed the sunset of 1.0 broadcasts starting in February of 2028.

The draft takes a more neutral approach to many other key issues, raising a series of questions about key topics like the creation of new rules mandating ATSC 3.0 tuners in all new TVs.

More specifically, the draft NPRM seeks comment on many issues and proposals closely related to these tentative conclusions about the transition, including: the use of encryption or digital rights management (DRM) on broadcast signals; a requirement that new televisions be able to receive and display 3.0 signals; and a requirement that traditional pay TV providers carry 3.0 signals to their subscribers.

The NAB, Pearl TV and larger broadcasters have argued that 3.0 tuner mandates are necessary for a successful NextGen TV transition so that a large number of consumers can be able to access the broadcasts. Consumer electronics firms and the CTA have consistently opposed a tuner mandate, arguing it would increase the cost of TV sets and is generally unnecessary because most viewers watch video content over streaming and pay TV services, rather than over-the-air antennas.

Initial reaction from broadcasters to the draft NPRM was positive, with Pearl TV and the ATSC applauding the FCC for working to find ways to accelerate the transition to ATSC 3.0 broadcasts. It was also generally vague, given that the draft does not take a strong position on some key issues like a mandatory sunset or 3.0 tuner mandates.

“Pearl TV and the local broadcasters commend FCC Chairman Carr for launching a new proceeding on NextGen TV that signals to the consumer technology industry, broadcasters, and consumers that the final transition to next-generation broadcasting is underway and that the technology provides an unparalleled opportunity to enhance and improve television service to millions of viewers each day,” Anne Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV, said in a statement sent to TV Tech.

The Link
Tying ownership rules to the end of ATSC 1.0 is not new; the NAB argued that the two issues were linked in the proposal it submitted to the FCC in February. “Due to the Commission’s ownership restrictions which have fragmented the industry by design, no broadcaster is in a position to shut down ATSC 1.0 by themselves while other stations in the same market remain on the older standard,” the association said.

In her statement, Gomez also acknowledged the tie, but expressed concern about how consolidation could impact broadcast technology.

“The benefits of NextGen TV to broadcasters increase if the national ownership cap is raised or eliminated,” she said. “A station group with a nationwide footprint and data about their audiences will be able to compete for national targeted advertising campaigns. They also plan to sell datacasting services using the broadcast spectrum made available by the more efficient standard to, for example, broadly and efficiently transmit technical updates to devices such as phones and cars outside traditional broadband connections.

“This may well be a great use of spectrum but we should certainly consider the policy implications of allowing this before it happens,” Gomez concluded.

The Federal Communications Commission is hoping MPEG-4 can do the heavy lifting in bringing an end to ATSC 1.0.

On Oct. 7, the commission published on its website a draft notice of proposed rulemaking that will enable TV broadcasters to make more permissive use of ATSC 3.0. The draft is an agenda item for its Oct. 28 open meeting. (Whether or not the federal government is open for business then is unclear at this writing.)

Earlier in the year, the National Association of Broadcasters petitioned the agency to set up two dates certain—February 2028 and February 2030—for the shutoff of ATSC 1.0, depending on market size. The agency’s draft NPRM sets that request aside. Rather, the FCC has tentatively concluded broadcasters “should be allowed to choose when to stop broadcasting in 1.0 and start broadcasting exclusively in 3.0.”

Since non-backward-compatible 3.0 was authorized in 2017, FCC rules have required broadcasters electing to deploy NextGen TV service to simulcast 1.0 and 3.0 as a way to preserve over-the-air TV service to viewers with 1.0 sets.

Broadcasters and the FCC itself have repeatedly asserted that it’s not in the commercial interests of stations to disenfranchise large numbers of viewers by making a flash cut to 3.0.

In the draft NPRM, the agency put it this way: “Simulcasting remains important for protecting viewers during the transition period. At this stage broadcasters have strong market incentives to continue to effectively serve their viewers. We believe we can and should rely on these incentives and allow stations themselves to decide how and when to move forward with full 3.0 service.”

Enter MPEG-4. Today, in most 3.0 markets, multiple broadcasters share one stick and RF infrastructure to transmit NextGen TV. In a few, it’s two. They also have jumped through hoops and shared facilities to remain on-air with their 1.0 signals. (All of this is necessary because they were not awarded a temporary second channel assignment for their 3.0 signals as was the case in the analog-to-digital transition.)

The draft NPRM would stand this lighthouse structure on its head. Rather than one or two 3.0 lighthouses and the remaining sticks in a market transmitting legacy DTV, broadcasters would preserve ATSC 1.0 from one or more shared lighthouses, freeing them to devote far more available broadcast bandwidth in their markets to NextGen TV and making it possible for them to begin offering more advanced 3.0 services.

The draft NPRM proposes allowing stations that elect to continue simulcasting to use MPEG-4 encoding for 1.0 multicast streams. The more efficient MPEG-4 encoding is central to a 1.0 lighthouse. A year ago, my TV Tech colleague Doug Lung wrote an editorial on this, which the commission noted in the draft NPRM.

Can MPEG-4 pull this off? The jury is out. Broadcasters have told the commission that only viewers with older sets—16 years or older—would be unable to receive the video portion of an MPEG-4 ATSC 1.0 transmission.

Anecdotally, some broadcasters that have employed MPEG-4 for digital subchannels have been flooded with calls from viewers with older sets that could not receive a picture. As Kyle Walker, vice president of technology at Weigel Broadcasting, recently told me: “Our findings indicate that approximately 20% of televisions cannot display MPEG-4. In the rare instance when one of our broadcast affiliates mistakenly changes one of our networks from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, we hear from viewers almost immediately.”

At least for those viewers, authorizing MPEG-4 for ATSC 1.0 would essentially be the same as authorizing a 1.0 shutoff in favor of 3.0: It would require consumers with older TVs to buy a converter box or a new set.

That brings us back to the notion of broadcasters not wishing to disenfranchise existing OTA viewers. It’s not in their financial interest to reduce audience size and associated ad revenue, nor is it in the public’s interest to lose free OTA service.

Many U.S. broadcasters have refused to see mobile as an important part of their future, Sinclair senior vice president of advanced technology and ONE Media Technologies president Mark Aitken says. But he hasn’t.

Sure, the path to linear NextGen TV on mobile phones will be difficult, especially as carriers and device makers control the device ecosystem. But that hasn’t dissuaded him.

Returning from IBC in September, Aitken said he had conversations with fellow broadcasters from Brazil and India that illustrate the challenges of getting linear TV onto cellphones, as well as a possible solution.

In this interview, Aitken discusses the lessons broadcasters can learn from the ISBD-T SEG-1 mobile phone experience of Brazilian broadcasters, the role India and its direct-to-mobile (D2M) strategy may play, the growing ecosystem of ATSC 3.0-enabled consumer devices, and other key business opportunities that 3.0 offers U.S. broadcasters.

(An edited transcript.)

TV Tech: Broadcasters are on the cusp of greater certainty with respect to an eventual shutdown of 1.0 and, ultimately, 3.0 finishing the transition. Is there any reason to think that the wireless carriers and their device vendors will enable linear TV to be received on mobile phones?
Mark Aitken: I think the answer to that is no. Not linear TV, but what we have to offer through ATSC 3.0 that is not TV in the conventional sense they will, over a relatively short period of time, come to understand that the multicast broadcast capabilities of ATSC 3.0 can work to their advantage.

TVT: Let’s set datacasting aside for a moment and focus on linear TV to mobile phones and devices offered by carriers. Why won’t that happen?
MA: I think the issue of controlling the device is a very real issue. One example came out during conversations at IBC with some Brazilians. As you know, Brazil recently adopted ATSC 3.0 for their terrestrial television.

Part of the Brazilian experience brought to light what ended up happening as it relates to ISDB-T. Previously, they elected to use ISDB-T for their physical layer and ended up doing their own version of some of the middle layers of the ISO stack, but they wanted mobility.

They were very aspirational and saw a future that U.S. broadcasters have long refused to see as a future. They see mobility as being an important part of their future, and they made the decision for ISBD-T.

[Editor’s note: Brazil officially adopted ISDB-T in June 2006. In August 2025, it adopted the ATSC 3.0 physical layer for its next-gen DTV+ system.]

And just as use of their linear mobile channel was available and a flood of devices that came to the Brazilian market—because the other alignment for ISDB-T was Japan, as Japan already had it—you had a large number of mobile device manufacturers that were already building ISDB-T 1-SEG-enabled mobile devices.

As they started to come into the market, suddenly other options for delivery of video came along, and that was the business of the carriers, and the broad availability of these free-over-the-air-capable phones suddenly dwindled down to just a couple of devices that were available, squeezed out by the mobile network operators.

It's clear. They’re in the business of making money. People want to watch relevant content. There was and continues to be a large amount of relevant content that TV broadcasting delivers, whether it’s local news or sports.

But they squeezed ISDB-T as a free service out of existence because they control the device universe. When someone like Qualcomm makes the statement: “We have no intent to build separable chips for broadcast services. 5G Broadcast is part of our silicon,” you know what they are making very clear is that the services and capabilities that the mobile network operators are demanding at the core of the devices that serve their consumers at the end of the day they will control.

Just because 5G exists as a small area on a 7nm chip structure in the middle of a phone doesn’t mean the carriers are going to allow its use. There are lots of ways to figure that one out.

In the U.S., you can use MediaFLO as an example. At the end of the day, Verizon could never come to business terms with a separate entity to operate the MediaFLO network.

(Read: Opinion: Why European broadcasters need to gain control of the mobile device ecosystem)

Verizon tried to operate it themselves, and they began to realize there’s a lot to this business that they didn’t understand. There’s a lot to the licensing side. There’s a lot to the IP royalty side.

This all enhances at least this one guy’s opinion: Thinking that Qualcomm and the mobile network operators are going to allow broadcasters to continue in the business of operating free-over-the-air television to mobile devices, it's insane to imagine that that's going to be the case. And I believe it’s a trap.

Will ATSC 3.0 ever make its way onto a system on a chip at the heart of a phone? I think that, again, it comes back to having success in showing a plentiful device universe.

TVT: Where does development of that universe stand?
MA: Well, I think that some years after we have success in showing a plentiful device [ATSC 3.0] universe is when 3.0 as a system on a chip may emerge.

By the way, we showed smartphones, tablets and obviously television sets, USB dongle devices and feature phones [with 3.0 receivers] at IBC in September.

Feature phones are a class of devices that I would venture to say you will never find Qualcomm engaged in supplying because the economics aren’t there.

We see that as an opportunity, particularly in a country like India or any number of developing nations, and we’re clearly going after some of those market opportunities.

My point is, we’ve had discussions with MediaTek and Qualcomm. By the way, MediaTek provides more SoCs [system on a chip] in the mobile phone market than Qualcomm—more than anybody in the world.

They are very clear. Show us a market that wants ATSC 3.0 and it’ll be on the SoC.

Until then, we've got a more than capable chipset. The fact that I can show you a half-dozen different types of devices that fill out that ecosystem shows that if we can do it, I would venture to say just about anybody can.

It's not our core business, but we feel that strongly about mobile that we’ve put in much effort to make that happen.

TVT: You brought up India, which has announced it favors a direct-to-mobile (D2M) strategy but hasn’t yet selected how it intends to make that happen. Where do things stand with ATSC 3.0 as the solution?
MA: Look, you know, if India adopts ATSC 3.0 for D2M and every imaginable device, that would be huge.

At IBC, we spent a lot of time with the chairman of Prasar Bharati, the public broadcaster in India, discussing exactly the future in India.

Has ATSC 3.0 been chosen? No, not yet. You’ve got a bureaucracy that’s being navigated. At the same time, you have other interests that don’t see that it’s to their benefit that ATSC 3.0 is chosen. So, we don’t have a slam dunk in India, but at the same time, most stakeholders in broadcasting have been engaged in support of ATSC 3.0.

Will a minority faction win out? Well, I guess some of that will come down to money and how much people are willing to lie. And you can quote me on that.

TVT: You mentioned how important feature phones with 3.0 reception will be in developing markets like India. Are there any other devices?
MA: I did leave out another class of devices. Intel now has a reference for ATSC 3.0 on their laptops. One of the reasons for that is remote learning, which is an exceptionally important piece of the puzzle in India. I can tell you that there is a another very large, well-known PC manufacturer that is moving to integrate ATSC 3.0.

TVT: Earlier, you said you believe carriers ultimately will recognize the multicast broadcast capabilities of ATSC 3.0. Why?
MA: This is because of the IP nature of the standard and the work that is going on openly now in ATSC with B2X [broadcast to everything.]

B2X is a two-stage program. It’s activity that ONE Media started and has been engaged in for more than three years. For more than the last year, it’s transitioned to a small group inside ATSC. The membership knew about it, but now it has become public-facing. ATSC has broadcast to the rest of the world that this activity is underway and is inviting folks from across the spectrum of telecom to participate.

What ATSC 3.0 has to offer is its unique multicast broadcast capabilities lend themselves to providing an economic incentive for large mobile network operators to contract capacity inside of our spectrum. Sinclair and ONE Media have been public about some of that activity. We've done webinars with a large focus on automotive.

I can tell you that it was a learning experience. It was one of the reasons that we internally decided to develop B2X broadcast-to-everything because we began to understand the needs of those folks who we saw as being potential clients in that datacasting activity.

We’ve also talked about CDN [content delivery network] offloads. When you dig deep into those verticals, it’s certainly not the same vertical we’re in as televisioners, but you begin to understand the unique relationship they have with the carriers and the uniqueness of that carrier infrastructure.

To be really attractive to them as a carrier of their bits, our bits and their bits need to be equals in the way they are formed, and the way that they are received and processed. That’s what B2X is all about. It is a bridging technology that’s nearing completion.