NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) Mission Systems and Technology Office has announced that it is working with SpectraRep to evaluate how broadcast television datacasting could serve as a resilient and redundant pathway for delivering NOAA Weather Radio audio and data to transmitters and digital devices.

More specifically, as part of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA), NOAA/NWS and SpectraRep, LLC will assess whether existing digital television broadcast infrastructure can enhance the distribution of NWR content, particularly during periods when other networks may be disrupted.

The project will also examine opportunities to expand endpoint delivery options to reach modern digital and mobile platforms without altering or replacing existing NOAA Weather Radio services.

“NOAA/NWS is looking forward to collaborating with SpectraRep, LLC to evaluate innovative approaches for delivering NOAA Weather Radio content via datacasting and other pathways for modernizing access to NOAA Weather Radio content,” says George Jungbluth, Director for NWS Mission Systems and Technology Office.

For more than 50 years, NOAA Weather Radio has been a critical component of the nation’s public warning infrastructure, providing continuous forecasts, watches, warnings, and emergency information to communities, emergency managers, and partner organizations.

Television datacasting uses a small portion of a digital TV broadcast signal to securely transmit data as a one-way service that is unseen by television viewers and the general public. Digital television datacasting is designed for very high availability—exceeding 99.9% annually nationwide—making it a potential candidate for improving continuity of operations during emergencies, NOAA said.

As part of the research, SpectraRep, will also work with NOAA/NWS to better understand the current NOAA Weather Radio workflow, including how content is generated and transmitted.

Using NOAA/NWS content and technical expertise, SpectraRep, LLC will configure a demonstration showing how live NOAA Weather Radio content can be securely transported through a local television broadcast partner and delivered to a NOAA endpoint(s), such as a NOAA Weather Radio transmitter.

SpectraRep, LLC will also share access and seek feedback on their AlertNowM mobile solution which can tap into multiple transport paths—including radio, broadcast datacasting, and internet sources—on a single mobile platform.

The results will be used to develop strategies for strengthening NOAA Weather Radio’s resiliency and expanding access for digital audiences nationwide, NOAA said.

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.

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.

The four broadcast groups behind ATSC 3.0-based datacasting company EdgeBeam Wireless this week named Conrad Clemson to serve as its CEO.

Clemson takes the reins of the new joint venture company having led EditShare as CEO. Prior to EditShare, he founded and was CEO of BNI Video, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2011. At Cisco, he held senior leadership positions.

E.W. Scripps, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair, which formed the joint venture, are optimistic about EdgeBeam’s prospects. The new company will leverage a portion of the broadcasters’ spectrum to deliver data via an ATSC 3.0, one-to-many, over-the-air broadcast network.

Ultimately, datacasting via 3.0 could generate an entirely new revenue stream for the partners that boosts earnings and the value of their TV spectrum.

In this interview, the new EdgeBeam CEO discusses his priorities, when the company expects to begin generating revenue, its sales strategy, the competitive landscape and more. (An edited transcript follows.)

TV Tech: What are your top priorities as you take the reins at EdgeBeam Wireless?

Conrad Clemson: The first thing anybody does walking in is assess what the situation is. I'm a technologist by background, so I think of things oftentimes in a techie way.

As I was going through the process of getting to know the EdgeBeam team, I laid out the concepts of running the company in two-week sprints and then I laid out a six-month path.

The key place to start is really assessing where we are. As we come out with that assessment, the No. 2 thing is going out and building the team.

What I found with companies is that you really have three important elements that must come together: the team, the technology and the market.

We’ve got a great market out there. Everybody needs data. Technology, we understand what it is. We’re going to have to do some work to make sure we’re ready to commercialize it.

Then the real key is going out, understanding the team we have in place and what we’re going to do to supplement that to create the kind of team that’s going to build a multi-$100 million or billion-dollar company.

TVT: When do you think you will have your executive and sales teams in place?

CC: My hope is within three months, we'll have an executive team and the sales team in place.

We really need to understand where in the commercialization phase we are to understand how much we are looking at order-driving, execution-oriented sales teams vs. kind of the Marines storming the beach—business-development resources—that help us establish that initial beachhead.

My feeling is that early on, we're going to be doing more business development than sales as we’re out there establishing the market, establishing who EdgeBeam is and then driving forward.

But make no mistake about it. The most important thing we want to do is to commercialize the technology, and that will drive on the sales team.

This is going to be a very technically oriented sale to begin with. That means you have both a sales organization, but also the sales engineers that go with that. That’s a critical piece as well.

The other thing that will be very important for us to do is to really validate and build two key elements: our core culture and our senior leadership team. Then we can develop our strategy.

With those three pieces in place, it will be time to turn the crank and get the job done.

TVT: It’s a frequent refrain in the TV industry that some younger folks don’t recognize television is transmitted over the air. Others might have a vague understanding, but think of it as something grandma watches. I wonder if that extends into the boardrooms of your potential clients. If so, how do you change those perceptions and demonstrate 3.0 datacasting is a viable alternative to other wireless services?

CC: One of the things that really attracted me to EdgeBeam is there are a lot of wireless service providers out there and the sales program always goes the same way: “Hey, I’m faster; I’m cheaper and I have more coverage than the other guy.”

This is the first time in a long time that I think a company has a chance to come out and say, “We have something different to offer.”

We're not here to surf the web. We’re here because we have a differentiated wireless offering. If that offering aligns with the kinds of services you're trying to put out into the marketplace, we can just do it better.

We have unique strengths. The first thing is this is a network that is naturally a broadcast network, a point-to-multipoint network. What are the applications for one-to-many? There are a lot of those.

There are easy ones like [streaming offload for] high-value live events, be they sports, news or otherwise.

There’s downloading software to stuff and by the way, in the case of interesting things like automobiles, there’s a ton of downloads. Those are great point-to-multipoint applications. But then you look and ask what about stock tickers? What about betting tickers?

Then there’s the core strength of having a very powerful transmitter. If you’re in the middle of a city with buildings and parking garages, we are unique in our ability to put our signal through to your endpoint.

If you’re offering a 5G signal, it’s really good and it’s really fast, but it ain’t going to go through concrete.

Then there’s timing, which goes to positioning opportunities. We look at those three things that make us different from the other guys.

We can come and do something that, quite frankly, is better—not just a little bit of a minor difference [compared to wireless companies’ offerings].

TVT: I think the thing most people in this industry want to know is when EdgeBeam will earn its first 3.0-based datacasting dollar.

CC: Let me be like a classic entrepreneur. When are you going to sell one? When are you going to sell 100 and when are you going to sell a million?

I think the company remains hopeful that between now and the end of the year, we’ll sell one.

We don’t light up $10 million, or $100 million, or pick a number of revenue. That’s not the plan. I think we want our objective to be as quick as possible.

And don't hold me to December. It might be January. The point is in the near term, we should see first customer revenue.

How that grows is both driven by internal constraints—our ability to invest and go get that revenue—and the external constraints of EdgeBeam as a company, looking back to our spectrum granters and showing them we can do something meaningful with this spectrum. We want to earn the right to have more spectrum.

TVT: A few months ago, the National Association of Broadcasters petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to move forward on a plan to sunset ATSC 1.0. Will EdgeBeam remain viable if there's no movement on that sunset? If the sunset is established, what will that do for EdgeBeam’s business?

CC: We're going to make sure we’re ready to go, and we’ve got a great service. We know we can see some early wins, but we're going to be really thoughtful about not stepping on the gas ahead of where the real revenue—revenue with a capital R—is coming from.

TVT: Does that mean that if the industry remains stuck in the dual-standard DTV world, that you’ll be able to make a go of it with the 7 to 8 Megabits per second that are available today for 3.0 datacasting in transition markets?

CC: Absolutely. But we need to challenge ourselves with how we get creative. If the demand for our services is outstripping the capacity to provide them, that’s an opportunity for us to be smart technologists and go figure it out.

We’ll take the highest-value pieces and put them on the limited bandwidth that we have, and we will figure out how to go create some more bandwidth and be good engineers, innovators and entrepreneurs to do that.

TVT: When EdgeBeam was announced, the joint partner companies said there would be an opportunity for other broadcasters to profit from allocating some spectrum for EdgeBeam datacasting. Do you have any other details about how that will work or what it will look like?

CC: So, day one was Monday. It’s a little early to be having conversations with potential other partners.

Having said that, we intend to be an open environment. Our assumption is as we start to show success other broadcasters will look around and want to be a part of that.

I'll be excited to see that, but I would step back and say the first thing we have to prove is that the dog will eat the dog food. That will create the energy and the excitement in other broadcasters to want to be a part of this, too.

TVT: At the risk of mixing metaphors, what low-hanging fruit are you targeting to demonstrate the dog food is tasty?

CC: We’re seeing a lot of traction in e-GPS [enhanced GPS], and I think the IoT [Internet of Things] market is ripe. I think those are all markets we can start exploiting quickly with fast turnarounds.

But some of the markets we are going to attack are multiyear engagements. It’s time to get those started, as well, with a clear understanding that we need to balance the risk-reward [ratio] and make sure that as a small company we’re focusing our limited resources in the right place.

TVT: Do you have any idea about how your rates will stack up against your wireless competitors?

CC: Good question. And to be honest with you, I don’t know the answer to that at the moment.

Having said that, I think one of the things that we can really strive for is to provide very deterministic costs for customers out there trying to bring those things [their data] onto our network.

As a young company coming into this environment, I think we have the opportunity to look at what our end customers are trying to accomplish and create pricing models that line up with that and have a great advantage.

The question for our end clients is, what kind of an economic value proposition can we bring to them? One in which they look at us and say, “this is a great opportunity,” because they know exactly what it is going to cost, independent of how many people watch it [or how many end points receive the datacast].

TVT: Among the four joint venture partners, two different broadcast core network solutions were in use as three of the four deployed their previous iterations of 3.0-based datacasting. I was told in previous interviews that the one chosen for EdgeBeam would be up to the new CEO. What have you chosen?

CC: The easy answer would be great. That would be there’s a single one that everybody has that’s fully deployed, and we only have to operate with one element out there.

The last time I checked, there were at least two of these things that were deployed out in the network. If you look into an IP network and ask whose routers are being used, well, they use multiple people’s routers.

When you’re building a mobile network, whose packet core gets used? There are four or five of them out there. So, I wouldn't want to preclude [any of them] and say: “The answer has to be A, or B or A and B.”

We’re going to have to look and see what's in there and what has the capabilities needed. My guess is, in all likelihood, we’ll have to go through a process of both rationalizing that and understanding what makes sense and what we should do out there. Then, we’ll make that decision over time.

TVT: Is there anything else you’d like to share about EdgeBeam?

CC: A couple of things. First, what a great time it is to be standing up a company. I’ve been working with the teams here for a couple of months, and I will tell you this is a world-class set of companies and investors to be working with.

The other thing is this is ground zero. This is the fourth company I’ve been a part of in a very early stage of growth and development.

I think this is a really interesting time in the industry to start taking advantage of AI tools that are coming online. Not stuff that we’re building into the product, but rather AI technologies and new capabilities that will help us as we think about the internal workings of the company in a native-AI fashion.

More information about EdgeBeam Wireless is available on the company’s website.

ATLANTA, BALTIMORE, CINCINNATI and IRVING, Texas—The four major broadcast groups behind the ATSC 3.0-based EdgeBeam Wireless datacasting joint venture today named Conrad Clemson as CEO after a monthslong search.

Clemson comes to the new role with decades of leadership experience in broadcast, media, telecommunications and technology innovation. Most recently, Clemson served as CEO of EditShare and earlier in his career was the founder and CEO of BNI Video, a pioneer in service management platforms for pay TV. Clemson later held senior leadership positions at Cisco, which acquired the company.

“I'm honored to join EdgeBeam at this pivotal moment,” said Clemson. “With the collective support and scale of our founding partners—Scripps, Gray, Nexstar and Sinclair—we have a unique opportunity to redefine wireless delivery for enterprises through the power of ATSC 3.0 and IP-based infrastructure.”

The four joint venture partners in EdgeBeam have a combined footprint the exceeds 90% of the country—something the broadcasters deem as essential for offering a viable wireless data delivery service based on one-to-many 3.0 broadcast transmission. The broadcast groups have expressed confidence that EdgeBeam effectively addresses the fragmented nature of the broadcast business. EdgeBeam aims to make transactions and data delivery fast and painless for customers.

Clemson will lead the build-out of EdgeBeam’s platform and operations, fulfilling the shared vision of its founders for nationwide, next-generation data delivery, EdgeBeam said.

The founders of EdgeBeam wish to cash in on the needs of many large businesses to deliver wireless data reliably to multiple endpoints without incurring the expense of doing so via unicast networks. Among the first markets to be targeted are streaming offload, automotive and enhanced GPS.

More information is available on the new EdgeBeam Wireless website.

At the 2025 NAB Show in April, four of the most prominent TV station groups announced the launch of EdgeBeam, a new datacasting service targeting the enterprise market. The four groups—Sinclair, Nexstar Media Group, Gray Media and E.W. Scripps—plan to use the ATSC 3.0 standard as a more efficient “one-to-many” data offload service that could be used, for instance, by the automotive industry for software updates.

In the following interview, TV Tech Editor in Chief Tom Butts talks with Sinclair Broadcast Group CEO Chris Ripley about the joint venture.

TV Tech: What specific market demands led the four broadcast groups to form EdgeBeam Wireless as a joint venture rather than pursuing separate initiatives?
Chris Ripley: There’s a handful of reasons that we decided to do a joint venture. No. 1 is that currently no broadcaster on their own covers the entire country, but together the four of us cover 98% of the country [either 1.0 or 3.0] and then also spectrum density within each market is increased, so that allows for more services to be added in any one market. And the second reason is that these are new businesses we are going into. This is datacasting, and be it enhanced GPS streaming, offload, automotive, these are all areas that we don't currently have expertise in our companies today—or wireless systems as well.

So building a new company—and each one of us doing it on our own and building the same infrastructure from scratch that you would need to run a new core system and have a different set of customers and solutions—would be incredibly inefficient. It's sort of like the same reason why, in the early days of telecom, for instance, there was just one telecom provider in any one market, because it made sense to do all that work and buildout. That’s more of an extreme example, but it's a similar rationale. There is a certain amount of technology and infrastructure that needs to be built out, and it just wouldn't make sense for each of us to do it on our own.

TVT: When do you anticipate announcing your first customer and how important is it to have a marquee, household name?
CR: We already have trial customers. We haven't announced anything yet. We are very close to hiring a CEO to lead EdgeBeam and whether to announce customers, that's a decision for him.

TVT: Who would be your typical customers and how will EdgeBeam distinguish itself from competitors?
CR: There are several different ways that the system distinguishes itself. No. 1, it can do things that other systems can't do—a good example of that is stream and offload.

Once you get above a certain number of users or streamers in any one market, all viewing the same content like a big NFL game, for instance, or the Tyson fight [last fall], the quality has to go down in order to facilitate that same number of concurrent users. So I think there's a stat that one CDN player put out that if you were to aggregate all of the capacity of the internet and all the CDNs globally, they could only handle 10% of the peak broadcast mode—“broadcasts” used more generally in terms of content linear channels. And that's wired, not wireless, so there just simply isn't enough capacity to shift all of the viewing and take the peaks.

When you build a system, you don't have to build it for the peaks—and the peaks are quite large when you have big events, for instance. And if you're going to stream everything, which is quote the future video, unquote, you find out pretty quickly that, a) the infrastructure doesn't exist today, and b) the amount of money that would have to go in for it to exist doesn't make sense. So you need another solution, and broadcast is a great solution for that.

Broadcasters are also very good at delivering precise time within milliseconds—it's just as good as GPS at delivering precise time. And that's why you hear a lot about BPS, which is the backup system that NAB has been promoting to various government agencies that are looking for a directional backup to GPS. And that's just a capability built into ATSC 3.0—specifically the “bootstrap,” and that's where the precise time is put. And it's very durable for us to pick up, and it can operate with no connectivity to the internet and no connectivity to GPS. So that's a really unique characteristic of the system that gives it an advantage over other systems.

Another example is it's very high power, and it's not easily jammed. So there's other companies looking at how they can use our signals, our 3.0 signal wave forms, and bounce them off of aircraft and drones and use that to detect low lying small aircraft—that's another sort of capability that other systems just don't have.

And then the other advantage we have is cost and that’s because we're a one to many system. So if you've got a situation where you want to get a lot of the same data to a lot of people, then we're going to be just inherently more cost effective. A great example of that is software updates to cars. Those software updates are pretty much the same software that they want to send out to the entire fleet, and if you're paying cellular rates on a one to one basis, the other car manufacturers are just getting killed on that, so they're very interested in how they can send their software updates through our system.

And the other advantage is that we already have the existing infrastructure—this is a business that we're tacking on to our core business, and it doesn't use the excess capacity. It doesn't take away from our business; it uses the same infrastructure. There is an investment we have to do to overlay this business, but it's tiny compared to what wireless players had to pay to acquire spectrum, build towers, build the network. So our marginal cost and our ability to go one to many gives us a massive cost advantage.

TVT: And as the technology develops, the cost of deploying it will go down, correct?
CR: Right, we're either going to compete on capabilities or costs—those are the two vectors, and I think we have advantages of both and and I do think as as more capacity becomes available, and more stations are converted, costs can come down and EdgeBeam will potentially be the only game in town. For some of these solutions, I think that they will likely want to bring down costs over time, because as the market expands, that'll bring in more customers. And so there's a balance of cost vs. maximum revenue.

TVT: Would the four companies that make up EdgeBeam consider investing in getting 3.0 chips deployed for the service?
CR: Yes, the services that we're mainly focused on are more business to business than business to consumer. So obviously, chips are out there on TVs and we think that that market is going to grow quite robustly, especially now that we're setting up a sunset of 1.0 with the FCC, and the dongle market, I think, is going to be quite significant—that'll be driven out of that sunset.

Some of the services that we're looking at, like, for instance enhanced GPS which has been trialed, we have receive devices—they're bespoke, receive devices that people use, mainly other businesses, like utilities, etc. We think that a drone market will be a big, big, big market for precise GPS or enhanced GPS, and so those are going to be receivers that we've designed and obviously, they'll probably be built by someone else. We are investing in receivers, and in terms of moving into more broad consumer receive capability, like in phones—like what we're doing in India with the cooperation of our Indian partners and the public broadcaster, I think remains to be seen. Right now we're focused mainly on B2B.

TVT: In 2024, Sinclair announced the launch of the Broadspan datacasting service that you were doing with Edgio. What's the status of that?
CR: Broadspan is alive and well. It is the software that powers the network. So we're using it, other broadcasters are using it, and it is the traffic system that will allow data to flow through our stations. And you need something like that to actually make this work.

TVT: What is the role of the FCC in the deployment of EdgeBeam? Are there any technical issues that the FCC will have to deal with, or is it mainly regulatory in terms of the shutdown of 3.0 and ownership?
CR: What was submitted to the FCC by the NAB [in April] encapsulates what we need the FCC to do, which is draw a line in the sand for the industry and say that we know we're transitioning by Feb. 15 of 2028, that we—collectively as an industry—agreed to and so we really just need the FCC to follow through on that proposal.

TVT: What kind of conversations have you had with other broadcasters since you announced the launch? What have you heard from people outside of the joint venture?
CR: We've gotten a lot of interest from broadcasters about joining EdgeBeam but right now, we're focused on building the team. We expect to announce the CEO shortly, and so we've just told people, sit tight, we’re building the team but there will be opportunities for them to join.

TVT: Will you be able to announce customers before the end of the year?
CR: That strategy is going to be up to the new CEO, but I do think we will have customers before the end of the year.

TVT: What do you anticipate will be the first type of application EdgeBeam will be used for?
CR: It's already being used for enhanced GPS in several markets. So I think that’s going to be the first use case.

TVT: How do you think the development of BPS is going to impact EdgeBeam
CR: That’s a separate initiative but I think EdgeBeam will be incredibly helpful to getting BPS done. We're very involved in it as is Nexstar and other broadcasters with NAB. And we've lit up BPS in Baltimore and Nexstar has done it in Denver. So I think EdgeBeam can be very helpful if we get the order from the government to roll it out, which I think we will.

TVT: In what ways could the emergence of EdgeBeam impact the financial valuation of broadcasters spectrum holdings, and how might this shift investor perception in the industry?
CT: I think it could have a huge impact there. When you do the math on how much excess spectrum, or how much more we can do with our spectrum, once we transfer to 3.0, because it uses higher compression standards, you get a lot more capacity, and I suspect that many broadcasters will add more content—that's our core business.

That's what happened in the analog to digital transition; it was the same sized pipe, but we had a more efficient pipe and we ended up filling it with more content, more channels, and that's been great for the consumer. And I suspect that when we sunset 1.0 and we free up all the capacity that is wasted putting out two standards at the same time, more content will come, but also datacasting.

So it's a very significant expansion of the revenue opportunities for the industry. When you think about what can be done mathematically with this same spectrum we have today, we ultimately think some of these datacasting solutions could be more lucrative than the data for the core business. For streaming, offload, enhanced GPS and automotive, the total addressable market in those areas is like $50 billion; the total addressable market for broadcast is $40 billion. So we're going to be able to play in much bigger areas and diversify our revenue streams and have much more opportunity.

TVT: What types of partnerships do you anticipate having outside of the broadcast industry, and what kind of partnerships are important for the future of EdgeBeam?
CR: We've got a lot of those talks going on, especially as we are developing various use cases and then productizing those. Certain people that were developing those products with our partners, potential partners could be broader partners like with a CDN, for instance. I also think we’re very likely going to partner with a wireless player, like an AT&T or Verizon or an auto manufacturer.

There's a fine line between who's a customer and who's a partner, right? But I think that some will be customers and some will be more strategic partners that will help us expand the service throughout various target industries.

HC2 Broadcasting, a station group that advocates the adoption of 5G Broadcasting for the U.S. broadcasting industry, is asking the FCC to approve the standard for low power TV stations to move to potentially move to an all datacasting model.

The request comes a year after the group, which owns 131 LPTV/Class A stations and four full power stations, asked the commission to allow two Connecticut LPTVs conduct experimental broadcasts 5G Broadcasts. The FCC approved the first experimental 5G Broadcast station—Milachi Media's WWOO-LD in Boston in 2023.

HC2 has been working with XGN Networks, a start-up led by "SuperFrank" Copsidas to allow broadcasters to adopt 5G Broadcast as a voluntary alternative to ATSC 3.0/NextGen TV, which was approved by the FCC in 2017 and is currently available to about 76% of U.S. TV households.

5G Broadcasting is a direct to mobile platform that runs independently of any other service on a smartphone chip be it cell service, satellite, wifi, or Bluetooth. Advocates, including the “5G Broadcast Collective”—which includes HC2, Malachi Media and the LPTV Broadcasters Association—say broadcasters can deploy 5G Broadcast by replacing their current exciter with 5G Broadcast exciter with modulator and 5G core software, without impacting the station’s current transmitter and antenna.

Although 5G Broadcast has been approved by international standards bodies, the standard has not been approved for commercial use in the U.S. and there are no mobile devices on the market that can receive such 5G Broadcasts in this country.

Although HC2’s petition doesn’t ask the LPTV to abandon current rules that require them to broadcast at least one free-to-air standard definition (“SD”) signal, it does want the commission to explore a potential all video-free future.

(Read: "What is 5G Broadcast?")

“With the remaining capacity available for ancillary and supplementary services, the Commission should examine whether the time has come to allow all 6 MHz of LPTV spectrum to be exclusively devoted to datacasting without the need for a free-to-air signal, given the ubiquitous nature of 5G-capable devices.”

Datacasting is nothing new for U.S. broadcasters. PBS has partnered with public safety and educational organizations to test datacasting over ATSC 3.0 and commercial broadcasters such as Sinclair, Nexstar Scripps and Gray have teamed up to launch Edgebeam to use 3.0 for enterprise datacasting services.

Spectrum Efficiency
HC2 says it is petitioning the FCC for several reasons based on LPTV’s business model and the public interest.

“The technology allows an LPTV station to transmit a single 5G signal to its entire service area, which can be received by any compatible mobile device,” HC2 said. “5G Broadcast thus provides both the spectrum efficiency of the one-to-many structure of broadcast operations and access to compatible mobile devices on existing 5G networks. LPTV stations utilizing 5G Broadcast are poised to deliver numerous benefits across multiple services, including enhanced programming, datacasting, connectivity, and public safety."

HC2 added that adopting its proposal “would require very few rule modifications,” and that the rue changes are aimed at “authorizing its use by LPTV stations on a voluntary basis.”

It also said that LPTV broadcasters would continue to operate according to FCC rules.

"LPTV stations that voluntarily choose to operate in 5G Broadcast mode would be required to comply with all of the existing technical requirements for LPTV stations… including maximum power levels and emission requirements," adding that “because there is no proposed increase in power levels or in unwanted emissions, there is no greater potential for increased harmful interference to any other broadcast or non-broadcast users than there would be from LPTV stations using the ATSC 1.0 or ATSC 3.0 transmission standard.”

LPTVs are Different
HC2 also argued that the LPTV sector has been treated differently than full-power stations during the current transition to ATSC 3.0., and that because LPTV stations are not required to also carry 1.0 simulcasts, the industry is better positioned to experiment with 5G Broadcast.

“LPTV stations have been less engaged in the ATSC 3.0 conversion, and the majority of LPTV stations still operate in ATSC 1.0 mode,” the petition said. “Indeed, in recognition of the fact that LPTV stations are fundamentally different from full power TV stations when it comes to ATSC 3.0, the Commission specifically authorized LPTV stations to 'flash-cut' to ATSC 3.0 without being obligated to continue airing an ATSC 1.0 simulcast. Full power TV stations, in contrast, are subject to a burdensome ATSC 1.0 simulcasting requirement when they voluntarily elect to broadcast in ATSC 3.0.”

HC2 also said it was not asking for any mandates requiring consumer electronics manufacturers to make devices compatible with the standard.

“Importantly, unlike the recent petition requesting a hard transition date for converting TV stations from ATSC 1.0 to ATSC 3.0, this Petition would not impose any mandates on TV receiver manufacturers or require multichannel video programming distributors (“MVPDs”) to make any changes to their physical infrastructure,” they said.

HC2 argued that 5G Broadcast represents the next generation of television, contrasting it with ATSC 3.0’s approach.

“Like ATSC 3.0, 5G Broadcast transmissions eventually may be receivable on conventional television sets, depending on market conditions,” they said. “HC2 is not proposing that TV manufacturers be obligated to include 5G Broadcast-capability within their sets because the marketplace should decide that issue. Moreover, even though the concept of solely ‘in the home' TV viewing may now be considered quaint, the marketplace of TV 'receivers' in today’s world is now essentially anyone with a handheld compatible 5G device, in any location.”

It also called for the signals to be unencrypted and “freely available to any viewer with a compatible device or receiver, without the use of a decoder.”

HC2 says current tests have been very positive. “Preliminary results… confirm that 5G Broadcast reception from on-site trial receivers has been excellent, with strong signal reception as far as 20 or more miles away from the transmission site.”

HC2 said its proposal is consistent with FCC rules that require using spectrum that is most beneficial to the public interest and issued a challenge to opponents, quoting FCC rules that “[a]ny person or party (other than the Commission) who opposes a new technology or service proposed to be permitted under this chapter shall have the burden to demonstrate that such proposal is inconsistent with the public interest.”

Although FCC Chairman Brendon Carr is bullish on advancing 5G technologies, his position on "5G Broadcast" is less known. However, he has called for new spectrum auctions that could impact its future.

It’s still early days for EdgeBeam Wireless, the joint venture of E.W. Scripps Co., Sinclair, Gray Media and Nexstar Media Group aiming to deliver datacasting service nationwide via ATSC 3.0, but that does not mean the new company is starting from a standstill.

While EdgeBeam interviews prospective CEOs and begins putting in place a sales organization, customer service and other essential personnel, it enters the business of delivering wireless IP data with the seeds BitPath and OTA Wireless have sown by developing prospects and customers beginning to sprout, Sinclair President and CEO Chris Ripley said.

BitPath, a spectrum consortium of Sinclair and Nexstar, as well as the Scripps-Nexstar OTA Wireless joint venture, will be folded into EdgeBeam along with customers and relationships already under development. “BitPath is already signing up trial customers for enhanced GPS,” Ripley said. “That’s a product in flight.

“Streaming offload and automotive connectivity, those are efforts that are already in flight but at the various EdgeBeam partner companies, and those are being contributed as well,” he said. “So, although EdgeBeam is sort of booting up and hiring people, it’s going to be a warm handoff of these activities.”

Launching the joint venture with the backing of these major broadcast groups to make 3.0-based datacasting a commercial enterprise is a positive development for the broadcast industry, said Rick Ducey, managing director of BIA Advisory Services.

“It’s encouraging to see these kinds of commitments by four companies to work together to try to develop this datacasting space for the industry and have a new revenue stream that complements advertising and maybe replaces retransmission,” Ducey said. “It’s a place they have to go.”

EdgeBeam makes it easier for data customers to transact with broadcasters because it will offer a central point of contact to access broadcast spectrum for data delivery, Scripps President and CEO Adam Symson said.

“We as individuals [the four station groups] spent some time developing industry relationships, and what became very clear was that on the buy side of the data services business, they want to be able to have one conversation with an agent in order to reach customers across the country,” Symson said.

“The fragmented nature of the broadcast business precluded that kind of success. So, creating this joint venture allows this company to serve the marketplace in the way that the marketplace deserves to be served.”

Strength In Numbers
At its launch last week, EdgeBeam Wireless noted the combined footprint of the four station groups exceeds 90% of the United States. As of this writing, 76% of Nielsen households are covered by a NextGen TV signal.

“Whether or not all of that has been converted to ATSC 3.0 is beside the point because it will be,” said Symson, who added that the EdgeBeam launch comes at a time when Federal Communications Commission leadership will be changing, which may “catalyze the opportunity for the conversion to 3.0.”

Beyond the four station groups, the new joint venture will invite other broadcasters to come onboard by contributing spectrum for datacasting to fill out the network. At the moment, however, specifics of such arrangements are unavailable. “That’s going to be up to the EdgeBeam team to span out and sign up additional broadcasters,” Ripley said.

EdgeBeam offers its four joint venture founders and any other broadcaster choosing to join in a way to diversify revenue streams. A revenue scenario BIA released in November 2021 predicted that annual industry revenues could reach $6.4 billion by 2030, with an average utilization of 3 Megabits per second devoted to datacasting.

“With respect to the media marketplace and broadcasting, [diversifying revenue sources is] going to be critical if Americans want to maintain local journalism, local sports and localism,” Symson said. “It’s going to be critical that we be allowed to identify new ways for us to monetize our spectrum.”

But diversifying revenue sources promises to strengthen more than the bottom line. As incoming FCC chair Brendan Carr has raised the specter of a new incentive auction, taking steps to build the value of broadcast spectrum is a smart thing to do, Ripley said.

“If we're able to monetize the spectrum more effectively, provide value-added services to the consumers and create more competition within the wireless ecosystem, that is going to up the value of our spectrum,” he said.

“To the extent that we are successful in adding additional use cases to our spectrum through EdgeBeam, that will increase the value of our spectrum and therefore the threshold [price] broadcasters would be willing to accept in order to have to sell their spectrum.”

Service Details
At this point, many of the details, such as specific service pricing, what core network technology will be used to distribute data to the edge for transmission and what financial commitment each of the partners made to the joint venture are unknown.

What is known is that EdgeBeam Wireless is an independent organization, with a mission to create value through datacasting.

“For me, that was what I needed to see happen,” Symson said. “I didn’t want EdgeBeam to be encumbered by legacy thinking or by legacy risk profiles over different views on capital allocation.”

Pricing has not yet been determined; however, for many applications it will be less than the $1 to $2 per gigabit, which is common for wireless service, Ripley said.

At this point, it is unclear whether a single core broadcast network technology will be deployed to serve data streams to transmitters for distribution or a combination of technologies will be used. At last year’s NAB Show, Sinclair unveiled its Broadspan broadcast core network platform and has since deployed it. Others in the joint venture have deployed solutions from HPE, which in May 2024 announced its was divesting of its Communications Technology Group.

“The JV is in an evaluation period as to what technology to use,” Ripley said. “We’ll have to see whether we end up staying with a multi-technology situation, or we have one solution for everything. That’s to be determined.”

By early April at the NAB Show, Ripley is hopeful EdgeBeam will have its new management team in place and will be introducing itself and some of its products to the industry. Both Symson and Ripley are optimistic EdgeBeam will have its first paying customer before the end of the year, and possibly within months, they said.

That is a critical milestone for EdgeBeam and its partners, Ducey said. “Once it becomes material as a financial event, BIA and those in the station valuation business will start factoring it into our discounted cash flow models as will the equity analysts,” he said.

“They’ll say, ‘Oh, this is actual revenue coming in now. What’s the cost basis? What's the revenue? Is this scalable and sustainable? Is it recurring?’ Then they're going to start to adjust their models.”

Whether that creates higher spectrum value for an auction scenario or it simply creates greater shareholder value, adding a complementary revenue source strengthens broadcasters.

“All businesses need to continue to innovate and develop new revenue streams, and so do we,” Ripley said. “We had a great year. Our retrans continues to grow, and we’re growing core ad revenue.

“But if we don’t add another revenue stream, the industry is going to be in trouble longer-term. Having a new revenue streams and new growth opportunities in the hopper is what this is all about.”

(Editor’s note: Gray Media and Nexstar Media Group were contacted for comment but declined.)

LAS VEGAS—At this week’s CES here (Jan. 7-10), the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) is showcasing a number of new NextGen TV/ATSC 3.0 receivers, gear, services and improvements to the broadcasting standard at its booth in Central Hall 20340.

The group reported that a host of new ATSC 3.0 receivers and enhanced broadcast services will reach U.S. consumers this year, with RCA launching a lineup of NextGen TV sets and new ATSC 3.0 accessory receivers from ADTH, MyVelo, Stavix, Vbox, Zapperbox and Zinwell among the new consumer products showcased at ATSC’s booth.

Expanded High Dynamic Range, interactive gaming, and digital signage options are also on show this week, as local stations and networks take advantage of the key benefits of next-generation broadcasting—including the ability to launch virtual channels with internet connections, the group said.

The displays come at as the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard is now widely deployed in the U.S., South Korea and Jamaica, with Brazil also recommending ATSC 3.0 to power its DTV+ service. Additionally, tests of ATSC 3.0 broadcasts are on the air in Trinidad and Tobago, India, Mexico, and Canada, the group said.

“More than three-quarters of U.S. viewers now have access to NextGen TV broadcasts, and at CES we’re very pleased to see the addition of RCA as a sixth TV manufacturer to join the roster of those offering NextGen TV sets, a list that now includes nearly 100 different receiver models,” Madeleine Noland, president of ATSC, said. “The first affordable USB-style receivers will also soon be available from ADTH for Android and Fire TV devices. These new products will reach even more consumers, with millions already enjoying NextGen TV receivers at home.” Panasonic recently returned to the U.S. television market with several OLED models powered by Fire TV equipped with NextGen TV electronics, and the addition of RCA in 2025 will bring even more choices to consumers planning a display upgrade.

More specifically, the group said that technologies from six TV and six accessory device manufacturers are on display this week at the ATSC booth at CES, including more than a dozen different types of NextGen TV products, device software offerings from Tolka and Mirakulo, the Run3TV broadcast application, and Advanced HDR from Technicolor. NextGen TV displays from Hisense, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, RCA, and TCL are in the ATSC exhibit, as are ATSC 3.0 accessory receivers from ADTH, MyVelo, Stavix, Vbox, Zapperbox, and Zinwell.

In addition, ATSC’s NextGen TV “Wall of Champions” in its booth highlights growing investment across the ecosystem. “We invite CES attendees to experience all these innovations in person at the booth. Plan your visit for 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 7, to join us for a much-deserved coffee break sponsored by Rohde & Schwarz,” Noland said.

ATSC will be showcasing NextGen TV’s ability to transmit digital data for new purposes such as digital signage. ATSC will feature a new signage kiosk equipped with everything necessary to offer messaging—including an antenna for over-the-air reception, a receiver and on-board storage and playback. In the ATSC booth, the signage kiosk managed by USSI Global will feature local headline news, traffic and weather updates, emergency alerting and advertising messages and promotions from KTVN-TV, the Las Vegas ABC affiliate owned by E.W. Scripps.

Also on display will be enhanced services from broadcasters for HDR and interactivity.

More than 200 NextGen TV services in the U.S. now include HDR, with many also adding immersive Dolby Atmos audio to daily broadcasts, the group said.

At CES, Sinclair is showing a side-by-side demonstration of the eye-popping consumer benefits of HDR, highlighting the enhanced picture quality made possible with ATSC 3.0 HDR broadcasts compared to standard ATSC 1.0 digital TV broadcasts. Local stations started adding HDR to sports broadcasts in 2024, greatly expanding offerings that take advantage of what the ATSC 3.0 standard makes possible. Today, more than 80 million viewers have access to NextGen TV with HDR.

In terms of interactivity, ATSC said that many stations are enhancing local content with the Run3TV broadcast app, which offers on-demand programming from local stations and opens the door for interactive content such as program restart and hyperlocal weather forecasts. The ATSC exhibit will also demonstrate gaming over NextGenTV by GameLoop, which is launching a new channel and its “Play Now” feature, which allows NextGen TV viewers to instantly play games showcased on the channel by using their TV remote or mobile phone.

In addition, broadcasters are also using the ATSC 3.0’s internet protocol backbone to add channels and local content streamed through internet connections, the group said.

For more information, visit www.atsc.org.

CHANTILLY, Va.—Datacasting solutions provider SpectraRep has appointed George Molnar as its chief technology officer.

Molnar will draw on his 25 years of experience in crisis and emergency management technologies to spearhead SpectraRep’s national public alerting datacasting network for public safety and government and commercial communications, the company said.

"SpectraRep is delighted to expand our team with broadcast and public safety veteran George Molnar,” SpectraRep president Mark O’Brien said. “Molnar’s dual background in broadcast engineering and statewide interoperability coordination will be invaluable as we continue to build our nationwide datacasting network for public alerting and encrypted public safety tools. His technical expertise will enable us to expand our operational goals while coordinating key partnerships with state and local officials.“

Molnar’s extensive experience and education includes his tenure as senior director of technology at all-news radio station WTOP Washington, D.C., where he led technical and operations IT, broadcast activities supporting newsroom and production activities and disaster recovery facilities, SpectraRep said.

He was also director of engineering and management, WARN Project, PBS, where he led a cross-functional team and multimillion-dollar effort to update the PBS WARN system to comply with new Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) requirements. In addition he held emergency management positions with CyberSafeNV and the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, where he was actively engaged in initiatives focused on public, business and school safety.

“I am excited to join the SpectraRep team, where I can combine my experience and commitment to broadcasting and public safety with the company’s proven solutions," Molnar said. “SpectraRep’s innovative approach to emergency alerts through datacasting is transformative, especially given the need for reliable alerting across the nation. I will be laser-focused on our goal of efficiently and quickly establishing a nationwide network of stations dedicated to keeping communities safe and informed during critical times."

SpectraRep’s emergency alert datacasting services are active at more than 130 public television stations. The company has announced a strategic goal of creating a nationwide public alerting system in 2025.

TORONTO—The city of Calgary and Humber Polytechnic's Broadcast-Broadband Convergence B2C Lab have entered what is believed to be North America’s first ATSC 3.0 municipal use project.

The multiyear collaboration between the city and Humber, a public university in Toronto, will examine how NextGen TV can improve municipal services and enhance efficiency by making Calgary a more connected city.

“Having access to the digital world is now more important than ever, and ATSC 3.0 has great potential as a capacity multiplier to help all Calgarians gain equitable access and be part of the online world,” said Erin Ruttan, IT project manager leading Calagry’s ATSC 3.0 and digital equity efforts. “Connections make our neighborhoods strong. But when many of those connections happen online, it can be challenging for some people to be part of the community. We are keen to look at ways we can use ATSC 3.0 technology to make lives better for all the people in our community.”

The project aims to improve city services and build digital equity. The project will focus on designing, building and testing several over-the-air ATSC 3.0 datacasting applications. They include:

• Secure and improved communication for emergency responder networks.
• Targeted public emergency alerting.
• Dynamic digital municipal signage.
• Remote education access.
• Resilient timing and navigation solutions in case of GPS disruption.

The first phase of the project, expected to continue through December 2025, will involve experimental broadcasts using a single transmitter installed at the Harvard broadcast tower in Calgary. The transmitter

will be directly connected to Humber’s B2C Lab in Toronto.

Humber staff and students will oversee implementation of applications, signal processing and data transmission live from Toronto to Calgary.

“As the home of North America's first Broadcast-Broadband Convergence Lab, Humber Polytechnic is at the forefront of developing next-generation television and data delivery applications enabled by the ATSC 3.0 standard,” Ann Marie Vaughan, president and CEO of Humber Polytechnic, said. “This collaboration with the city of Calgary demonstrates the significant impact Humber is making nationally and the importance of collaborating with like-minded partners who are excited to push boundaries and explore innovative solutions that can be applied across various industries, from emergency response to digital education, all while providing hands-on opportunities for our students to engage in research and development.”

Fifteen years ago this month, U.S. broadcasters “cut the cord” on NTSC, shutting down analog TV and putting the finishing touches on a transition to digital that lasted more than a decade. 

Viewer response was fairly muted, but that’s because broadcasters, regulators and consumer electronics companies rightly anticipated an outcry if too many viewers lost access to a free over-the-air signal. Navigating the deadline to shut down analog was a frustrating process as all parties involved attempted to assemble the variety of moving parts that made up the transition.

In the summer of 2024, the industry is looking at the next shutdown—the end of ATSC 1.0. Despite the arduous task that faced broadcasters in the 2000s during the first transition, this next transition could be even harder to achieve.

Comparing the two transitions is apples to oranges. The first transition was mainly based on regulatory guidelines that in essence, forced industries to cooperate toward a common goal. The cable, broadcast and consumer electronics industries were also facing a far less complex media ecosystem where there was less competition for eyeballs. And perhaps the biggest factor was the decrease in prices for large screen 16:9 flat screens that aligned with broadcasters’ move to HDTV, a very noticeable and welcome advance for home viewers.

What Do You Get With NextGen TV?
The transition to ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGen TV) is touted as “market-driven” with a lighter regulatory touch than the move to 1.0. There are no specific deadlines for stations to deploy the standard nor are there any mandates to provide tuners in any receiving devices. There aren’t any mandates for broadcasters to provide anything more than simulcasting ATSC 1.0. 

And, in contrast to the first transition, broadcasters face a much more complex media landscape and Silicon Valley competitors with far deeper pockets and much less to lose if a particular experimental service failed (remember Quibi?). It’s also harder to get viewers who are now used to getting their programs in 4K and HDR to get excited about 4K HDR broadcasts. 

Mark Aitken, senior vice president of advanced technology for Sinclair Broadcast Group would beg to differ on that front. 

“HDR is very significant, and one of the promises of the ATSC 3.0 standard is better television for America’s living rooms,” Aitken said at this year’s NAB Show. “It was the focus of the ATSC at this year’s CES. CBS’s delivery of the February Super Bowl LVIII in HDR should spur others to add this enhancement to their ATSC 3.0 transmissions and I expect to see announcements from other networks,” said Aitken, who added that some 40 Sinclair stations are on the air with Advanced HDR by Technicolor. 

Aitken’s sentiments are echoed by Anne Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV, the consortium of broadcasters and manufacturers promoting NextGen TV, who discussed how local Louisville, Ky. TV stations promoted HDR, 4K and Atmos immersive audio in their local 3.0 broadcasts during the week leading up to the 2024 Kentucky Derby. Local stations partnered with a local retailer to give away NextGen TV sets and promotions on their websites attracted “a significant increase in traffic.”

“I think that is a good indicator of the interest in HDR,” she said. Schelle also noted Pearl’s recent announcement that several large station groups, including Gray Television, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Hearst Television, Tegna and The E.W. Scripps Co. will accelerate funding of the ATSC 3.0 Framework Authority (A3FA), the driving force behind the RUN3TV platform. Pearl TV says it expects additional broadcast groups to become involved in the future.

“RUN3TV is  built by broadcasters for broadcasters and it allows companies who built on the platform to easily build applications and try out unique features and have them be able to work across the multitudes of operating systems that are currently out there and more to come,” she said.

A new partnership with ROXi to launch interactive music channels, as well as NBC’s announcement that affiliates in top markets are launching ancillary services via NextGen TV were among the other 3.0 highlights announced at the NAB Show in April. 

Beyond consumer applications, broadcasters are also using a portion of their spectrum to deploy new datacasting services. Also at the NAB Show, Sinclair launched its “Broadspan” datacast service in partnership with Edgio. The new service will enable data distribution in all the current markets where Sinclair stations are offering ATSC 3.0 broadcasts. Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley invited other station groups to join the service. 

Bandwidth Constraints
While all of these new capabilities are brought to us via the ingenious capability of ATSC 3.0’s combination of broadcast with IP, there’s only so much bandwidth available and that bandwidth is further constrained by the 1.0 simulcasting requirement.

At presstime, ATSC 3.0 has been launched by more than 91 stations in 40 markets, bringing the advanced broadcast standard to within reach of more than 75% of U.S. households. Pearl TV says it expects that number to grow to more than 200 stations in 53 markets by the end of 2024.

Most of those stations are simulcasting 3.0 with 1.0 over “lighthouse” transmission partnerships in which one local station offers up its transmission facilities to “host” the other 3.0 stations in particular markets. This requirement is in place during the transition to ATSC 3.0. Originally, the FCC imposed a 2025 deadline to end 1.0 simulcasting but in 2023, moved the date to July 17, 2027. The decision was in part predicated by the industry’s exhortations to the commission earlier in the year about a “stalled” transition.  

In response, FCC Chairman Jessica Rosenworcel announced the formation of the “Future of TV” task force at the 2023 NAB Show, inviting all industry players to work together towards a successful conclusion of the transition to 3.0. 

“This Future of Television initiative will gather industry, government, and public interest stakeholders to establish a roadmap for a transition to ATSC 3.0 that serves the public interest” Rosenworcel said at the time. “A successful transition will provide for an orderly shift from ATSC 1.0 to ATSC 3.0 and will allow broadcasters to innovate while protecting consumers, especially those most vulnerable.”    

‘Frank’ and ‘Candid’
The FCC asked the NAB to take the lead by hosting the meetings, and while the industry has been tight-lipped about characterizing the tone, the best the press has been able to get out of sources is that they are “frank” and “candid,” which, in Inside the Beltway-speak, can have a wide variety of meanings. 

But given the cable industry’s long-held viewpoint that certain guardrails must be in place before it replaces 1.0 with 3.0 and the consumer electronics industry’s vehement opposition to any Congressional tuner mandates, it’s understandable that the task force may not arrive at a definitive deadline that will please everyone.

The NAB, for its part, is staying on message. “The Future of TV initiative has made great progress, and we are looking forward to releasing the report later this year,” they told TV Tech. “We appreciate the participation of everyone involved in this effort to help ensure a smooth transition.”

ATSC President Madeleine Noland agrees that ending the transition is top of mind for broadcasters, noting that until a deadline is established, broadcasters are finding ways to add more capabilities despite the bandwidth constraints. 

“As exciting as datacasting is, until the transition is farther along—and I don’t mean getting from 75% to 100%—but I mean within a given market, it’s important to have more transmitters available with 3.0. I think about the Boston market and we have one transmitter up, which is carrying five or six high-definition signals and at least two standard-definition search services. There’s not a lot of room to do anything else.”

Noland mentioned the recent addition of five more 3.0 stations in the San Antonio market as one of the ways around such constraints. “I gotta tip my hat to San Antonio for being able to get that second stick up.“ Noland said, adding that the current focus will not be in trying to finish the other 25%, but in expanding coverage in existing markets. “Let’s try to get depth in the markets that we already have because we’ve got all the big markets; let’s build it out and be able to do more with 3.0 in those markets.”

Consumer Devices
According to the CTA,  the cumulative U.S. installed base of NextGen TV receivers topped 10.3 million in 2023 and consumer sales of NextGen TV products are expected to increase by 45% in 2024. ATSC says more than 100 consumer products that support NextGen TV are expected to be available by the end of 2024, with the vast majority being TV sets from Sony, Hisense, TCL and Samsung. LG, which announced a suspension of the manufacturing of NextGen TV sets in 2023 due to a patent dispute, currently sits on the sidelines.   

Unlike the transition from analog to digital when the federal government subsidized the purchase of low-cost digital tuners for consumers who have yet to go digital, NextGen TV’s market-based approach provides no such incentives. 

One person, however, believes that a pure market driven approach is unrealistic and notes that public-private partnerships between industry and the government have an historic precedent that should also play a part in the transition to NextGen TV. 

John Lawson, executive director of AWARN, a consortium of business and government entities promoting advanced emergency alerting technologies on 3.0, thinks  low-cost converter boxes subsidized by the federal government would help accelerate the move to sunset 1.0. 

In an op-ed on TV Newscheck in March, Lawson wrote: 

“Congress would establish a new voucher program for 3.0 set-top boxes and dongles. This time, however, the subsidy program would be established in the name of public safety, for both resilient alerting in the face of climate change and national security to provide a back-up for GPS. Broadcasters would agree to carry Advanced Emergency Information, perhaps with sunset provisions for EAS, and receivers would be enabled to display AEI messages.”

Lawson said he arrived at his position after a meeting with the FCC as well as with broadcasters in Michigan.

“Senior staff at the FCC told me that the broadcast industry had made it clear from the beginning in their opinion that the 3.0 transition was unlike the transition from analog to digital, and that it would be a purely market driven approach,” he said. “And then I went out on the road so to speak to the Michigan Broadcast Engineering Conference I really got a dose of reality,” adding that nobody raised their hand when he asked attendees if the 3.0 transition was “on the right track.”

Lawson adds that his proposal follows a traditional path and promotes, “in effect, a partnership between government and industry.”

“American capitalism is dependent upon R&D and other investments by the federal government and it allows companies like Apple and Meta and many others to make a lot of money. [But] there's a general healthy weariness among the broadcast industry about getting government involved but there are many, many examples of where the two actually support each other.”

Will it Survive as a Purely Market-Driven Transition?
The transition to ATSC 3.0 contains an insane number of moving parts as well as a variety of approaches and while no one is suggesting Congressional mandates of any kind, in its current state, there remains some question as to whether it will survive its status as a completely market-based transition.  

But don’t tell that to Rob Folliard, senior vice president of government relations and distribution with Gray TV and chairman of Pearl TV who says the transition to 3.0 is moving at a faster pace than the move to 1.0. 

“[The transition] has worked better than the government-mandated transition 20 years ago, we are moving ahead faster,” Folliard said. “And I think the reason the market-based approaches work is because the broadcasters see a huge opportunity, a huge ROI, and we’re making it work. We’re finding creative ways to cooperate, channel share, in order to make the transition happen.”

While technology is central to making ATSC 3.0 a success as a means to deliver wireless data, it’s only a part of the story.

There are plenty of business considerations that must line up—both for broadcasters and potential datacasting customers—if 3.0-based datacasting services, such as OTA Wireless’s offering, are to succeed.

In this, the third and final part of TVTech’s Q&A with Nexstar Media Group executive vice president and CTO Brett Jenkins and E.W. Scripps vice president of strategy and business development Kerry Oslund, the pair discuss coverage, how other broadcasters might participate in OTA Wireless and 5G Broadcast. Oslund also offers a hypothetical scenario illustrating the savings 3.0-based datacasting can deliver.

(Editor’s note: Part 1 and Part 2 of the interview are available online.)

(An edited transcript.)  

TV Tech: You mentioned earlier [in Part 1] that Nexstar and Scripps cover more than 90% of U.S. broadcast markets. Does that mean OTA Wireless will invite other broadcasters to participate by making a portion of their 3.0 channels available for datacasting to achieve 100% coverage?

Kerry Oslund: Let’s begin with OTA Wireless. If you think about Scripps and Nexstar, they’re both affiliates of OTA Wireless. 

OTA Wireless works on the data plans and works on the peering between networks if there’ll be multiple networks. A customer can start its journey in any network, and it doesn’t have to end at a particular network. It will peer into other networks.

But, yes, we need 100% coverage. Not only that, in some markets we will need density. We'll need deeper coverage. So, two things are happening. 

We are having conversations with potential affiliates. They're coming to us now and asking: “How do we get involved? We would like to be an affiliate. What does it look like to be an affiliate?” That's where we are on that particular journey.

Brett Jenkins: I’ll try to give you an analogy. We're effectively setting up a data business—a data service company. 

It's quite possible there could be affiliates. It's also quite possible there could be other entities in this space with which we want to collaborate. The analogy I like to make that makes sense is you can envision roaming agreements.

So, affiliation is one way. But there may be some other network that’s set up, and you just have roaming agreements. You have a way, as Kerry said, to peer different core networks together. I think that's very logical. I don’t know whether the industry will bake out that way, but it certainly baked out that way in the wireless industry. There are a lot of good analogs between what we're trying to do and what the wireless folks have already done. There are several different paths.

I will just tell you, honestly, of all the things that keep me up at night when I feel pressure to get this business going, achieving 100% coverage is not one.

TVT: Do single frequency networks (SFNs) fit into the OTA Wireless vision for datacasting?
BJ: That’s a really cool thing that is sometimes overlooked. Another great tool in the 3.0 toolkit is the ability through SFNs to densify signals that you already have on the air. This is how I explain it to our finance people. “You want more bandwidth? You know what, I can’t give you bandwidth per se, but I can give you throughput.”

Because I can add money, I can add CAPEX, and I can add infrastructure. Now I can increase the throughput of my signal. We've never had anywhere close to that ability before. 

TVT: When will OTA Broadcast have its first paying customer?
KO: First off, there are two types of customers. There's the first dollar you can frame, and that will happen soon. Then there's the first $10 million you can frame, and that's going to take a little bit longer. But we are working the small players with our business development efforts, and we are also working the largest of large players that are automotive or are a step above automotive and service automotive.

I can tell you the trajectory of interest is going up and to the right fast. I know that it sounds weird, but we're as close as we've ever been to the first dollar of revenue. I think it's going to happen very soon, but I don't want to give you a date.

TVT: Can you run the numbers for a hypothetical customer considering OTA Wireless as opposed to wireless network alternatives?
KO: Let’s pretend you are the customer. You have 100,000 endpoints, and the average file size you send is 1GB. Your frequency—how often you send it—is three times per month. 

Let’s say TV signals will fulfill 85% of your needs. You’re still going to need to send 15% by an LTE partner, Wi-Fi or whatever.

We’re going to offer you a price of $1, and I am going to make this part extreme. You are paying $3 now. Maybe you would pay that for 100,000 [endpoints], but not for a million. The added upgrade cost is $60, and the contract term is seven years. We’re going to do a weighted cost of capital and a discount rate. 

When we run the numbers, we see that for your new CAPEX cost of $6 million, over a seven-year period your inflows are going to be $44 million based on the saving you created by switching to TV service [3.0-based datacasting].

Then we can calculate what it's going to cost for the bill of materials for all of that. Obviously, there’s more that goes into it. 

But what we've learned in our research is that after we get the potential customer impressed by the technology, then they need to be impressed by the math. The tool I used to calculate this hypothetical helps them get impressed by the math.

There's no engineer in the world who can see this math and not go back and tell the boss about it because that might be their last week on the job if they don't.

[Editor’s note: Oslund created this hypothetical live during the interview using an online tool the service calls the “OTA Wireless Customer Saving Calculator.” The calculator is available to the public online.]

TVT: Who is selling OTA Wireless’s datacasting service?
KO: Nexstar and Scripps have contributed business development people. They are out there hitting conferences that we’ve never been at before. We’re going to agriculture conferences and automobile conferences, and we’re making lots of phone calls.

We do have some inbound now from large companies that are having issues with bandwidth consumption because they’ve decided to acquire premium live sports [broadcast rights], and they are looking at broadcast as a way to offload some of that stress and congestion on their networks.

TVT: What about 5G Broadcast? Is there a role? Will it be a competitor?
KO: We're keeping an eye on it. We have a standard [ATSC 3.0] that has been built to change. If in fact there's some relationship that can or should be had with 5G Broadcast, we're open to it. Brett's on the ATSC board, I'm on the ATSC board. So, at least for me, that's where I'm keeping my head when it comes to 5G Broadcast at that level—not so much at Scripps.

BJ: To me that is much more of an overarching kind of industry issue to watch and pay attention to.

Like I said, it could easily be possible to peer with the 5G Broadcast core network. It probably creates a lot more complexity in the receiver. The irony there is that’s what the 5G Broadcast guys are claiming their system does is it makes it easier on the receive side. As an engineer, I would say the jury is way, way, way out on that. So, I think we just keep an eye on it. But it’s nothing that keeps me up and night and certainly nothing we are dealing with on a business level.

KO: I need to just mention, too, that Qualcomm and Rohde [Rohde & Schwarz] have come to us and suggested the idea of coexistence where ATSC 3 and 5G Broadcast can live on the same 6MHz frequency. Our response has been: “Prove it.” If those guys really want our attention, they will prove it in the lab, and so far that hasn't been done. But the challenge is still there. Please show us.

For ATSC 3.0-based datacasting to live up to its fullest potential, broadcasters must use their allocated channel assignments in a way that best balances the totality of their chosen business models with their available data throughput—whether those IP packets contain video, audio or data.

But before the TV industry can achieve that ultimate goal, several shorter-term milestones must be achieved, not the least of which is finding a way to minimize ATSC 1.0 service as a “nightlight” to viewers slow to buy new NextGen TVs.

In this, the second part of an interview with Nexstar Media Group executive vice president and CTO Brett Jenkins and E.W. Scripps vice president of strategy and business development Kerry Oslund, the pair discuss advancing the 1.0-to-3.0 transition, how digital out-of-home display may prove to be the lowest hanging fruit for 3.0 datacasting and the HPE-based core network that will enable OTA Wireless to match the geographic coverage requirements of datacasting customers.

(Editor’s note: Part 1 is available online.)

(An edited transcript.)

TV Tech: Brett, what struck me about your answer [regarding transitioning from ATSC 1.0 to 3.0 in Part 1] is that broadcasters will hop on board the 3.0 datacasting train when they see revenue being generated. But isn’t something going to have to give if more sticks are to transition—namely digital sub-channels?
Brett Jenkins: You know, again, I think it's easy for me to just say it depends—because it really does. Every market is different. There's a different number of stations and different spectrum partners. Some folks lean in more than others. Literally, every market and every TV station is unique. This is not a one-size-fits all solution to the transition problem. 

I think it starts with some of the things broadcasters have already said, which is at some point we do need cooperation from the regulatory authorities. We started the Future of Television initiative together with the FCC—sort of the industry going to the regulators and saying we could use some help figuring this out. 

What does the end of the transition look like? My personal read of the situation is there are solutions in almost every market that could speed us along, such as if there were a little more certainty about the availability of television sets and receivers and if there were more certainty around certain dates. I think that would help the folks on the consumer product side look at this and say, “We've got to get a little more serious about road mapping this stuff [ATSC 3.0] into our products.” There's a lot of effort going on that hopefully will get us through some of these problems. 

I just would say as a practical matter, one of the solutions floated by engineers in our industry—folks like me—is the inverse concept of the lighthouse. We always came into this with the idea that there's a lighthouse that lights the way, and then at the tail end, there's a nightlight, that sort of keeps the lights on for let's say, the laggards in the marketplace. 

To be quite frank, there is no reason why the industry or even just markets on a market-by-market basis could not decide to move toward that nightlight concept even under today's regulatory framework with the simulcasting mandates and get more 3.0 stations on the air than 1.0.

But it does require doing things like taking your Diginets off 1.0 and moving them onto 3.0. So, that's one idea. The other idea you're starting to see is we can free up more 3.0 spectrum if we're willing to take our 1.0 Diginets and move those to MPEG-4 and create less burden on the 1.0 spectrum. Nexstar has done that in a couple of markets. I know other broadcasters have done that, too. So, I think we've got a couple handles that we are ready to execute on, and we could execute on them very rapidly.

I think there are operators who are going to be cautious, and quite frankly, it's rational to take a wait-and-see position. We have to do our job of proving there is a business out there for some portion of broadcasters.

I feel strongly it makes sense. We've got these tools; they're ready; we've thought about them; and we've talked about them. We know how to execute them. When the time is right, we can pull those levers to get us further along the transition path.

Kerry Oslund: I happen to be on the Future of TV Group 1 Committee. Everything Brett said is what we're talking about. It starts with date certainty, and then it moves to that nightlight and then taking a look at the codecs that are available to us.

Our standard (ATSC 1.0) is over 15 years old. The codec we're using, MPEG-2, is 30 years old. This is old, old stuff. We need the ability to use new, new stuff—the stuff our competitors are using. Whether it's HEVC or VVC or whatever, we've got to get away from something that's 30 years old and takes way more bandwidth than is required anymore. 

TVT: At the NAB Show in the ATSC booth, a representative from AT&T Business was talking about AT&T rolling out 3.0 datacasting to its retail stores to deliver content for digital signage. I believe the representative mentioned OTA Wireless as one source of 3.0 bandwidth. What can you tell me?
KO: We definitely know what they are doing, and yes, they could potentially be customers—for sure.

I think what we're really talking about is digital out-of-home display. When we talk about a serviceable market and where the first dollar is digital out-of-home is probably the lowest hanging fruit.

Without talking about AT&T, I can talk to you about another company that we're further down the line with. It has 4,000 screens that are servicing banks. They really liked the idea of pulling a Sony Pro TV out of a box, hanging it on the wall and it's already configured for digital out-of-home use without having to connect to the bank's networks and without having to talk to their engineers.

They're saving setup time, and then they're saving money when it comes to the bandwidth. One of these signs typically takes about 3.5 GB per month. The costs that are being applied for the wireless connection are anywhere between $2.50 and $12 per gigabyte. That's the market. 

Alright, we are entering the market, and we're saying we can do a lot better, even if it costs a little bit more to upgrade your device. These are very smart capital investments if in fact you're getting such a break on the bandwidth costs.

TVT: Earlier [in Part 1], you talked about the broadcast core network and HPE [Hewlett Packard Enterprise]. Could you tell me where that stands today at OTA Wireless?
BJ: One of the first things Kerry said when we started working together—even before we had the name OTA Wireless—was, “Look, if we're going to set up a business, we're going to need business software and systems just like every other business needs to be able to support a customer and collect money. How do we apply cash? How do we create an invoice? How do we track what it is that we're invoicing? Kerry had that vision, and we went to our partners at HPE, a well-known and very smart technology company that does these types of things for lots of different businesses. They created what we at the time called the core—our core network product.

KO: This is an order-to-cash system. We call it our portal. It starts off with the assistance page to show if there are any alerts or alarms that we need to be worried about. Then we take a look at our coverage map to see what markets are lit up.

If we want to showcase our reach and our ability to reach a potential customer’s devices, we can upload their locations. In this case, I'll upload the locations of the McDonald’s in Michigan, and you can see all the locations that fall within the Detroit RF footprint and those that fall outside of it.

By the way, we're just not lit up in the markets outside of Detroit, but we cover most of Michigan between Nexstar and Scripps.

TVT: What about control of individual stations that make up the 3.0 datacasting network?
KO: We have a service catalog where from a single point of control, we can go—with the right permissions—change all of the television services at one station or at 100 stations. So, we have a single point of control where we can synchronize everything. In this particular case, we’re talking about a datacasting service. We could do an HD service or a broadcast app.

Anything that needs to be configured at a TV station, we can do a central point of control. If we're looking at datacasting, we decide how many megabits per second we are going to allow the customer to access, and then the customer will have access to that when it's time to upload a file to be datacast. 

[The system] can reach into an S3 [Amazon Simple Storage Service] bucket or watch folder and grab the files there. If it's API-connected to whatever data distribution service the customer already uses, [it can work with that]. We give it a flight date and define how long we're going to run it.

In this case, imagine I'm reaching into an S3 bucket, and I'm going to take the book “War and Peace,” and I'm going to send it out over TV signals. I upload it, and boom, it now is going out over Detroit and Kansas City. That’s not a fake. We really did that.

TVT: I imagine paying customers will want confirmation that their files have been delivered.
KO: This is where Sony's magic comes in. They helped us build the return path report. We can use any sort of connectivity to send back just a few kilobits of information that says we got it. We send out the FAT file in one direction. We were sending out 1 GB files for an automobile company just last week, and then we ping back using Wi Fi, Bluetooth, 4G—whatever sort of connectivity we can get—and send back just 8 kbs that say: “OK, here’s the file; here’s what we got; here’s when we got it; here’s the device that got it; and here’s the GPS coordinates where the device was when it got it.”

Because now we have sent the file, we've confirmed receipt of the file, then the next button is the best button. That's where we get to bill. That's the core portal, and it's pretty fun. I mean, if you look at the billing, and obviously we've got big data going through there right now, but it's kind of like watching a gas pump.

If you know you're filling up and it gets to $100, now you're getting depressed. This is the reverse. We're watching the pump, and you're getting so excited about it because you're getting paid the whole time. 

Part 3

LEAWOOD, Kan.—Nexstar Media Group and E.W. Scripps have been working to make profitable ATSC 3.0 datacasting a reality for more than a year. 

Their datacasting joint venture, OTA Wireless, covers a huge swath of the United States with broadcast signal, giving potential customers wishing to reach devices ranging from Internet of Things (IoT) devices to car makers an affordable alternative to unicast wireless network data distribution.

Working with companies like HPE and Sony—as well as the 3.0 deployments of both companies, OTA Wireless has put in place the pieces necessary for success. For example, during the video conference interview conducted for this Q&A, OTA Wireless’s HPE broadcast core network was used to instruct Scripps 3.0 stations in Detroit and Kansas City, Mo., to begin datacasting Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in mere moments. 

In this, the first of a three-part interview, Nexstar Media Group executive vice president and CTO Brett Jenkins and E.W. Scripps vice president of strategy and business development Kerry Oslund, discuss the beginnings of OTA Wireless, the importance of creating a new revenue stream for broadcasters, moving beyond the ATSC 3.0 lighthouse to 1.0 nightlights and the heads 3.0 datacasting is turning outside the broadcast industry. 

(An edited transcript.)

TVTech: What was the genesis of OTA Wireless?

Kerry Oslund: It was a call in late 2022 from Brett [Jenkins]. We talk regularly about many things, but he had been doing some of the same work I had been doing on looking at maps of broadcast spectrum. Where we had licenses, and I think he was the first to notice they [Nexstar Media Group] cover a lot of the country, and we [E.W. Scripps] cover a lot of the country, but if you put it all together, we cover almost all of the country.

That led to us saying, “We’ve got to do something more demonstrative than a PowerPoint and theoretical discussion about what we might be able to do.”

We quickly realized what talents and acumen we had and which talents and acumen we did not have. We went out, and we found some partners to help us to build our dream. HPE was one of those partners and Sony was the other.

Brett Jenkins: That’s exactly what happened. There are a lot of different benefits that could come from NextGen TV, but I think a couple broadcasters in particular have from the start sort of leaned into this idea of creating what, frankly, could be, and we think will be, a completely different revenue stream differentiated from the rest of the business.

We think that's both sort of a logical use of the spectrum assets that we steward as well as a really smart way to bolster the business [and] provide some diversification of revenues, which I think is good for any business.

Our industry is challenged and under the gun from, mostly unregulated tech giants who are creating a lot of disruption and change in the marketplace, and it becomes difficult for us to compete.

To keep the mission going, quite frankly, I think that's a piece where Kerry and I, you know, see eye to eye, and we talk about a lot. This is a chance for us to just improve our businesses so that we can keep doing what we have done in serving our local communities with news and information and serving those local businesses with the marketing opportunities for them to grow and thrive and employ people in those communities.

It really started with a math calculation. It started with that, “Hey, who's interested?” Quite frankly, it's hard to herd cats in any industry, probably particularly in the broadcast industry. So, you've got to make sure you have a coalition of the willing for operational simplicity.

I think the fewer folks in the room to make decisions, the easier it's going to be to achieve consensus. So, we just happened to notice that if you put Nexstar and Scripps together—the two largest spectrum owner-operators in the country—you reach just with the two companies over 93% of TV households calculated by DMA.

KO: We’d be remiss in not mentioning that our CEOs quickly bought into this and then started to run with it. You’ll remember BIA Advisory did the study that put some really big numbers [on the revenue potential of ATSC 3.0-based datacasting].

Then Perry [Sook, chairman/CEO of Nexstar] on one of his analysts calls talked about this as a possible replacement for retransmission consent revenue. 

When the father of retransmission consent revenue says something like that, it’s an E.F. Hutton moment where you have to listen.

We have done a lot more math. That's probably half of what we do anymore—just doing the math. But we took a look at those big numbers. We asked ourselves, “OK, what is our share of that number? And then we asked ourselves, [with an awareness] that [the BIA Advisory number] is based generally on supply, “What is the demand out there?”

So, we have done demand studies, and that $15 billion pie has shrunk down as we went from TAM [total addressable market] to SAM [Serviceable Available Market] to SOM [Service Obtainable Market].

When we got down to that obtainable market, that number was still so compelling that we said, “OK, let's form a business together.” That's what we did in 2023. We formed OTA Wireless. So, we’re working together, financing technological builds in 2023. In 2023, the numbers suggested it's time to turn this into a business.

TVTech: Under the lighthouse model around which the 1.0 to 3.0 transition is taking place, stations generally share a stick and channel to get on air with NextGen TV. How much bandwidth is left over to support a new service like datacasting?

BJ:  Although it's very much an engineering answer—and I always joke about this—it depends. Some markets are more stacked than others. There are several markets where we have lots of bandwidth. We look at markets where there are multiple lighthouses and those are probably the markets where there's more spectrum available for other business activities. 

So, it's hard to give you one answer. I would say this, we think there are plenty of business opportunities that don't take a ton of capacity that we could stand up in the early days of the transition and make a real business.

Certainly, we can stand up more businesses as we get through the transition and more bandwidth becomes available. Once there is a real business opportunity and there's cash flow being generated… you have the potential for almost a gold rush of people saying, “I've really got to figure out a way to get my spectrum onto the new standard.”

I can tell you from field tests [of ATSC 3.0] that it performs so much better for the core business and the new businesses. Once people start realizing that, they're going to say, “We’ve got to lean in and figure out a way to get more spectrum converted.” 

KO: These are not just broadcast engineers saying that it performs. Now we have engineers from other segments that are going along for the ride and watching, the performance of ATSC 3 in mobile environments with data and entertainment. They're beyond [understanding] that it works. Now, they want to understand the business model and how we move that forward. 

That's where a lot of our focus is now. Education and awareness for sure, because we are entering new market segments. When you say, “Did you know that we can deliver mobile wireless data over TV signals?” even very sophisticated engineers will sometimes say “What?”  They're very interested, and then we quickly get to the business models.

A large part of the business model with one-to-many technology is how much money we can save those data customers on the download side. T-Mobile, Verizon or AT&T are charging 5x for bandwidth, and we're able to charge 1x.

When you start throwing in the idea that if in fact you need entertainment services, whether that's TV or radio, or you need other services like enhanced GPS, then that becomes all the more interesting for some of these potential customers.

[Editor's note: Part 2 of the series can be found here and Part 3 is here.]

The 2024 edition of the NAB Show will be remembered as a turning point in the effort to make ATSC 3.0-based datacasting a profitable proposition. 

Sinclair Broadcast Group advanced its goal of monetizing spectrum from datacasting with the announcement of its Broadspan datacasting platform (see p. 25). AT&T Business was on the show floor in the ATSC booth discussing a significant upcoming trial of 3.0 datacasting that will lead to a Q4 2024 commercial launch for business clients, and a new venture, Peak3, informed public broadcasters at Public Media Venture Group (PMVG) TechConnect one day before the show about its efforts to sell 3.0 datacasting services to Internet of Things (IoT) customers.

Data Verification
The new Broadspan platform gives businesses a way to distribute data over the air to any device with a 3.0 receiver. Leveraging the broadcast core network Sinclair announced at the 2023 NAB Show, the platform enables customers to plan, order and validate delivery of their data. 

“They [customers] can immediately visualize network availability and order distribution tailored to their needs with a full picture of the path their data will take through the network,” said Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley during the company’s NAB Show press conference. 

Initially, Sinclair is making Broadspan available in the 30-plus markets where it is serving as the 3.0 host station; however, the company wishes to work with other broadcasters to grow the service, he said.

There are a couple of key takeaways from the Broadspan announcement. First, Sinclair already has a taker for Broadspan. Content delivery network Edgio will use the platform to deliver data over the air that supplements internet streamed content from OTT subscription services to give viewers access to 4K video. 

Second, the excess bandwidth available on Sinclair’s 3.0 host stations available for Broadspan is 9Mbps for delivery to stationary receivers, said Ripley. While at first glance that may seem paltry when compared to median U.S. mobile and fixed broadband speeds of 130Mbps and 250Mbps, respectively, such a comparison misses the point. 

“It’s apples and oranges,” said Ripley. “When we say 9Mbps, that covers an entire geography…. multiply that by the number of people it covers, you’re going to get very, very big numbers in terms of total capacity.”

AT&T Joins ATSC
On the floor in the Las Vegas Convention Center West Hall, AT&T Business was full of surprises. The first was that the company joined the Advanced Television Systems Committee within the past two months. It is interested in using ATSC 3.0 as a business solution for wireless data delivery, said Cy Smith, founder and CEO of CY Networks, which recently has been hired by AT&T Business to provide engineering services related to 3.0 datacasting.

(Read: NextGen Datacasting: There's Money to be Made)

CY Networks makes a small, portable ATSC 3.0 receiver called Caros>>l (pronounced Carousel) that can receive and parse a 3.0 data stream and offers support for linear, real-time as well as non-real-time datacasting.

The second surprise is AT&T Business this summer will launch a pilot program using 3.0 OTA data delivery to Caros>>l receivers for digital signage applications at its own retail locations—rather than fiber circuits or 5G, said Smith, adding that if all goes as expected AT&T Business will launch a 3.0-datacasting service for businesses before the end of the year.

AT&T Business is talking to “OTA Wireless”—the E.W. Scripps-Nexstar Media Group datacasting venture—about securing 3.0 bandwidth and is “hoping to work with everybody that wants to work with us” to secure bandwidth, said Smith.

IOT Potential
Peak3 also sees the potential of 3.0 for datacasting and has raised venture funding to become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) to provide data IoT solutions for enterprises, said Alp Sezen, Peak3 CEO, who spoke at PMVG TechConnect.

Peak3 has inked a deal with Sinclair for 3.0 bandwidth and is weeks away from signing a deal with OTA Wireless as well, said Sezen, who was at the conference to find a way to work with public broadcasters as well. The company already has customers that will soon deploy, including a June rollout in Seattle and another that will launch later in Denver, he said.

IoT customers do not care about whose network is used to deliver their data; they simply care that their IoT devices can receive that data when it’s transmitted. “We feel we can do that on a national basis [leverage ATSC 3.0]” he said.

Sezen noted Peak3 has overcome a pricing impasse that made its launch difficult. The problem stemmed from the newness of 3.0 datacasting. Broadcasters, fearing they were leaving money on the table, were reluctant to assign a value to their 3.0 bandwidth available for datacasting. The solution proved to be a revenue split that would assure broadcasters their capacity was optimally priced.

Together, all of these developments demonstrate ATSC 3.0-based datacasting isn’t just technically possible, but more importantly that it is a viable, new revenue source that will benefit the bottom line of broadcasters.

Perhaps at the 2025 NAB Show, there will finally be some movement on a way to sunset ATSC 1.0 so that NextGen TV—including ATSC 3.0 datacasting—can begin living up to its full potential.

In a notable leap forward for broadcasters planning to monetize their NextGen TV broadcasts, Sinclair has announced the launch of its “Broadspan” datacasting platform. 

The platform enables data distribution in all the current markets where Sinclair stations are offering NextGen TV, aka ATSC 3.0, broadcasts. 

In making the announcement, Sinclair’s president and CEO Chris Riply said that the platform would be open to all other broadcasters and that they had signed up their first user, Edgio, a leading content delivery network. 

During last year’s NAB, Sinclair had promised to build "the NextGen TV infrastructure" that would open up new "datacasting opportunities for broadcasters," Ripley said. “Today, I'm here to tell you what we've done just that."

“This infrastructure will provide the means to intelligently use all available ATSC 3.0 spectrum from multiple stations to deliver the customer's data quickly, efficiency efficiently and securely,” Ripley said. 

He stressed capabilities of ATSC 3.0 for efficient data distribution and monetization opportunities and highlighted the infrastructure's ability to allocate spectrum intelligently, deliver data quickly, and provide a cost-effective solution for data recovery. 

Ripley and Eric Black, CTO and GM of media at Edgio also emphasized the platform's potential to offload significant video data from the internet, reduce congestion, and enhance the user experience.

Edgio’s CDN works with many companies, including broadcasters, to provide OTT delivery of content. 

Black said that the Broadspan platform “takes advantage of the unique capability of ATSC 3.0. to converge broadcast and broadband capability seamlessly. It is a game changer as you will be able to offload significant video data from the internet to reducing congestion and enhancing the user experience while allowing increased bit rates without the loss of any service.”

Black said that “by leveraging ATSC 3.0’s convergence of broadcast and broadband, we are delivering a true 4K experience. Broadspan isn’t just a game changer; it is a paradigm shift in defining immersive entertainment.”

Black also said that the bandwidth provided by NextGen TV broadcasts will dramatically expand the ability of streamers to provide 4K content. “This provides a path to the deliver of 4K content to 100 million, 150 million viewers,” he said. 

In announcing the platform launch, Ripley also discussed some of the upcoming developments and opportunities for 3.0 services. He noted that BIA advisors has issued a forecast of $10 billion in potential datacasting ATSC 3.0 revenue for broadcasters and said that the launch of their service “will put the industry on the path to achieving those projections.” 

Ripley said that the excess bandwidth available for datacasting on the Sinclair stations is about 9Mbps, which would be sufficient for many services, including the delivery of 4K content by CDNs like Edgio. 

However, the capacity is limited by the current system of using a lighthouse station to deliver the 3.0 signals from the local network affiliates, who continue to deliver ATSC signals. 

To expand that capacity, Ripley said that broadcasters and the NAB are working with the FCC to come up with a sunset date for ATSC broadcasts. 

“One of the main topics in collaborating with the FCC is how do we get out of the lighthouse model when we sunset ATSC 1.0” he said. “As an industry, that is a major objective for just about every broadcaster that I know. It's a major objective for the NAB. It is something that we're going to be pushing forward with the FCC to figure out when that date be and when we can turn off the lighthouses and convert the rest of the stations.”

HUNT VALLEY, Md.—Sinclair Broadcast Group has announced a strategic memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Korea Radio Promotion Association (RAPA) and CAST.ERA, which is a joint venture between Sinclair and SK Square, to enhance ATSC 3.0 services between Korea and the United States and expand the DDaaS (Data Distribution as a Service) platform globally.

Using NextGen TV, aka ATSC 3.0 broadcasts to deliver data is widely considered one of the most promising ways for broadcasters to make money on NextGen broadcasts. 

The DDaaS platform provides a broadcast backbone for wireless IP (Internet Protocol) data delivery. It harnesses a cloud-based local broadcasting management-control platform and real-time datacasting technology to meet the needs of data users. 

Sinclair, CAST.ERA and the Korea Radio Promotion Association have developed a “Broadcasting Cloud Demonstration Consortium” and will jointly present their empirical service model at NAB 2024, North America’s most prominent broadcasting technology exhibition.

Commenting on the agreement, Del Parks, president of technology at Sinclair reported that “soon we will have 30 of our initial NextGen Broadcast stations connected to our DDaaS platform so we anticipate playing a leading role in accelerating the adoption of the DDaaS business model and the continued transformation of local broadcast capabilities and our ability to serve the public, not only in Korea and the United States, but globally.”

“Through cooperation with Sinclair Broadcast Group, and CAST.ERA, we are determined to promote ATSC 3.0 services that can be utilized in both Korea and the United States,” added RAPA vice chairman Song Jung-su. “This is a pivotal step in our expansion plans.”

Kevin Gage, COO of CAST.ERA, noted that "through this MOU with Sinclair Broadcast Group, a distinguished U.S. broadcaster spearheading innovation in next-generation broadcasting services via DDaaS, and the Korea Radio Promotion Association, which provides extensive support for the activation of ATSC 3.0 services and the global expansion of DDaaS, we anticipate the realization of innovative next-generation broadcasting services shortly, underpinned by close collaboration between the two countries.”

PLYMOUTH, Wis.—Heartland Video Systems (HVS) has announced that it is working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to offer broadcasters new ATSC 3.0 datacasting solutions. 

The datacasting offering will provide 3.0 broadcasters with new revenue streams from businesses who want better options for sending firmware, software, and increasingly important data, the companies said. 

BIA Advisory Services and industry executives have identified datacasting as one of the most potentially profitable applications of NextGen TV, aka ATSC 3.0. 

This collaboration combines HVS' broadcasting technologies with HPE's global IT expertise to offer a comprehensive ATSC 3.0 datacasting solution, the companies said. 

"Our collaboration with HPE is a pivotal moment for HVS. This collaboration melds our profound broadcasting knowledge with HPE's exceptional data management prowess. The result is a superior ATSC 3.0 datacasting solution that ensures efficiency, accessibility, and notably, enhanced profitability for broadcasters," said Dennis Klas, founder and president at HVS.

"We see datacasting as a unique opportunity for broadcasters to exploit new business models,” added said Paolo Ceccherini, worldwide business lead, digital video solutions, at HPE Communications Technology Group. “Early adopters who have already selected our industry-first, award-winning Broadcast Core Network solution — which is based on decades of experience in broadcast automation and orchestration — have provided extremely encouraging feedback. We are excited to collaborate with HVS to accelerate this industry transformation further," 

The companies also stressed that the solution will provide broadcasters with increased bandwidth, unmatched reliability, and advanced customization.

More information on the new ATSC 3.0 datacasting solution is available at www.hvs-inc.com. 

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. & DALLAS, Texas—GAIAN Solutions and ARK Multicasting have created a joint venture that plans to set up the nation's largest Broadcast Internet Network and to swiftly launch the service in over 30% of the country using NextGen TV spectrum. 

The two companies said that they have committed to an aggressive roll-out and that the joint venture aims to initially extend its network to all 300 television stations currently served by ARK.

"We are shopping for partners in other markets, as the potential for growth and reach is tremendous, and the opportunity for all television broadcasters who partner is unmatched by existing models" said Joshua Weiss, CEO of ARK.

Leveraging valuable NextGenTV spectrum, the joint venture promises to launch a plethora of applications, including citizen safety, IoT management, Smart City Services, Digital Signage and Interactive applications. 

The network is initially launching dozens of these applications in 10 markets and plans to rapidly expand to cater to the needs of cities and communities across the country, the companies said. 

"In the explosive and rapidly changing world of AI-based digital solutions, the Mobius platform brings light-speed capabilities to envision, engineer and launch applications leveraging the NextGenTV network," said Chandra Kotaru of GAIAN, which has developed Mobius, a Low Code AI-enabled Digital Transformation as a Service (DTaaS) platform to quickly create digital experiences. "You think of an app, we deliver the app. On-Demand IT is the future, and we are proud to bring such bleeding-edge technology to the NextGenTV industry."

ARK Multicasting has been developing services using NextGen TV/ATSC 3.0  relieve congestion for Internet Service Providers and provide datacasting services for many verticals, including distance learning, the connected car market, smart agriculture, telehealth, and over the top video streaming providers. ARK’s footprint of around 300 broadcast outlets covers one third of the U.S., reaching around 100 million people, the company said. 

For further information, please visit www.gaiansolutions.com and www.arkmulticasting.com. 

LAS VEGAS—With analysts like BIA Advisory Services forecasting that the datacasting capabilities of NextGen TV will produce over $10 billion in revenue for broadcasters by 2030, Sinclair has announced ambitious plans to build and operate an interconnected broadcast platform to provide commercial services and solutions for national data distribution. 

During a press conference at the 2023 NAB Show, Sinclair’s president and CEO Chris Ripley outlined both the opportunities NextGen TV is creating for datacasting and described Sinclair's plans to create a platform that would allow broadcasters take advantage of those opportunities using their platform to automate and simplify the process of using their spectrum for datacasting. 

Ripley likened their Data Distribution as a Service (DDaaS) platform, which it expects to go live in the first quarter of 2024, as “the glue between all their stations and so we'll be ready to go to market to go live with this system. Any broadcaster who wants to participate can use this system to automate…the provisioning of the data. They can do it manually but no one will possibly ever want to do it that way. It just wouldn't ever scale.”

More specifically, the platform will use NextGen Broadcast (ATSC 3.0) network technology to provide a wireless broadcast backbone for IP (Internet Protocol) data delivery across the country, increasing the value of spectrum for all broadcasters and providing an IP connection to serve their communities better.

This effort is not to be confused with the rollout of NextGen TV broadcasts, which are now in more than 60% of the country and expected to hit 80% by year’s end. Rather, it is more like a system used to manage a station’s advertising, Ripley said. 

As NextGen Broadcasting is deployed throughout the country, and other broadcasters see the value in participating in this business, Sinclair expects use of the platform to increase from local and regional services available in some markets now to nationwide services by 2024.

To this end, Sinclair has created a new DDaaS business-related unit under Del Parks, president of technology, to capitalize on these emerging opportunities.

To create the platform, Sinclair established several joint ventures and strategic relationships with some key technology partners in the U.S., Korea and India.  Working with Sinclair, these partners are designing, building and deploying this sophisticated DDaaS platform infrastructure.  

Those relationships include CAST.ERA, a joint venture with SK Telecom, the South Korean, Information Communications Technology company, which brings its sophisticated experience to infrastructure development.  SK Telecom will be providing its advanced mobile edge computing technology, “Petasus Media,” to the project.  Sinclair will also rely on Saankhya Labs in India, which will contribute to the broadcast Core Network and provide wireless technology to the new DDaaS platform. 

Ripley also laid out a number of use cases that NextGen TV can exploit given the “one-to-many” architecture of broadcasting. Those will include large-scale software updates for “edge-heavy” industries as well as services to automobiles. 

Data distribution companies or Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) seeking a cost-efficient supplement to perform data off-loading from traditional unicast cellular service will find this data distribution platform to be a needed complement to their IP data distribution tools, Sinclair reported. 

Spectrum providers, such as BitPath, will be able to utilize the DDaaS platform to monetize their spectrum in a way that is not currently possible in today’s decentralized and unconnected TV broadcast architecture.

As an example, providers of data services to vehicles will be able to deliver software updates simultaneously to an infinite number of IoT devices in their smart vehicles to update software for new functionality, infotainment, bug fixes, and navigation, Sinclair said. 

Safety updates can be delivered within hours, not days. Services can be provided to hundreds of thousands of devices instantly and simultaneously with no slowdowns since broadcast architecture is not subject to cell phone network bottlenecks. 

The platform is also designed to enhance Advanced Emergency Information significantly by enabling region-wide connectivity for this critical public interest service that can provide robust connectivity where other communications systems may fail, especially during peak traffic times or in an emergency. 

Last year’s Florida hurricanes are critical examples of the robust broadcast infrastructure.  While over 2/3 of the cell phone network failed  in and around Fort Myers during the category 4 Hurricane Ian (over 1,550 towers down), area-wide broadcast coverage remained in service.  Of the 32 TV stations serving the Tampa market and another 14 in Fort Myers, only 5 suffered temporary outage.  

All the remaining television broadcasters blanketed the area.  Interconnecting these TV broadcasters using a data network will ensure that users with charged cellphones and vehicles equipped with NextGen reception capabilities will have access to evacuation routes, shelter locations, and emergency resource locations, all of which can be conveyed in multiple languages.   

The sophisticated NextGen wireless backbone will incorporate new cloud technologies including SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Network) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) orchestration, Sinclair reported. 

This will permit cooperating broadcasters to match available spectrum capacity dynamically with users’ data needs.   

This platform is also designed to allow customers’ data to be tracked, confirmed, and billed in an effective ‘least cost routing’ manner, Sinclair reported. 

The backbone network will also provide a wide range of security, modulation, and coding options catering to specific applications and quality of service needs.  This data platform can scale across various spectrum-enabled businesses including automotive services, aircraft/drone connectivity, first responder missions, distance learning solutions, and more, the company said.  

Over-the-air television distribution as a business is at a tipping point. No one has ever invented a  more efficient way to distribute content to mass audiences. At the same time, it is existential that  broadcasters rethink how we are using our core asset—the spectrum that carries our TV channels—to  provide that distribution. 

Yes, we will continue to serve the public by providing free-to-air local and  national news, information and entertainment programming that is the quid pro quo for our licenses  to use that spectrum. It’s a good business. But it is plateauing. Embracing the other uses of that  spectrum—datacasting uses—will be critical to growing our industry, supporting the existing model  and venturing into whole new experiences that ensure our relevance in a world dominated by the  internet services of big technology companies. Wired and wireless! 

Status quo is not an option. And reliance on a diginet business model to augment our over-the-air  revenues will be insufficient to ensure our long-term survival. Niche rerun channels will not be the  savior of our current business model. It’s good-tasting candy when we really need a banquet of  nourishing food to grow. 

To mix metaphors, why rent out spare bedrooms in a single-family home  when we can erect a skyscraper on the same chunk of land using the ground floor to live in and renting  the upper stories to multiple businesses? That is the spectrum reuse enabled by NextGen  Broadcasting. That is what datacasting is all about. 

Making the Most of Spectrum
KEY: Deploying NextGen Broadcast (ATSC 3.0) capabilities and providing multiple  non-TV use-cases will be critical to sustaining our ability to remain in the content  distribution business. 

Across industries and around the world, virtually every spectrum  user is constantly striving to improve service offerings with existing spectrum. The beauty of the IP based NextGen Broadcast transmission standard is that broadcast spectrum can be used for so much  more than simple delivery of one-way, unenhanced television program streams. 

It needs to be seen  as an essential element of internet distribution that has never-before been possible. In economic terms,  this is the market’s way of maximizing productivity and is the essence of how spectrum can be used  most effectively. In business terms, it permits broadcasters to match and exceed the best features of  competing video delivery platforms while also bringing new services to the public that will provide  new revenue streams. 

This has been a part of the “digital promise” since broadcasters converted from  analog transmissions and has been anticipated by regulators and broadcasters alike for many years.  Developments to-date justify analysts’ predictions that, in the next decade, broadcasters will develop  a third revenue stream as robust as advertising and retransmission fees for the content we produce or  license.  

The government-defined deployment rules, however, complicate this promise. Rather than providing  temporary additional spectrum to ease the transformation to this remarkable IP-based broadcast  service, the deployment plan is hampered by a requirement that broadcasters simulcast programming  in both the current ATSC 1.0 and new NextGen Broadcast standards. 

That process eats up virtually  all of the NextGen digital capacity earmarked for new services. It’s like trying to grow new sequoia  trees but having to contend with dwarf, bonsai tree clipping protocols. That needs to end.

Spectrum Aggregation
KEY: To be clear, that means that broadcasters must have complete and unfettered  access to all of their digital capacity, not just the remnants left over after hosting our  competitors on our broadcast towers. And that means a sunsetting of the 1.0  simulcasting rules as soon as possible. 

While individual broadcasters will use a portion of their NextGen  spectrum capacity for enhanced traditional linear video services, they may use any “excess” capacity  for other offerings. Those offerings can include advanced features such as ultra-high definition and  high dynamic range video and immersive audio. 

They can also include datacasting. Scaling that  service on a regional and national basis will require broadcasters to aggregate their capacity and offer  it for non-video use cases. The fundamental mission of BitPath, the joint venture between Nexstar  and Sinclair, is this aggregation process. The possible use cases for this one-to-many datacasting  service are limited only by imagination. 

The most promising of several initial data uses include in-vehicle video entertainment enhanced and telematics.

 The NextGen  Broadcast standard is uniquely designed to synergize OTA broadcast and broadband 5G services.  Nowhere will this be more immediately beneficial than in automobile servicing. Recent  demonstrations by CAST.ERA, a joint venture between Sinclair Broadcast Group and SK Telecom  from Korea, and Hyundai Mobis highlighted in-vehicle video entertainment with enhanced geo targeting capabilities, including hyper-local, location-based, targeted ad and content insertions.  

Connected vehicles are rolling computers that need servicing. Using NextGen Broadcast capabilities,  providers of data services to vehicles will be able to deliver software updates simultaneously to an  infinite number of IoT devices in their smart vehicles to upgrade software for new functionality,  infotainment, bug fixes, and navigation. Safety updates can be delivered within hours, not days.  

Services can be provided to hundreds of thousands of devices instantly and simultaneously with no  network slowdowns since broadcast architecture is not subject to cell phone network bottlenecks. Live  updating of 3D mapping, for example, requires huge amounts of data so that autonomous driving vehicles  don’t bump into things. 

You can’t do that with WiFi. You can’t do that via a spotty cell phone system.  You can do that through a robust, one-to-many broadcast system. And broadcasters with complete access  to their NextGen IP capacity will be perfectly positioned to provide those needed services.  

Content Distribution Offload
KEY: Positioning the broadcast industry to take advantage of these new services  requires thoughtful advance planning to deploy NextGen Broadcast capability now,  not some date in the future. Accelerating the deployment is essential. 

Well over 80% of all consumer Internet traffic  today is for video with more than 1.1 million minutes of video streamed or downloaded every second.  Those are one-to-one events. In other words, streaming a 1 GB movie to 50 million people would  consume 50 million GB of spectrum capacity. 

That’s extraordinarily inefficient when compared to  the one-to-infinite broadcast architecture that could cover all 210 Nielsen markets with a collective 210 GB. For the math aficionado reader, that’s using a mere 0.00042% of the broadband streaming  model. If Netflix or some other streaming service wants to complement its data offloading options—viewing NextGen Broadcast as a content delivery network extension—renting broadcast bits to  provide the exact same service at a fraction of the expense seems to be a worthwhile pursuit.

Signage
KEY: To ensure that capacity exists to provide these types of services, developing  the local, regional and national networks now is essential. That means both station  deployment and access to the full NextGen digital capacity—sunsetting the 1.0  simulcasting requirement. 

From electronic billboards to transit signs in buses, trains and taxis to  elevator screens to gas station pumps and electronic vehicle charging stations, businesses attempt to  grab our visual attention. The marketing tools are omnipresent. But content needs to get to those  places. 

Doing that efficiently and inexpensively is a datacasting service that makes broadcasting part  of a holistic 5G distribution plan for any advertiser. Sinclair’s spectrum delivery pilot on USSI  Global’s electronic vehicle charging stations is the precursor of many more applications to come. 

Augmented GPS
BitPath has demonstrated its NavPath and BitPoint systems  which can put broadcasters in the center of the fast-growing Positioning, Navigation and Timing  market while enhancing their public service commitments. Using a trivial amount of a station’s NextGen digital capacity, these enhanced GPS services can provide vast improvements to location  accuracy for an unlimited number of users, vehicles and devices – all at a small fraction of the cost of  existing services. 

These new BitPath service offerings will support dozens of use cases, including  Internet of Things applications, autonomous vehicle tracking, precise drone delivery, and emergency  response. BitPath has committed to make NavPath and BitPoint available to first responders at  no cost. 

Advanced Emergency Information
The targeting and IP capabilities built into  the NextGen Broadcast standard make advanced emergency information services a natural fit for  broadcasters. The expanded capacity of NextGen broadcasts combined with its pinpoint targeting  capabilities enables more than a simple crawl on the screen warning of a crisis. 

Now, viewers can see  the weather report, Doppler Radar images, evacuation routes, and shelter locations, and hear them in  multiple languages. Similarly, a hazmat spill, school lockdown or AMBER alert can be targeted to  specific geographic regions, and viewers can have instant access to critical information. 

And since  the robust over-the-air broadcast system architecture is based on a “one-to-infinite” capability (where  the system can never be overloaded), it provides a RELIABLE and dramatic enhancement to current  emergency notifications, especially in relation to the fragile cell phone system that does not weather  storms or natural catastrophes well.  

Redundant First Responder Platform
KEY: NextGen Broadcasting can save lives. It’s imperative that the government  act swiftly and decisively to accelerate NextGen Broadcasting deployment with  access to all of a station’s NextGen digital capacity, enabling these critical services.  

In a successful display of the advanced  emergency datacasting features of the NextGen Broadcast standard, SpectraRep recently  demonstrated a sophisticated deployment of advanced interagency sharing protocols for emergency  communications in connection with the 2022 U.S. Marine Corps Marathon.

 It did the same for  activities surrounding the July 4th celebrations in the nation’s capital. The company deployed its  redundant datacasting solution during the complex and dynamic security event to deliver encrypted  video, alerts, and file sharing among eight public safety agencies. 

All data was delivered securely  over-the-air on a broadcast station without the need for internet or wireless data transmission (LTE) services. With NextGen datacasting, public safety departments can communicate and exchange alerts  without having to rely on cellular systems that can become overloaded at large scale events.  

E-Learning
KEY: FCC, please take note. This is a life-saving application of NextGen  Broadcasting. Access to all of a station’s NextGen Broadcast capacity can hasten  these services. 

NextGen’s datacasting capabilities are being specifically targeted for  enhanced e/ and distance learning. The need for these services was dramatically demonstrated during  the COVID pandemic as educators struggled to reach students where broadband connectivity was  limited or unavailable. 

All broadcast stations—commercial and public—will have the capability to  improve the learning environment of students significantly across the country, especially in places  where the Internet just doesn’t reach. In cooperation with SpectraRep, Sinclair has been demonstrating  those services over existing NextGen stations. Today that’s done with a separate reception box—a  gateway—but tomorrow the reception capability will be built into all receivers. 

Developing the Distribution Network
The datacasting use cases described above are just the  low hanging fruit. Many, many additional applications are waiting to emerge as we devise tools and  protocols to aggregate NextGen Broadcast spectrum. 

Two additional fundamental requirements are  also under development that will help spread these sophisticated new services offerings. They are: 

CORE NETWORK. Connecting multiple NextGen-transmitting stations with potential  customers in need of diverse datacasting capacity is a critical new but economically rewarding  challenge. Never before have we had the ability to connect television stations logically as a  distribution platform. Stations existed as islands—separate, independently addressable, disparate  entities. 

We now have the ability to link them. That infrastructure does not yet fully exist but is in an  active planning stage. Cutting edge broadcasters are on the cusp of designing, building, and operating  an innovative and interconnected broadcast platform intended to provide a wireless broadcast  backbone for IP data delivery across the country. 

ATSC, itself is supporting some of this activity  through a Specialist Group to develop standards for a “core network” that will enable datacasting and  permit it to scale across multiple stations and markets.  

BROADCAST MARKET EXCHANGE (BMX). Maximizing the efficiency of matching  aggregated spectrum capacity from multiple broadcasters with the needs of data users is the holy grail  of an efficient datacasting network. 

This will eventually be accomplished in the cloud using artificial  intelligence in a broadcast market exchange—BMX—giving data users and other distribution platform  operators an alternative distribution tool. Sinclair has been at the forefront of designing the  underlining BMX superstructure that will be integral to the core backbone network. 

KEY: Creators and innovators need an environment to succeed. A network this  complex doesn’t just happen. It requires advanced planning and, importantly, a  regulatory environment that nourishes this type of evolution. 

Within 15 years, broadcasters will make as much money selling their bits for data distribution as they will for selling commercial ads in TV programs.

How’s that for an incentive for broadcasters to begin deploying NextGen Broadcast services? We  are at an existential pivot point in time where the fundamental basis of our industry is at stake.  Fortunately, we’ve met the technological challenge to keep our businesses relevant.  

KEY: We now have a data delivery pipe that is the envy of the world— integrated  with the Internet and reaching mobile viewers with targeted programming and ads,  ultra-rich video and audio programs reaching deep into buildings. Perhaps most  important, we now are at the table for a myriad of NEW businesses apart from linear  TV. It’s now time to capitalize on it. 

BARCELONA, Spain—In what T-Mobile is calling a world-first at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the carrier has announced the successful completion of a four-carrier aggregation data call on its 5G Standalone Network with a commercial device. The test combined four channels of mid-band spectrum to hit peak speeds topping 3.3 Gbps.

The successful tests and the deployment of these technologies more widely in the future is an important development for media companies seeking to deliver live news, sports and other content over 5G networks. 

They also have important implications for the rollout of NextGen TV broadcasts. Ultimately, the rollout of 5G broadcasting services built on these infrastructures could radically change the media landscape, providing both competition and potential partners for broadcasters looking to rollout datacasting services using ATSC 3.0.

In this test, T-Mobile aggregated four channels of mid-band spectrum on its 5G standalone (5G SA) network using the Samsung Galaxy S23 device, working with Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Samsung. 

Carriers see 5G SA as the future of wireless, delivering a whole new level of performance – faster speeds and lower latency (improved response times). 

In a keynote at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, T-Mobile’s president of Technology Neville Ray explained T-Mobile’s plans to take its nationwide 5G SA network — the only in the U.S. — to the next level. 

In addition to discussing the four-carrier aggregation data call, Ray also announced that the carrier had deployed VoNR service in four additional cities and plans to cover 100 million people with VoNR in the coming months.

“We are working with industry leaders around the globe to move the 5G ecosystem forward for the benefit of wireless customers everywhere,” said Ray. “With the most advanced 5G network in the world, T-Mobile is at the forefront of wireless innovation, spearheading new capabilities so we can continue raising the performance bar and enable future transformative applications that require a seamless and robust 5G connection.”

5G carrier aggregation allows T-Mobile to combine multiple 5G channels (or carriers) to deliver greater speed and performance. In this test, the T-Mobile merged four 5G channels of mid-band spectrum – two channels of 2.5 GHz Ultra Capacity 5G and two channels of 1900 MHz spectrum – creating an effective 225 MHz 5G channel. 

That’s like taking four separate highways and turning them into a massive superhighway where traffic can zoom faster than before, the company said. 

Customers with the Samsung Galaxy S23 will be among the first to experience four-carrier aggregation later this year with more devices to follow, T-Mobile said. 

With VoNR, T-Mobile is moving voice traffic to 5G so customers stay consistently connected to 5G. In the near-term, customers connected to VoNR may notice slightly faster call set-up times, meaning less delay between the time they dial a number and when the phone starts ringing. 

Most importantly, VoNR brings T-Mobile one step closer to additional improvements to its 5G SA network because VoNR enables advanced capabilities like network slicing that rely on a continuous connection to a 5G core. 

Today VoNR is now live in six cities – Cincinnati, New Orleans, New York, Portland Ore., Salt Lake City and Seattle. In the next few months, T-Mobile said it will expand this technology to additional cities covering more than 100 million people in the coming months.

LAS VEGAS—Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. and its subsidiary, One Media 3.0, will be demonstrating key enhancements to the NextGen Broadcast standard (ATSC 3.0) at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week. 

Sinclair said that those enhancements are part of Sinclair/One Media 3.0’s vision of a “mobile-first” offering of video and data services as well as the delivery of significant picture quality improvements and offerings that provide a more efficient merger of broadcast and broadband capabilities. 

As part of those efforts, Sinclair will be showing the latest version of Sinclair’s Broadcast App. The App is designed to tap into the fact that viewers today are agnostic on how they receive TV programs so long as the quality is equivalent between providers. It provides a way for broadcast and broadband services to be merged so as to provide the best of over-the-air and Internet delivered content, which will be a key component of new delivery ecosystems, Sinclair said. 

Available both over-the-air and via broadband, the Broadcast App’s menuing technology allows viewers to choose content regardless of how it gets to their screens. 

During the show, Sinclair also said it will demonstrate for the first time the ability to launch the Broadcast App not only from over-the-air NextGen Broadcast (ATSC 3.0) and existing digital TV (ATSC 1.0) transmissions, but also via cable, telco or satellite services through legacy set-top boxes. 

“The beauty of the NextGen Broadcast standard is its ability to both enhance the content we deliver and do it as flexibly as possible,” explained Mark Aitken, president of One Media 3.0 said. “The hybrid nature of television today means we must make it as easy as possible for viewers to take advantage of our offerings.”

In addition, Sinclair said that it would be showing a fully mobile audio ‘Infotainment’ service that is being readied for consumer trials by several auto dealerships in the Baltimore, Md. region.

Drive testing for the system is already underway, Sinclair said. 

The infotainment service uses a single mobile receiver that brings a variety of new services into the age of connected vehicles. Those include enhanced GPS, over-the-air software updates, Infotainment (audio, video and others) and a number of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) and cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) services. 

The demo is designed to build on a recent series of webinars hosted by Sinclair focused on the automotive sector and the value an ATSC 3.0 receiver brings into mobile vehicles.

Also during CES, Sinclair will be showing the work it is doing with USSI Global in the area of electric vehicle charging that combines USSI's digital signage and managed services expertise with Sinclair’s NextGen Broadcast capabilities to provide a first-of-its-kind datacasting offering. 

A prototype EV charging kiosk will be on display at CES. This datacasting application supports multi-tenant advertising and real-time updates of local content, providing a unique personal experience, the companies said. 

“Data Delivery as a Service is the inevitable next step in the evolution of broadcasting, where we can continue to provide exceptional and enhanced video programming and, at the same time, repurpose the remaining capacity of our channels to meet the needs of data users nationwide on market-disrupting terms,” explained Chris Ripley, Sinclair’s president and CEO. “Our partnership with USSI Global opens wide the door to an enticing array of new services that enhance the choices for businesses and individuals alike.”

HUNT VALLEY, Md.—Sinclair’s ONE Media 3.0 and AutoMobility Advisors, a leading connected auto industry strategist, have announced that they will hold a series of three webinars focused on how NextGen Broadcast/Multicast can improve over-the-air (OTA) data transmission to connected vehicles.  

Insider Intelligence predicts that by 2025 70% of US licensed drivers will drive a Connected Vehicle. But current cellular wireless technologies can present challenges to automotive manufacturers due to data transport costs, lack of ubiquitous coverage, and limited reliability during emergency situations, the webinar organizers said. 

This three-part webinar series will address how a new wireless broadcast/multicast network technology, powered by NextGen Broadcast (ATSC 3.0), can augment existing networks and improve the Connected Vehicle experience for consumers and manufacturers.

The first webinar will be held on Thursdays at 12 PM Eastern Time on October 27 with a panel for former auto executives and broadcasters. That discussion will feature:

• Connected Vehicle proof of concept activities and a report from CAST.ERA on NextGen Broadcast/Multicast Connected Vehicle testing over the past three years. They have quietly been making significant progress that has gone unreported in the U.S. Cast.Era is a technology development joint venture between SK Telecom, the largest mobile carrier in South Korea and Sinclair Broadcast Group. 
• A report on 5G/NextGen Broadcast/Multicast integration programs. Members of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC, an international standards development organization), including Cast.Era, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and ONE Media 3.0, are working on various international initiatives involving wireless IP distribution including integration with 3GPP standards. These include activities in South Korea (integration into the automotive environment) and India (which is testing a “Direct to Mobile Broadcast” model). These technologies are moving along faster than many realize, the participants reported. 

Additional webinars will occur on November 10, and December 1. 

The organizers noted that NextGen Broadcast/Multicast is a wireless Internet Protocol (IP) multicast network technology being integrated with advanced telecom platforms (3GPP 4G/5G systems), supporting automotive functions benefiting from multicast data delivery and significant efficiency gains. This new multicast network for automotive is being readied by U.S. broadcasters.

Among the Connected Vehicle functions that could see improvement are OTA car updates (software upgrades), Real Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning (providing continuous centimeter accurate geolocation), safety and emergency alerting, and live or pre-positioned infotainment.

To address those developments the webinar series will also feature:

• A report from national NextGen Broadcast/Multicast spectrum aggregators;
• A CES 2023 Show sneak peek at the introduction of the first U.S. NextGen Broadcast/Multicast-enabled vehicles;
• Automotive Advanced Emergency Information (AEI) services and;
• An invitation to participate in NextGen Broadcast/Multicast spectrum efficiency testing and RTK geolocation testing.

“The past year has seen significant NextGen Broadcast milestones achieved including half of U.S. households in markets now able to receive a NextGen Broadcast/Multicast signal, while South Korea and Jamaica are moving forward with their related adoptions,” explained Mark Aitken, president of ONE Media 3.0 and senior vice president of advanced technology at Sinclair Broadcast Group. “India, Brazil, and many other countries are looking at these solutions and the real value added to the wireless marketplace. Now is the right time to share the automotive technology development projects we have all been working on.”

Each webinar will have one hour for speaker presentations and focused questions, followed by 30 minutes of audience Q&A.

Webinar #1: October 27, 2022: ATSC 3.0 value proposition for automakers

What is NextGen Broadcast/Multicast, which Connected Vehicles functions can it improve, and why consider it now?

The basic value proposition: Improved efficiency and adding unique value. Use cases where NextGen Broadcast/Multicast networks are being deployed to supplement 5G and LTE networks.

Webinar #2: November 10, 2022: Three Connected Vehicle functions that can be made more efficient by adding a supplemental NextGen Broadcast/Multicast network

Automotive and NextGen Broadcast/Multicast experts take a deep dive on connected OTA (mobile software updates), continuous RTK (geolocation), and live or pre-positioned in car infotainment.

Webinar #3: Dec. 1, 2022: V2X: As automotive connectivity extends to other vehicles, road infrastructure, and even smart city data, what value can an ATSC 3.0 network add?

Registration for the webinar series is available here. 

CHANTILLY, Va.—SpectraRep, a provider of  datacasting services for more than 20 years, in concert with Sinclair/ONE Media says it completed a successful NextGen Broadcast pilot of its IncidentOne datacasting solution for D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management and six other federal and local public safety agencies. This application delivered sophisticated emergency communications through improved video, alert, and file sharing among multiple public safety agencies during the 2022 July 4th celebrations in Washington, D.C. on the National Mall using the advanced spectrum platform capabilities enabled by the NextGen Broadcast standard.  

Based on the NextGen Broadcast standard, IncidentOne layered a new secure wireless network on top of existing communication procedures to facilitate inter-agency sharing of data at unprecedented levels. Employing the NextGen Broadcast facilities of Sinclair Broadcast Group’s station WIAV and partnering with America’s Public Television Stations and the Advanced Television Systems Committee, the pilot program was a significant demonstration of the new capabilities of the Internet Protocol-based standard that dramatically improves television transmission, SpectraRep said.

IncidentOne is an existing enterprise-grade wireless emergency communications solution that uses over-the-air digital television (DTV) technology to deliver operational and crisis incident data quickly and securely. 

While IncidentOne has been used in the past to datacast public safety information via DTV airwaves, SpectraRep says datacasting with the new and efficient NextGen Broadcast standard supports a more robust transmission signal, higher data capacity, and, for the first time, mobile reception.

“SpectraRep and our partners are extremely pleased that the datacasting pilot supported by ATSC 3.0—NextGen Broadcasting—provided an enhanced ability to protect the public with more bandwidth and reliable mobile reception around data sharing,” said Mark O’Brien, President of SpectraRep. “As shown during the pilot, our datacasting solution helps first responders identify potential threats and disseminate emergency response information more quickly and efficiently than ever before possible. It remains our goal to increase the ability of emergency responders to have what they need to protect lives.”

O’Brien also noted that the NextGen Broadcast signal provided flexibility for optimizing data capacity and signal reception in both indoor and mobile facilities, which is key to fully supporting public safety professionals in the field. He added that large-scale events typically overload cellular systems, making it difficult for public safety departments to communicate and exchange critical data.

Mark Aitken, president of Sinclair’s technology subsidiary, ONE Media 3.0, added, “The advanced datacasting capabilities using the NextGen Broadcast standard is exactly the type of service that broadcasters around the country can provide and is a unique example of why accelerated deployment of these capabilities is so critical. NextGen can save lives.”

NAB EVP, Technology/CTO Sam Matheny said "this live datacasting pilot spotlights the unique and valuable opportunities made possible by the ATSC 3.0 standard, especially when it comes to public safety. This successful program can provide a blueprint for federal, state and local first responders to strengthen their emergency communications capabilities and reliably share lifesaving information during times of disaster. 

"NAB thanks the agencies and technology partners that participated in this project, as broadcasters continue to leverage ATSC 3.0 features to best serve the American people."   

This article was updated to add NAB's statement. 

Confirming the success of the pilot program is DC Statewide Interoperability Coordinator (SWIC), Charles Guddemi, who reported, “We observed success with streaming encrypted video over the datacast signal, and then could successfully target and send that video to other agencies. We also confirmed the ability to send alerts and files to the authorized participating agencies.”

Top successful outcomes from the pilot program include:

• Safe and secure inter-agency sharing of video, messages, and files was achieved using SpectraRep’s IncidentOne datacasting solution.
• Select agencies transmitted secure alert messages that also included attached files.
• SpectraRep’s datacasting solution reached command staff and decision makers across agencies without requiring access to or interconnection between individual agency secure networks.
• SpectraRep’s mobile phone video application provided access to handheld video sourced from agency personnel in the field to operations centers.

Technology partners in the pilot program include DigiCAP Ltd., West Pond Technologies, Sinclair Broadcast Group (WIAV) and their technology group ONE Media 3.0, E/M Wave, Winegard, Osprey Video and SpectraRep LLC. Key Association partners include APTS America’s Public Television Stations, ATSC, and the National Association of Broadcasters.

SpectraRep's partnership with APTS, in particular, stretches back nearly 20 years when it announced in 2003 it was working with the association to deliver public safety information via DTV airwaves. 

A case study for the pilot program is available on the SpectraRep website. Click here to download.

DETROIT—New testing of ATSC 3.0 to determine if the NextGen TV standard is robust enough to hold up to the rigors of video streaming and secure broadband file delivery to moving vehicles has revealed that the standard is indeed up to the challenge.

A field test conducted by the Pearl TV coalition with Auton at the Motown 3.0 Open Test Track here showed how robust the transport layer and software applications of ATSC 3.0 are in delivering non-real-time data. The results of the test along with those conducted earlier demonstrate 3.0’s relevance as a viable, data delivery alternative to reach vehicles, Pearl TV said.

“The Motown Test Track continues to be a lead research and development environment for service providers, like Auton, automakers, OEM vendors, media distributors and internet service providers of all types to convene and foster new application development,” said Anne Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV.

“The innovation from the broadcast industry behind the NextGen TV standard is unbound and is reflective of its commitment to enabling a national wireless data distribution fabric for the automotive industry, which it needs to deliver mobile video, audio and digital content to the on-the-move public," she added. 

Testing was done in concert with the E.W. Scripps Company WMYD 3.0 lighthouse station and was powered by the Triveni Digital Broadcast Chain. Test results proved the ability of the standard to deliver files in a wide range of environments, including urban, suburban and exurban settings, the broadcast coalition said.

“Auton continues to lead the way in developing an ATSC 3.0 mobility platform that is effective, secure and more cost-effective for delivery of essential software updates and infotainment to the connected and autonomous vehicle market,” said Auton CEO Robert Foster. “By pioneering the use of NextGen TV technology, we’re able to satisfy the growing demands of the automotive industry with the ultimate integration that will enhance access to mobile broadband services for consumers, enterprises, fleets and public transportation and personal portable devices.”

The Triveni Digital Broadcast Chain offers a variety of tools to optimize data delivery from the physical layer with the help of forward error correction (FEC) and ModCod settings available via mechanisms like statistical multiplexing and opportunistic data insertion, said Ralph Bachofen, company vice president of sale and marketing. 

“These tools can be applied together or separately on each of the data services according to the business needs and use cases,” said Bachofen.

More information is available on the Pearl TV and Triveni Digital websites.

HUNT VALLEY, M.D. and MELBOURNE, Fla.—Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. and USSI Global announced today that they will partner to offer the nation’s first commercial datacasting service using the NextGen Broadcast standard (ATSC 3.0). The pilot program will deliver local content, advertising, and data files to the rapidly growing Electric Vehicle Charging station market. 

The pilot will help validate the promise of datacasting as a commercial service for broadcasters with USSI Global combining its digital signage and managed services expertise with Sinclair’s NextGen Broadcast capabilities to provide this first-of-a-kind datacasting offering, the companies reported.

In announcing the pilot, Chris Ripley, Sinclair’s president and CEO said, “Predictions of broadcasters supplementing their programming businesses with ancillary services has captured the imagination of all broadcasters. It’s been a part of the `digital promise' since we began the conversion from analog transmissions 25 years ago. Everyone has been waiting for the promises to be fulfilled. That has now arrived with our partnership with USSI Global, which opens wide the door to an enticing array of new services that enhance the choices for businesses and individuals alike.”

Anthony Morelli , USSI Global’s chief operating officer added that: “USSI Global’s experience in the broadcast and digital signage industries uniquely positions us to power datacasting services for EV Charging stations, one of the fastest-growing business opportunities for DOOH. Our strong partnership with Sinclair in the Broadcast Market makes the pivot to datacasting a natural progression. USSI Global’s ecosystem allows us to build out a multi-tenant EV charging network.”

The companies said the pilot will confirm the technology’s ability to achieve several goals, including the ability to support EV Charging systems with dedicated content in select markets; to refine the system design; to optimize presentation of content; to collect audience data; to validate financial assumptions; and uncover unknowns.

As part of the effort, Sinclair will leverage existing content and advertising capabilities using NextGen Broadcast capabilities. The pilot program will require wireless delivery, storage and integration of data into USSI Global’s ecosystem and will demonstrate a capability that can be scaled across the country, the companies said. 

Similar to a typical digital-out-of-home (DOOH) solution for foot traffic near an outdoor kiosk, this datacasting application supports multi-tenant advertising and real-time updates of local content, providing a unique personal experience. 

This user experience combines local content and advertising with data file distribution to all USSI Global kiosks in a given DMA. Feedback to Sinclair will include audience measurement and impression-based analytics captured through USSI Global. 

In addition, USSI Global’s field technicians will install and maintain all kiosks, and the company’s managed services team will provide remote monitoring, predictive maintenance and other support services from its full-service network operations center (NOC).

This datacasting use case will also demonstrate the potential for significant scalability as a growing business. The US Department of Transportation has set a goal of 500,000 EV Charging stations nationwide by 2030. When fully implemented, the goal is for EV owners to be able to find at least one charging port within 50 miles anywhere in the 50 states.

CEDAR HILL, Texas—If all goes as planned, ARK Multicasting will light up the first two LPTV stations of its planned coast-to-coast Broadcast Internet network based on the ATSC 3.0 standard this month.

The Dallas and Panama City, Fla., stations will be joined by eight others in College Station, Texas, Nashville and Chattanooga, Tenn., Pensacola, Destin, Jacksonville, Melbourne and a second station in Panama City, Fla., before the end of Q1 2022. 

ARK Multicasting holds the licenses or construction permits for 283 LPTV stations around the country, positioning the company to deploy Broadcast Internet service to millions of households. The company plans roll out the service at all of the stations over the next 18 months if supply chain problems do not become an issue, it said.

“Broadcast Internet – because of its one-to-many architecture - is ideally suited to move large amounts of data to tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. Our network has the potential to increase the efficiency of 5G wireless networks, enable autonomous vehicles and provide farmers with precision agriculture technologies,” said ARK CEO Josh Weiss.

Several cloud computing and broadcast equipment companies are supplying technology for the deployment, including:

• Hewlett Packard Enterprises, which is providing infrastructure, software and services for the edge-to-cloud platform for the service.
• Comark Digital Services and transmission teams.
• General Data Tech, which will do staging, burn-in and deployment.
• Triveni Digital, which is providing its SkyScraper XM ATSC 3.0 Datacasting System, 3.0 Broadcast Gateway scheduler, GuideBuilder XM 3.0 transport encoder and StreamScope XM Analyzer—all running in a virtualized environment. 
• Ateme, which has worked for the past several years with ARK Multicasting, providing compression solutions.
• SpectraRep, which will provide the distance learning solutions to be deployed on the first 10 stations.
• Digital Alert Systems, which will provide emergency alerting.

The deployment marks the beginning of a new chapter for television broadcasting, opening up opportunities not possible before development of the ATSC 3.0 standard. Many of the vendors partnering with ARK Multicasting described the undertaking as being visionary and pioneering. 

“In the decades of experience Triveni Digital has in both traditional broadcast and datacasting, there are few things that compare to the excitement I feel about what ARK is deploying. They are true pioneers in this space and Triveni Digital is pleased to be right alongside them,” said Ralph Bachofen, vice president of sales and marketing at Triveni Digital.

CHANTILLY, Va.—In the first deployment of educational datacasting services using NextGen TV services, SpectraRep’s EduCast datacasting service has been selected by the New Mexico Public Education Department (NMPED) to deliver classroom content via ATSC 3.0 broadcasts to students without access to sufficient broadband services in their homes.  

The project, which kicked off in late November 2021, marks the first time in the United States that educational datacasting will be deployed using ATSC 3.0. Project partners include: New Mexico PBS (KNME and KNMD), KENW Eastern New Mexico University, KRWG New Mexico State University, CTC Technology & Energy, and CLARO Consulting.

“SpectraRep mobilized to deliver a fast and efficient rollout of our EduCast service in New Mexico,” said Mark O’Brien, SpectraRep president. “Within a short period, we delivered the hardware and software necessary for schools and families to begin using the secure functionality of datacasting to access educational content no matter where the students live. We are pleased to be selected by New Mexico to address the issue of equity in education head-on.”

EduCast will use television broadcast signals controlled by the New Mexico PBS stations to send educational materials over the air as files into student homes. These stations reach 98 percent of all New Mexico homes. Inside the home, a receiver will convey the information to the student’s Chromebook or other digital devices. Distribution of the 2,000 datacasting receivers began in November.

“New Mexico’s public television stations are excited about this partnership with our Public Education Department and a new opportunity to extend our mission to educate and engage -- anytime, anywhere,” said Franz Joachim, New Mexico PBS general manager and CEO. In a recent story, The Associated Press noted that datacasting can mitigate the digital divide for New Mexico students who were previously having to learn with limited or no connectivity.

“The main opportunity of datacasting is delivering a reliable method for students to call up classroom lessons or other educational materials much as they would tune in to watch any PBS programming through their broadcast television signal. We believe datacasting could be an important piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is universal digital access,” added Mark O’Brien.

The New Mexico pilot is funded by an award from Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham out of the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER), a pandemic relief measure from the U.S. Department of Education. New Mexico public television covers the entire state with a network of broadcast translators in addition to their full-power stations. 

“Leveraging opportunities created by digital broadcasting, we can devote a small part of our channel space to send internet content directly to students who lack sufficient broadband connectivity. Without affecting our television broadcasts in any way, we will create a pathway from teacher to student – bridging the digital divide and delivering content designed for internet distribution to homes that lack internet capabilities. We are proud to provide part of the solution to one of New Mexico’s most pressing problems,” Joachim said.

During a recent webinar sharing ATSC 3.0 tests and insights from Korean and the U.S. experts, BIA Advisory Services presented new data estimating that datacasting revenue from NextGen broadcasts could bring in a significant amount of revenue of $5 billion by 2027 and $10.7 billion in new revenue by 2030. 

“Broadcaster expansion into adjacent data distribution markets [with datacasting services will] drive significant incremental non-core revenue and valuation growth,” explained Rick Ducey, managing director of BIA Advisory Services, speaking at the “Korea—U.S. NextGen Broadcast Webinar” on November 23. 

The 2030 $10.7 billion estimate is BIA’s “middle case” scenario of 20% of total spectrum capacity being used for datacasting. In its high case, involving 27% of spectrum, those services could produce a whopping $15 billion; in the low case of using 12% of spectrum, they would still bring in $6.4 billion in 2030. 

The data is particularly good news for broadcasters facing a relatively stagnant ad market. BIA is predicting that revenue from TV over the air offers will see only a modest rise from $19.85 billion in 2022 to $20.13 billion in 2030 while subscriber fees from retransmission consent agreements will grow from $14.55 billion in 2022 to $17.37 billion in 2030. 

By 2030, datacasting will account for about 22% of their total revenue. 

“It's serious money,” he said. “It's a serious business commitment and endeavor….This is a significant amount of capital that will be infused into the broadcast industry."

Ducey said that he expects these datacasting services to evolve through four phases from proof of technology to proof of viable use cases, targetable and sustainable customer bases and scalable, profitable business models.

Potential use cases include agriculture, automotive for the connected car, digital signage, education and distance learning, GPS, IoT, public safety for emergency alerts and other features, telecom for hybrid NextGen TV/5G network applications and telemedicine.

Ducey also noted that broadcasters will start to generate new revenue from data casting as early as 2024, with those revenues hitting $1.7 billion in 2025 and $5 billion by 2027.

“The curve really starts this story in 2022, 2023 with low dollar volumes, and scales up with ….a sustainable, scalable sort of business offering $15 billion [in the high case], nearly $11 billion in the middle case and over $6 billion dollars for the low case,” he said. “So….in the least likely case, broadcasters are gonna be able to pick up another $6.4 billion with the use of NextGen capabilities [and if] things go well could be $15 billion, more than twice as much of that.”

ARLINGTON, Va.,—In an important demonstration of some of the new services that NextGen TV can offer, BitPath, CAST.ERA and ONE Media have delivered “Enhanced GPS” broadcasts that could provide a major new tool for autonomous vehicle navigation and other applications. 

The demo broadcast of “Enhanced GPS” (eGPS) data using ATSC 3.0 showed it could deliver positional accuracy within a few centimeters. 

That kind of accuracy could be very important in a number of applications like autonomous vehicle navigation. 

Additionally, a drone incorporating eGPS and a 5G radio was used to show the potential of “Beyond Visual Line of Sight” observation and live imagery. This demo delivered a near real-time broadcast of gathered live images that could very useful for news, first responders and other applications. 

The demoes are important because traditional space-based global positioning systems are vulnerable to low power and environmentally induced inaccuracies. Using the high-power data transmission capacity of terrestrial broadcast stations, improved eGPS positioning can be broadcast to an unlimited number of vehicles inside of the range of a licensed broadcast television station. 

The companies involved also noted that enhanced GPS is one example of how ATSC 3.0 could usher in a new era of datacasting services from broadcasters. 

Testing of eGPS and aerial observation capabilities was orchestrated by CAST.ERA, the joint venture between Sinclair and SK Telecom from South Korea, in conjunction with Doosan and South Korean broadcaster, MBC. Using advanced drone technology combined with the NextGen broadcast-enabled eGPS, the demonstration permitted supervised autonomous drone takeoff, flights and landing at extraordinarily precise locations. 

Commenting on this important proof of concept, John Hane, president of BitPath, which is building a national broadcast data network, noted that “today’s demonstration shows one of many high value, low bandwidth applications for broadcast data. Location services are more important to the economy every day. Applications extend from all transportation sectors to energy distribution, smart cities, public safety, and cyber security. BitPath looks forward to working with our partners and other broadcasters to add new dimensions to broadcasters’ public interest services.”

Kevin Gage, CAST.ERA’s chief operating officer, added that “data services, cloud management of ATSC 3.0 services and ultra-low latency media encoding are just a few of the new technologies we plan to release this year. The eGPS project highlights each of these technologies over a hybrid ATSC 3.0-5G delivery network.”

One Media 3.0 is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc.

WASHINGTON—Datacasting equipment and connectivity, which public TV stations have been using to help with remote education, have been deemed eligible by the FCC for funding through the Emergency Connectivity Fund Program, according to America’s Public Television Stations (APTS).

The Emergency Connectivity Fund was part of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Covid-19 package, which makes $7.17 billion available to eligible technologies. That now officially includes datacasting.

“We are profoundly grateful to the Commission for including datacasting among the technologies eligible for funding under this new program to help schools and libraries connect students without broadband access,” said Patrick Butler, president and CEO of APTS. “The unanimous endorsement of datacasting by members of the Commission is a powerful testament to the value of this technology in bridging the 'homework gap' that threatens the educational progress of millions of students still unconnected to the internet.

“We in public television are proud of the pioneering role our stations have played in applying datacasting technology to remote learning in a time of national crisis, and we look forward to partnering with the Commission and with state and local education agencies to deploy this technology quickly and comprehensively in those areas where broadband access will remain unavailable for some time to come.”

WASHINGTON—The FCC is throwing its support behind Broadcast Internet, approving a Report & Order that updates the rules and fee structure related to Broadcast Internet services.

ATSC 3.0 is the next-generation standard developed by ATSC that powers NextGen TV. This includes ATSC 3.0 ancillary and supplementary broadcast services, widely known as Broadcast Internet. Among the potential Broadcast Internet services is datacasting.

The Report & Order approved by the FCC today, Dec. 10, during its December commission meeting clarifies the fee structure pertaining to these ancillary and supplementary services, which the FCC says will ensure that TV broadcasters can partner with third-parties to provide news services without the risk of having to pay the federal government excessive fees.

The Order also adopts additional proposals designed to facilitate noncommercial educational television (NCE) stations to utilize Broadcast Internet services. Specifically, the Order allows NCEs to offer nonprofit, noncommercial, educational Broadcast Internet services alongside their TV programming as part of the primary use of their spectrum and cuts the fee on revenue from those services in half, from 5% to 2.5%.

NAB Senior Vice President of Communications Ann Marie Cumming issued the following statement in reaction to the FCC’s vote:

“NAB appreciates the commission’s attention to the development of ATSC 3.0 and all of the consumer benefits that will follow. In particular, NAB thanks all of the commissioners for working collaboratively with stakeholders to yield a positive item for the future of ATSC 3.0.”

Other organizations, like APTS, had urged the FCC to adopt the Report & Order. NCTA—The Internet & Television Association, however, did believe that Broadcast Internet services should adhere to traditional broadcast rules. As of the posting of this story NCTA had not issued a comment on the FCC’s decision.

The full FCC Report & Order is available through the FCC website. 

INDIANAPOLIS—Students across the country are learning remotely as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage. To support these efforts, Indiana has put $6.73 million in grants to the development and deployment of datacasting technology to help deliver educational content using TV signals.

APTS previously urged the FCC to recognize the role datacasting could play in supporting remote educational efforts, citing Indiana, as well as Pennsylvania and South Carolina, as states that have been using datacasting during the pandemic, which is particularly helpful for those who do not have reliable access to the internet.

Indiana Public Broadcasting Stations has reportedly raised the $6.73 million in grants and has the intention of doing a pilot datacasting program in January with Jennings County schools. Mark Newman, IPBS executive director, is coordinating the effort.

Newman is also working to provide datacasting services to other schools throughout the state. According to Newman, 84,000 students in Indiana do not have adequate internet access. He says the current level of funding can help about 8,200 households.

IPBS stations currently send broadcast signals to about 95% of the state to deliver public TV programming. It says that part of that signal can be used to send data with school curriculum, including images, videos and html files, into homes to power laptops, smart phones and tablets. To access the content, students would need a computer, antenna and receiver, with data viewed through an internet browser.

In addition to its ability to serve students without reliable internet, Newman says that datacasting is cheaper than deploying internet hotspots. It is estimated that the annual cost of datacasting for all IPBS stations would be $205,000, enabling data transfer from participating schools within their singla range. In comparison, IPBS says that a school district could spend at least $20,000 per month for a hotspot service, with an increasing fee based on the number of users.

“PBS began as educational television,” Newman said. “You might say we’re using technology to get back to our roots.”

WASHINGTON—In the midst of another school year impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, America’s Public Television Stations is making the case to the FCC for the importance of broadcast datacasting via public television in providing educational materials to U.S. households that do not have access to broadband.

Recapping a meeting that APTS and PBS had with the Lyle Elder of the FCC’s Media Bureau Policy Division, APTS outlined how broadcast datacasting has already benefited children in multiple states, how it could be improved with NextGen TV and why it should not be necessary for stations to pay additional fees for funds that support datacasting.

According to APTS, of the 56.6 million school children across the U.S., 20% lack access to broadband connectivity. While public TV stations are helping by providing curriculum aligned on-air learning opportunities, supplemental resources required by State Departments of Education, usually delivered via broadband, require extra support. This is where datacasting comes in, APTS says.

Public TV stations in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Indiana have implemented datacasting services to help deliver these supplemental resources by using their broadcast spectrum and to allow for any device with internet access to receive the materials, requiring only one Wi-Fi datacasting receiver in a home.

APTS says that the transition to NextGen TV will greatly enhance datacasting, as the newest receivers are ATSC 3.0 compatible, “truly creating broadcast internet services in education, public safety, telehealth, precision agriculture and more.”

To support their datacasting efforts, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Indiana have all provided state funding. Pennsylvania has donated $8 million to public TV stations specifically for datacasting, with $15 million in total being made available to schools to secure broadband, mobile hot spots and other platforms to increase equitable access to remote learning. South Carolina Educational Television received a $2.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to expand educational datacasting, and an additional $1.3 million from the state. Meanwhile, Indiana has provided a $1.38 million grant for establishing educational datacasting for schools in Jennings County.

In regards to this funding, APTS and PBS say that it is “illogical” to require public TV stations to pay a 5% fee on federal, state and local government provided funds for mission related public services. In addition, they asked the FCC to exempt public TV stations from ancillary and supplementary fees, saying that the collection of these fees is derived from “commercial use” of funds.

“Datacasting has the potential to change the remote learning landscape for children and educators in rural, low-income and internet desert communities because of its ability to transmit the same instructional content and educational resources that would normally require an internet connection,” APTS said.

INDIANAPOLIS—As the school year is about to kick off and remote learning once again the option for many with the COVID-19 pandemic, Indiana Public Broadcasting Stations (IPBS) is partnering with Jennings County School Corporation to provide datacasting technology to help expand remote learning access to students.

According to IPBS, the datacasting technology will be given to roughly 1,200 students who have little to no access to reliable broadband. Datacasting overcomes this by sending computer-based files over a television broadcast signal.

To carry out the implementation, IPBS member station WTIU is working with SpectraRep, a provider of datacasting technology. The project’s $1.38 million in funding is coming from a grant awarded through Indiana Governor’s Eric Holcomb’s emergency education relief program (GEER), which came as a result of the CARES Act for the specific purpose of improving distance learning/remote learning techniques and tech.

With the GEER grant, WTIU will have datacasting equipment at their station for sending signals to simple receivers and antennas at homes. The signal can be picked up and relayed to Chromebooks and tablets over Wi-Fi.

“The datacasting implementation in Jennings County will serve as a proof-of-concept that can be replicated in counties and school districts across Indiana,” said Mark Newman, IPBS executive director. “It can be a game-changing technology for areas of the state where broadband is limited or unavailable.”

IPBS will ramp up the datacasting initiative over the next two months, with the expectation it will be available to households in early November.

HUNT VALLEY, Md.—Datacasting is nothing new to TV broadcasters, but what is are multiple opportunities to earn additional revenue by offering ATSC 3.0-based datacasting services and the sizable effort going into making them a reality.

For more than 90 minutes on Aug. 18, various players in the process offered their insights during the “AT$C Webinar 4: Monetizing ATSC 3.0 Datacasting” webinar produced by One Media 3.0 and the Sinclair Broadcast Group.

The panelists, Kevin Gage, COO Cast.era, a joint venture of SK Telecom and Sinclair; Peter Guglielmino, CTO, Media & Entertainment, at IBM; Sasha Javid, COO of BitPath (formerly Spectrum Co); and Mark O’Brien, president and CEO of Spectrarep, discussed a broad range of related topics, including progress on a nationwide rollout of ATSC 3.0, various new datatcasting business plays, synergy between ATSC 3.0 and 5G networks, why ATSC 3.0 is a financially attractive alternative to 5G for certain data applications and how ATSC 3.0 might be the new Wi-Fi in terms of acceptance by wireless carriers. The webinar was moderated by Michael Bouchard, vice president, Technology Strategy, at One Media.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

Bouchard set the tone for the webcast up front, describing the fundamental difference between the existing ATSC 1.0 DTV standard and NextGen TV. “ATSC 3.0 turns broadcast spectrum into a big data pipe where linear video is only one form of the data,” said Bouchard.

Allocating a portion of a 3.0 channel to data transmission will enable broadcasters to create an IP packet umbrella over each of their markets, delivering the data of new customers who need to reach remote devices with their IP packets. 

ATSC 3.0 is the tool stations can use to offer “wireless broadcast service”—a term that seems redundant on its face but played heavily in the webinar to emphasize that broadcasters will be delivering IP packets over the air like other familiar wireless networks.

PLUS: Bringing Profits to NextGen TV

Reaching IoT (Internet of Things) devices and smart city sensors with data is an obvious application. While many people think about these devices being used in monitoring applications where a backchannel is mandatory, many other IoT applications where there is a “data asymmetry” are well suited to 3.0 datacasting, said Javid. 

“Whether those are software updates, some kind of command to take an action, these kinds of downlink information flows are needed to be timely to thousands if not millions of devices, and in some case there might even be an inherent backchannel,” he said, adding that utilities, for example, have a built-in backchannel “from the grid itself.”

Another application is enhanced geolocation services for a variety of smart devices, ranging from agricultural sensors and drones to driverless vehicles. A 3.0-based geolocation service will be particularly valuable because it can deliver data down to the centimeter, not meters. “That’s incredibly important, especially when you start having autonomous automobiles and drone services ...,” said Gage.

A GPS backup is another 3.0-related datacasting application. The U.S. military has expressed concern about the lack of GPS redundancy and what might be required to shore up the current system, said O’Brien.

“Launching satellites is incredibly expense,” he said. “So, if we can deliver maybe not the exact same service but some level of redundancy to the current GPS system, that is readily monetizable ….” 

Spectrarep specializes in offering public broadcasters datacasting solutions using ATSC 1.0, and is looking to leverage the mobile reception and enhanced indoor penetration capabilities of 3.0 to offer a higher level of service for first responders on the move, such as firefighters on their way to a blaze, and households in the general public without broadband service that are struggling to educate children at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, said O’Brien.

The company is currently deploying thousands of 1.0 datacasting receivers for education and is “about to hit the turning point where we have to [put 3.0 receivers in those devices],” he said, noting once that happens Spectrarep will be seeding the market.

3.0-5G SYNERGIES 

While the early days of 3.0 datacasting may see broadcasters competing with wireless carriers for business, the panel agreed that eventually the two will be seen as complementary, much in the same way as Wi-Fi networks came to be valued by wireless carriers.

“This has been proven already in the world between cellular and Wi-Fi,” said IBM’s Guglielmino. “There are two separate networks. People could say they compete, but if I am a cable company with a whole myriad set of Wi-Fi hotspots, it helps the end user get access to content when I don’t have access to a cellular signal.”

However, while synergy exists between 3.0 and 5G networks, there will be “a little bit of competition,” and broadcasters must have “a compelling value proposition” that stands up against what the carriers offer, said Javid.

“That’s exactly the use case of Wi-Fi. They did exactly that,” he said. “Wi-Fi wasn’t in the phone to begin with, but they created a compelling value proposition from the beginning. Eventually the carriers realized it was here to stay and that there were some benefits.” 

One major carrier that’s recognized the benefits of 3.0 datacasting is South Korea’s SK Telecom, said Gage.

“This [the 3.0-5G synergy] is why SK Telecom is so interested in this,” he said. “They see the value of broadcast, and they see the value of 5G. They see the hybrid network as the way the future will end up going.”

Gage recounted a demonstration of this 3.0-5G network synergy in 2019 on Jeju Island off the southern tip of the peninsula. A Maserati SUV was equipped with both ATSC 3.0 and 5G wireless receivers for the demo.

“We drove it around, and we were able to deliver real-time—and this was not optimized yet, not even first-gen test—and we were driving around taking in video off the broadcast network, and in this case we were adding maps, and we were adding advertising and we were adding data downloads via both 3.0 and 5G,” said Gage.

During the test, a 3.0 data signal was used to provide navigation waymarks that were combined with GPS location data delivered via the 5G network, he added.

SAVING COSTS AND RESOURCES

If wireless carriers are in the business of selling voice and data plans to consumers, why should they want to cooperate with broadcasters, offloading unicast traffic from their networks to a 3.0 datacasting network, asked Bouchard.

The answer comes down to reducing expenses and better resource utilization of the telco’s core networks, said Guglielmino.

“For every [one hour of an HD video] stream, it costs in electricity 60 cents,” he said. “If I am a telco, I am delivering point-to-point streams, so if I am delivering 100,000 streams for an hour, it’s 100,000 times 60 cents [or $60,000].”

This is a major problem for telcos because they earn no money from delivering over-the-top video streams. “They’re not monetizing it; they are subsidizing it,” he said, noting that the costs “go up exponentially” when higher frequency waveforms are involved as with 5G because more antennas and amplifiers are needed. 

While his example focused on video, Guglielmino pointed out that it is just as true for any data delivered and suggested how a 3.0-5G synergistic network could work. “If I’m [a telco] delivering 10 million updates to Toyotas, it’s probably going to be a lot less expensive for me to partner with a broadcaster to do it and … be the back channel because that’s what broadcast needs,” he explained.

Gage concurred and added that it will be unwise for a telco to dedicate its infrastructure to mass media linear content. “It doesn’t make sense to gum up a telco’s backhaul. It does not make sense to gum up their core. It does not make sense to create all of that extra congestion that not only affects that telco but affects the different partners that are using that telco’s private network,” he said.

BUILDING THE 3.0 NETWORK

Before broadcasters can cash in on these sorts of datacasting opportunities, they will first have to deploy ATSC 3.0, and that’s the focus of BitPath, a joint venture of Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair.

“What we are really trying to do is aggregate spectrum capacity across member television stations,” said Javid. “In order to compete against carriers, you are really going to need a nationwide network, and in the long term, that’s the only way to make a compelling play.”

At the beginning of 2020, the Advanced Television Systems Committee was trumpeting that more than 60 stations covering 70% of the population would be on air by the end of the year. However, COVID-19 has made that goal unworkable, said Javid.

“By the end of the year, we think another six to 10 markets [in addition to the 11 markets on air now with 3.0] are very doable this year despite the fact that we’ve had to deal with a lot of the COVID-19 challenges and restrictions on travel,” he said.

The goal now is to get to “critical mass” –which Javid views as 50% to 60% nationwide coverage—by mid-2021, he said.

“But the good news is that the deployments are happening. Each time we do a market, we get a little bit faster, a little bit better, at it,” he said.

Transmitting 3.0 is only half the story, however. The other key component to deploying a nationwide wireless broadcast network is the network core. “Developing the core is fundamental to anything we are going to do,” said Javid.

Guglielmino concurred. “[T]he core network to me is essentially a platform that’s similar to what the telcos have to have. They have to have ways to onboard services, provision services, activate services and bill the services,” he said.

IBM is investigating how to leverage open-source innovations, open source code and open source platforms in creating a 3.0 network core. “When you have these platforms established, then you can do things like add AI and ML [artificial intelligence and machine learning] to understand how to optimize the delivery,” he said.

Cast.era is leveraging the experience SK Telecom has garnered developing third-, fourth- and fifth-generation core networks as it tackles the 3.0 core for a hybrid 3.0-5G network, said Gage.

“Everything they have learned from orchestrating and slicing spectrum and moving data around and efficiencies and flexibility that you have so you get to a world where it is a low- or no-touch environment because of the sheer volume [of data] that’s circulating,” said Gage.

The webinar, the fourth in the series, concluded with questions from those in attendance.

The next webinar in the series, “Enabling the Broadcast Internet,” is scheduled for Sept. 1. Registration is available online.

CHANTILLY, Va.—I’ve spent the bulk of my career immersed in television technology—spanning satellites, cable, broadcast and internet. Recently, I’ve been focused on “crossing the streams” between television technology and public safety—specifically by exploiting the unique characteristics of digital television datacasting to support public safety, first responders and public alerting.

Public safety entities, who have historically depended on land-mobile radio (LMR) technology for communications, have been stymied by the limitations of those services. They are generally voice-only services with limited geographic footprints. 4G/LTE mobile services can offer increased functionality but are hampered by the limitations of wireless coverage, dependence on commercial power and congestion during public safety incidents—often making them unusable precisely at the times they are needed the most.

Datacasting utilizes a dedicated portion of broadcast television bandwidth to provide secure, targeted IP data delivery, including alerts, messages, files, images and video. Data is encoded, encrypted (when desired) and multiplexed with other program streams into the digital television broadcast signal. It is only receivable on targeted devices and is undetectable on television viewed by the public. Because it uses the resilient TV station infrastructure, datacasting is highly reliable, especially during emergencies (Fig. 1).

SIGNIFICANT BENEFITS

Datacasting has the potential to provide significant benefits when used to support public safety.

Broadcast television signals are widely available in urban, suburban and rural areas, so datacasting coverage is extensive. Public television transmitters alone reach nearly 97 percent of the U.S. population, including territories.

Because datacasting uses existing broadcast television infrastructure, it is highly reliable and resilient. Broadcast television has a proven track record of staying on the air even during severe weather events and extended power outages, as demonstrated during Super-storm Sandy and Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

Datacasting is not subject to congestion during emergencies. The licensed television spectrum is controlled by the television station licensee and staffed by professional engineers. When they allocate bandwidth to public safety, the same quality of service will always be available.

Datacasting can be used to multicast data to many users for the same cost as the transmission of data to a single user. Datacasting can make more efficient use of available bandwidth and reduce the load on LTE bandwidth, freeing that spectrum up for other uses.

Datacasting leverages a system designed primarily for the transmission of high-quality video and audio streams. Thus, it has the innate ability to address the public safety community’s desire for high quality audio and video data transport.

Television stations are designed as a communications hub, where fiber, satellite, microwave and LTE carrier aggregation allow for content aggregation from a remote command, state or national government agency, and distribution over a local TV station for last mile delivery.

Datacasting is relatively inexpensive to implement and operate. The bulk of the network operating costs are already covered under a station’s broadcast service model. Incorporating datacasting into a comprehensive communications plan leverages this sunk cost making datacasting very cost effective.

Datacasting provides an alternative communications path to the existing cellular system, which cannot easily handle large files and video and provides a redundant communications path in times of emergency when the cellular systems become congested and non-functional.

Datacasting improves interoperability and the ability to share critical files and videos between agencies and metropolitan regions.

A conceptualized digital television signal is shown in Fig. 2. In this simplified example, the station is transmitting one HD channel (shown in orange), and one SD channel (shown in blue), and has allocated a fixed minimum amount of their digital capacity to datacasting (shown in red). The digital capacity required for the two television signals varies in time, based on the complexity of the video.

So, there is often unused transmission capacity that can be used opportunistically for datacasting in addition to the minimum capacity set aside. Small content elements, for example, alert messages, take very little transmission capacity and can be transmitted very quickly. Larger content elements, for example, a live drone video feed, are best served through dedicated capacity. In extreme circumstances, a station also has the option to preempt or reduce quality on one or more video services to free up capacity for high-demand content.

LEVERAGING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING

So, what is one of the biggest challenges? Identifying and selecting the most appropriate and useful content to send to first responders. Think about a public safety datacasting system that supports all first responders in a station’s entire broadcast footprint. That might include state and local police, emergency management teams, fire services, school districts, public venues, corrections departments, state national guard and others. Today there are literally thousands of video sources in every community that are useful in supporting public safety incidents within just a single station’s footprint. Examples include police and national guard helicopter video, UAV drone video from wildfire incidents, traffic cameras, security cameras (from schools, sports arenas, correctional facilities, etc.), body cameras and hand-held cellphone video.

Traditionally we’ve had a dispatcher making human choices about which video sources are the most important to datacast and target to specific public safety entities and first responders; however, that model is reaching its limits due to the raw number of potential sources. It’s a phenomenon that psychologist Barry Schwartz describes as “The Paradox of Choice” in his book of the same name. There are so many choices that the opportunities that should be liberating us instead are overwhelming us and making it more difficult for us to actually make choices.

This is where the media & entertainment and public safety industry efforts around AI and machine learning are offering solutions to this choice dilemma. On the M&E side, work focused on content cataloging, automated analysis and metadata enrichment are helping to simplify and streamline the selection process. On the public safety side, work focused on human behavior analysis, facial recognition, event access control and deep learning are equally applicable to source selection for public safety datacasting.

Our plan is to leverage the ongoing work in both industries to help solve this real-world and growing challenge. The onset of Next Gen TV greatly enhances the capacity and opportunities for public safety datacasting. Coupling that with advanced approaches to content selection and curation will solidify broadcast television’s role in supporting public safety in our communities.

John McCoskey is chief operating officer for SpectraRep. He can be reached atjmccoskey@spectrarep.com. Follow him on Twitter at @John_McCoskey.

CHANTILLY, VA.—SpectraRep, a provider of datacasting technology for homeland security and public safety, has appointed John McCoskey as its new Chief Operating Officer.

McCoskey has more than 30 years of experience in the broadcast technology. Prior to SpectrRep, he headed up the technology, media and entertainment practice at Eagle Hill Consulting, was the first chief technology officer for PBS as well as the CTO and executive Vice President for the Motion Picture Association of America. He is also a contributor to TV Technology.

“John will be responsible for guidance, alignment and prioritization of SpectraRep strategy at a time when we are seeing incredible adoption of datacasting to improve public safety information sharing and as SpectraRep expands into public alerting,” said Mark O’Brien, president of SpectraRep. "His expertise in broadcast technology, coupled with his knowledge of the public television landscape will reinforce our course as law enforcement and first responders recognize the benefits of ATSC digital television transmission.”

[Read: SpectraRep Datacasting System Helps Share Public Safety Info]

“I am very pleased to be joining SpectraRep at this particular time because there’s such a tremendous opportunity to extend the community service mission of public television stations with datacasting,” McCoskey said. “Using my background, experience and relationships in this domain, I will focus on implementing SpectraRep’s vision to pursue new and existing opportunities that help solve problems on the local level. 

MONROE, IN–Federal and state public safety officials, local school staff and public television engineers this week teamed up to conduct a test using the airwaves of a local public TV station to quickly identify and neutralize threats to school safety.

The simulated school shooting incident was conducted at the Adams Central Community Schools. School administrators and teachers participated in today’s demonstration, but students were not on campus.

Datacasting uses public television broadcast infrastructure and spectrum to enhance public safety communications capabilities and send encrypted, targetable data streams to designated public safety personnel to help swiftly locate and neutralize threats to the public.

[Read: When Disaster Strikes, Public Broadcasting Delivers]

In the test, the data stream was used to share critical information from the simulated incident with first responders and public safety officials from multiple agencies. This information included live video from multiple cameras, school blueprints and other information that would be essential for responding to and resolving an actual school shooting threat.

The exercise was sponsored by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), in collaboration with the Integrated Public Safety Commission, Adams County Sheriff, Adams County Emergency Management Agency, and Adams County School District.

PBS 39, the public television station serving Adams County and headquartered in Fort Wayne, provided the datacasting equipment and expertise. America’s Public Television Stations, the national organization representing more than 300 stations in all 50 States, is a strategic partner with the Department of Homeland Security in promoting the public safety benefits of datacasting nationwide.

Datacasting’s “one-to-many” communications architecture makes it possible to send huge streams of information quickly to an unlimited number of law enforcement officers and first responders without risk of the congestion and system failure often associated with cellular networks during emergencies.

“The support, participation, and significant contributions of numerous agencies and personnel involved in today’s exercise made it a great success,” said DHS S&T Program Manager Cuong Luu. “The willingness and dedication of Indiana and Adams County first responders, as well as DHS partners and performers, has facilitated the development of innovative technology that will help the nation's first responders become better protected, connected, and fully aware to maintain the safety of American lives and communities. None of what we do would be possible without working together closely with first responders, academia, research and development, and the innovation community.”

“America’s Public Television Stations are proud to be a partner in today’s successful simulation of a well-coordinated response to a school shooting threat,” said APTS President and CEO Patrick Butler. “When a school shooting happens, every second counts. Today’s exercise shows that public television’s datacasting capabilities can share critical information with first responders on the ground quickly and efficiently, saving time and saving lives. Today’s historic event is another important step forward in public television’s growing mission of protecting communities and keeping Americans safe.”

“I’m convinced that state and local first responders can truly benefit from this public television station/public safety partnership,” said David W. Vice, Executive Director, Integrated Public Safety Commission. “The Indiana Department of Homeland Security and the Integrated Public Safety Commission have been working behind the scene for months on this pilot project, and we’re gratified to see it in action today.”

“Datacasting has the potential of providing key visual information to first responders for incidents where this technology is used,” Shane L. Rekeweg, Sheriff, Adams County, Indiana. “Both quality as well as quantity of information is important to first responders for a rapid and decisive response where other current technology fail to provide. A rapid response is needed by first responders in order to save lives. Today’s demonstration showed that datacasting does in fact provide the quality and quantity that first responders need for faster response resulting in saving more lives in critical incidents.”

“Adams Central Community Schools are extremely grateful for the opportunity to host this datacasting/active shooter exercise,” said Chad Smekens, Middle School Principal, Adams Central Middle School. “We believe the training benefits to local safety personnel, and the datacasting technology now in place, will help us protect the lives of students and staff at Adams Central long into the future. The Adams Central community is honored to work with the professionals at PBS39, the Department of Homeland Security, Indiana Dept. of Homeland Security, John Hopkins University, SpectraRep, and the many local and state agencies taking part in this exercise!”

“PBS39 is proud to be a part of this school safety exercise,” stated PBS39 General Manager Bruce Haines. “Datacasting is an important public television service that provides real world benefits far beyond the fine programming and educational services for which we are best known. As a tool for first responders, datacasting enhances the safety of the communities we serve and the people who live there.”

For two years DHS S&T and its technical performers Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and SpectraRep, LLC., have been collaborating with APTS on a series of pilot projects demonstrating datacasting’s compelling public safety use cases in various parts of the country. These included flood response and recovery in Houston; multiagency collaboration and interoperability among five federal and state agencies in Boston; search and rescue of missing persons in rural Grant County, Washington; and over-water emergency communications many miles into Lake Michigan from Chicago. In addition, local public television stations have implemented datacasting capabilities to assist with massive crowd control in Washington, D.C., enhance 911 responsiveness in North Carolina, and improve the development of early earthquake warnings in California.

MEMPHIS, TENN.--The Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security last week announced the funding of a $2 million pilot project that will allow Tennessee Public Television Stations to provide secure communications between local first responders and their management teams. The funds will go towards the installation of datacasting equipment and software that will allow each Tennessee Public Television station to send out and receive encrypted public safety video, files, alerts and other data along with regular programming.

Stations will begin testing the datacasting systems within six months of receiving the funds and it’s estimated that the entire project will be completed within 30 months. The Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security added that it expects what it calls the nation's "first statewide datacasting system” will be a model for regional and even national deployments in the future.

[Read: PILOT-Ing A New Communications Option For First Responders]

The six stations receiving the funds include: Memphis (WKNO), Martin/Lexington/Jackson (WLJT), Nashville (WNPT), Cookeville (WCTE), Knoxville/Sneedville (East TN PBS) and Chattanooga (WTCI). Using the datacasting and fiber connections already in place within those stations, fire, medical, police and government officials will be able to communicate with one another in targeted emergency or natural disaster areas.

“The partnership between the Tennessee Department of Safety and the Tennessee Public Television Council (TPTC) is ideal because all six public television stations in the state are interconnected, have tall broadcast towers, backup generator power, 24-hour operations, and the spectrum available to make this project a reality,” Michael LaBonia, WKNO President/CEO and Project Director said. “Datacasting technology should enhance existing emergency management systems already in place and become one more step in helping keep people safe in an emergency. We are happy to be able to add this new technology to our existing infrastructure and look forward to working with Safety and Homeland Security in Tennessee.”

WASHINGTON—PBS and America’s Public Television Stations (APTS) told the FCC this week that they support continual improvement of Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) messages but not at the expense of requiring increased broadcast bandwidth to pass those messages.

The reply comments to the commission come in response to an inquiry by the agency into the feasibility of including multimedia content in WEA messages.

“The PBS Warning, Alert, and Response Network (“WARN”) provides a hardened reliable backup to the primary WEA system, with a fully redundant design that leverages public television’s coverage to send WEA messages over public television transmitters that cover virtually all of the population of the United States and its territories,” public television said in its filing.

[Read: When Disaster Strikes, Public Broadcasting Delivers]

APTS members have adopted a resolution pledging in principle to devote 1Mb/s of public TV digital capacity for FirstNet public safety network participation. Many public TV stations use datacasting via their broadcast infrastructure to transmit encrypted, targetable IP data with their DTV programing. “This combination allows for a nationwide wireless IP delivery network that is natively multicast, just like the TV signals it occupies,” the filing said.

The filing pointed to other ways in which public television is assisting various governmental agencies with the distribution of emergency messaging, including:

• APTS working with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services to provide high-speed data delivery for earthquake warnings;
• A Department of Homeland Security pilot in Houston relying on public TV datacasting coupled with a band 14 LTE circuit for two-way communications used by the Houston police and fire departments; and
• A similar pilot test in Chicago involving the WTTW transmitter for emergency communications involving law enforcement and the U.S. Coast Guard on Lake Michigan.

According to the filing, “public stations are working with public safety entities locally in their communities and across their states to leverage the capabilities of broadcasting to distribute essential information during emergencies, and as such, must carefully guard bandwidth to ensure that these vital services remain available to communities and first responders.”

INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—Did you hear the one about a bunch of broadcasters walking into a golf resort full of Hollywood production types?

“If you bring it,” they said, referring to content, “We will come. With ATSC 3.0.”

The preceding anecdote was based on the true story of this week’s ATSC seminar at the Hollywood Post Alliance Retreat, held annually in Coachella Valley. ATSC 3.0, colloquially known as the “next-generation” broadcast transmission standard, is rounding the final corner of development and could be completed as soon as the second quarter of this year, according to Madeleine Noland of LG. Noland, whose work on 3.0 earned her the Bernard J. Lechner Award, highest accolade of the Advanced Television Systems Committee, said the standard is 80 to 85 percent complete. The seminar came just four days before the Federal Communications Commission is set to vote on voluntary deployment of the standard at the Feb. 23 open meeting. (See the component standards comprising ATSC 3.0 in the pop-out sidebar below.)

OTA+OTT
Noland opened the Monday afternoon seminar with a litany of characteristics—Ultra HD support, name your frame rate up to 120 fps, high dynamic range, wide color gamut, object audio, personalization and scalabilitya la one person gets 24 Mbps or a million. It makes no difference. ATSC 3.0, she and several panelists emphasized, redefines broadcasting the way jet propulsion redefined travel.

“Today’s system is designed with certain planning factors,” said Winston Caldwell, vice president of spectrum engineering in the Fox Networks Advanced Engineering Group. “The expectation was that people put Yagis on their rooftops, and the network’s designed to hit that antenna. Now, it doesn’t have to be like that. You can simply configure the system to deploy that network and give people an experience unlike they’ve had before with broadcast television. Think about the reliability of the cellular network. I tend to get frustrated with that. This is megawatts of power. The network can be configured to give you something no one has given you before.”

3.0’s capabilities leapfrog previous methodologies in that it supports interactivity versus push transmission only, but perhaps more radically, ATSC 3.0 combines broadcasting and broadband. Among other implications, that means channel surfers can move between over-the-air and over-the-top platforms like Netflix without jumping through a bunch of interface hoops.

RECEIVERS
That type of functionality—as well as ATSC 3.0 itself—requires a new generation of receivers, since the standard is not backward compatible with the one currently feeding TVs and cable headends across the country. This presents the old chicken-and-egg dilemma that HDTV had to get over, which is; what comes first, the content or the receivers? After HDTV finally drove a massive wave of new TV sales, a similar expectation for 3DTV hit the ground like a bag of wet cement.

TV manufacturers are taking a different approach with 3.0, which also supports mobile reception. LG, for example, introduced a gateway device at last year’s NAB Show that decodes ATSC 3.0 signals and redistributes them via Wi-Fi through an app. LG also introduced its first ATSC 3.0 4KTV at CES earlier this year in preparation for the deployment of 3.0 in South Korea this year. (South Korea officially adopted ATSC 3.0 last July, according to the Yonhap News agency.)

Noland and Caldwell were joined by Dave Siegler of Cox Media Group, Nandhu Nandhakumar of LG and Steve Koenig of the Consumer Technology Association for the first panel of the day on ATSC 3.0 distribution and display.

Siegler said Cox is “really interested in better pictures, immersive audio, dynamic ad insertion and advanced emergency alerting.”

Nandhakumar said LG is focused on “important consumer-facing features,” such as 3.0’s ability to reach further into buildings and support mobile reception. With regard to creating consumer awareness, his response was simple: side-by-side demos with 1.0 transmissions.

Koenig noted that “TV is something very different today… [it ’s] diffusion of content engagement across screens.” TV viewing on what old-timers call “TV” is decreasing, he said, from 61 percent in 2011 to 51 percent today.

SINGLE FREQUENCY NETWORKS
Caldwell took an audience question on single frequency networks and whether or not broadcasters would be willing to invest in multiple towers the way cellular service providers have. Single frequency networks, or “SFNs,” comprise multiple transmitter sites simultaneously slinging a signal over a single frequency. SFNs allow for greater signal saturation in a coverage area.

“When you put in another tower site, you expand the [bit] pipe,” Caldwell said. “It’s a real key to the efficiency of the system.”

“With regard to cost, we see the key to that just cooperation, as we move into the future, hopefully the broadcast industry can cooperate more. A single tower can host several broadcasters at once a key way to offset costs... with regard to SFNs, we’re talking about four towers, maybe 10, not hundreds of towers,” he said.

INTERACTIVY
Mark Corl of Triveni Digital led a second panel on interactivity featuring Guy Hadland of UniSoft Corp. Joe Winograd of Verance Azita Manson of OpenZnet and Pete Van Peenen of Pearl TV.

Hadland described how Unisoft provided data delivery and interactive applications for the OCAP cable standard, which is still in use in 14 million Charter homes. He said Unisoft now has a working data delivery system for ATSC 3.0.

Manson, whose company led an ATSC 3.0 app authoring project for the National Association of Broadcasters, said some new apps will appear at the upcoming 2017 NAB Show, including one for interactive advertising opt-in.

Hadland noted that, “Comcast Spotlight has been selling enhanced interactive ads for about three years. It’s one of the first things broadcasters can do.”

Van Peenen noted that the opt-in structure isn’t part of the 3.0 standard, “but from Pearl’s perspective, it would be opt-in,” to keep from peeving viewers, “but we don’t want people to have to opt in every time they change the channel.”

LIKE HbbTV
Winograd talked about HbbTV as an object lesson. HbbTV is a hybrid broadcast-broadband service in Europe. He said by “layering on top of OTA services an entry point into OTT, the broadcaster doesn’t lose a viewer when they change channels.”

He gave some examples of widely deployed HbbTV features, including real-time, customized content such as live, in-play soccer league stats, or viewer participation events. An addressable advertising feature “has gained a lot of traction in Germany,” he said, where 320 million “switch-in” ads per month are to delivered 26 million viewers over 10 million sets. These are overlays that occur during the program segment just when a viewer tunes into that program, hence, “switch-in.”

CONTENT PRODUCTION
A third and final panel featuring NAB’s Skip Pizzi; Steve Bartkowicz of NBCU, Thad Beier of Dolby Labs, Howard Lukk of SMPTE, and David McElhatten of Fox Networks Group, addressed ATSC 3.0 content production, for which Siegler earlier urged producers in the audience to have “an open mind.”

Pizzi addressed some key differences in producing audio for ATSC 3.0, which supports the type of technology that make it sound like raindrops are falling all around a listener. This object, or immersive audio technology, can place discrete sounds throughout a defined three-dimensional space. Immersive audio involves 12-plus channels, or “N”objects,” he said. Among other things, Pizzi recommended producing in immersive and downmixing to 5.1 or stereo.

Lukk talked about the advanced video features enabled by ATSC 3.0—multiple frame rates, aspect rations, resolutions, 10-bit color for high dynamic range, and how some of these lend themselves more readily to episodic TV versus live broadcasting. High frame rate, he noted, tanked in traditional cinematic story-telling, and might be more effective as a plot device much the way black-and-white and color were used in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Beier addressed high dynamic range, and said the first order of doing it is to “shoot well, first of all.” He noted HDR is not just for brightness, but for blacks as well.

“We think doing HDR first makes the best product. Mapping from HDR to SDR is better than an SDR version done by hand,” he said.

Finally, McElhatten said the killer 3.0 app is personalization, particularly for sports.

“At Fox, we do more than 11,000 sporting events a year, more than 8,000, highly regional. I’ve tried to do enhancement on drama, but it’s very hard,” he said. McElhatten showed screengrabs of “live biometrics,” analytical data and other information on drive Dale Earnhardt in a NASCAR event.

He also showed an example of a live multiscreen portal using the multiple content channels NBC employed in the 2012 London Olympics.

“There were eight channels that NBC owned that were running Olympic content,” he said. The idea of the portal is that a broadcaster can show all of their channels in small windows on a single screen, so a viewer could pick and choose among ongoing live events.


Also see where ATSC 3.0 was last year during HPA…
Feb. 16, 2016
“HPA 2016: ATSC 3.0 Update”
Over-the-air TV is on its way to resembling a more robust version of the Internet with the realization of ATSC 3.0.

And then go ahead and check out our ATSC 3.0 silo for more TV Technology coverage, and please feel free to drop us a line with any questions you may have about the standard.

CHANTILLY, VA.—SpectraRep did its part to help both the Houston Office of Public Safety and the Department of Homeland security share video and data during Super Bowl LI via its IncidentOne datacasting technology. The IncidentOne delivered encrypted public safety video and data to emergency responders by using the broadcast TV signal from public broadcaster KUHT-TV in Houston.

SpectraRep was able to help deliver video, files and emergency alerts without using internet or cell phone spectrum. The signal from KUHT-TV allowed SpectraRep to pool cameras in the area to deliver encrypted and targetable video. The IncidentOne system also provided the ability to integrate cell phone video that can be securely transmitted to targeted recipients over the KUHT television broadcast.

The Houston area has reportedly been using SpectraRep’s datacasting technology for more than a year. IncidentOne was supported by funding from the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate and is being developed in partnership with the America's Public Television Stations.

WASHINGTON—The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate has signed an agreement with American Public Television Stations in an effort to improve communications for the first responder community.

This Memorandum of Agreement signed by the two organizations is designed to make datacasting technology available nationwide. Datacasting allows public safety communities to transmit secure data over existing television signals to a targeted audience. Using this, voice, text, files, images and video can be transmitted during emergency situations.

Datacasting has previously been tested during recent events like a Republican Presidential Candidate debate and the NCAA Final Four.

S&T will use this new agreement to further its mission of providing first responders with tools and technologies to better respond to day-to-day and emergency challenges.