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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More information is available on the company’s website.

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.

WASHINGTON—Sunsetting ATSC 1.0, expanding business opportunities for NextGen Broadcast and increasing international adoption of the ATSC 3.0 standard were top of mind at the ATSC’s NextGen Broadcast Conference yesterday.

The meeting here hosted representatives from numerous industries with a stake in advancing ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGen TV). With the Future of TV initiative in the rearview mirror and the National Association of Broadcasters’ petition to the Federal Communications Commission to end ATSC 1.0 by 2030, there was no shortage of topics for debate.

‘A Little More Candid’
The conference was keynoted by former FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington, who resigned his position last week. Simington prefaced his remarks by noting that he could now “be a little bit more candid than I was able to be when I was sitting on the commission.”

He opened by lambasting broadcast critics who claim that its technology has had its heyday.

“The idea that we can scrap the broadcasting sector is so wrongheaded and misguided that it shocks me that anyone has ever taken that idea seriously,” Simington said, adding that the industry has “never been more threatened than they are today,” and that if certain actions are not taken soon, “we should expect to start seeing bankruptcies and disaffiliations.”

Among such proposals is quicker response from the FCC when determining host stations in markets launching NexGen TV, he said. “I think the FCC could issue guidance tomorrow that ATSC 3.0 hosting evaluations must be done in under 30 days, and every day that they don’t do that, it strikes me that that’s a conscious choice not to take that step.”

He called for quick action on establishing a date certain to sunset ATSC 1.0 by 2028 for the top 55 markets and by 2030 for the remaining DMAs.

“The FCC should definitely start a process for getting the date certain to sunset DTV, that’s simply nonnegotiable at this point,” Simington said. “The burden of running both ATSC 1.0 and 3.0 is obviously a major barrier to adoption, but just as important, it crowds out necessary spectrum for developing other services that are going to be key to the continued viability of broadcasting and to its ability, over time, to continue fulfilling the load bearing functions of local journalism and emergency alerting.”

Simington also strongly advocated the concept of datacasting over 3.0, particularly in the enterprise sector. The launch earlier this year of EdgeBeam Wireless, a joint venture between Sinclair, Nexstar Media Group, Gray Media and E.W. Scripps, is indicative of the lucrative potential of NextGen Broadcast, given broadcasters’ already installed infrastructure and national footprint.

“There’s really no option but to allow datacasting to flourish,” he said. “Fortunately, providing a consistent, interoperable backend at maximum possible geographic scale—ideally internationally—is readily achievable once regulatory barriers are removed. It would not be a heavy lift of permission, in my opinion, to just snap our fingers and make that transition start to happen, thus enabling the sales cycles and R&D investments that all of you would need to cross that threshold and make datacasting more of a paying proposition and less of an interesting side project.”

Simington said datacasting could transform broadcasters’ business models, calling broadcast IP connectivity “unique and valuable.”

“Long-term, I look at datacasting as enabling broadcasters to switch their primary source of revenue from connectivity and away from ad sales,” he said. “You’ve got three legs of the stool right now; you’ve got connectivity, which is more like a toothpick than a leg; you've got ad sales; and you've got retrans. With the pressure on others, the connectivity business is the only one that has a clear engineering advantage over any plausible entrant.”

Standards Progress
Advanced Television Systems Committee President Madeleine Noland opened the conference, updating attendees on progress made over the past 12 months.

“We have a number of forward-facing projects in flight right now, including ‘B2X’ or ‘Broadcast to Everything,’ which further aligns ATSC 3.0 with 5G new radio waveforms, enabling new mobile applications,” Noland said. “We have the broadcast gateway control protocol, a system that links System Managers and broadcast gateways, adding efficiency to datacasting operations. And we’re working on carriage of Digital Radio Mondiale services over ATSC 3.0 waveforms, which opens up a whole brand new list of questions.”

Noland mused about the future of the standard: “Someone I was talking to yesterday said, wow, ATSC is just going to be delivering apps. It’s almost like going to be a host as a platform, and the fact that we’re carrying Digital Radio Mondiale over it is the tip of the iceberg.”

Noland noted that when it comes to exploring new services for 3.0, the association is “casting a wide net.”

“We're listening to partners on nearly every continent; we’re studying verticals from automotive to agriculture; we’re tracking trends in streaming and spectrum management, public safety and media convergence,” she said. “And now we’re in a position to start refining that net, to prioritize, to invest, to set the framework for our future, not by chasing every shiny object, but by placing strategic bets, informed by data, insight and collective wisdom.”

The View from Brazil and the Caribbean
Raymundo Barros, president of the SBTVD Forum (Brazil’s TV standardizations group) focused on the reasons why the country—the second most populous in the western hemisphere—adopted portions of the ATSC 3.0 standard for its next generation broadcast protocol last year, adding the protocol’s physical layer to its “DTV+” digital broadcast service. With over-the-air television viewed by an estimated 60% of that country’s households, Barros called broadcast “the most important platform in Brazil.”

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make broadcast digital in the way we relate with the consumers and advertising, and we have a very important footprint that we are trying to speed up as much as we can in order to deploy the services throughout the country,” he said.

Singling out YouTube as perhaps broadcasters’ biggest competitor, Barros said DTV+ can succeed. “You want to compete against YouTube; YouTube is the only company that has captured the advertising on connected TV in Brazil,” Barros said, adding that with the connectivity and applications provided by DTV+, “I think we can be a very serious competitor when you take into consideration connected TV digital ads and integration with retail media.”

Barros said the country is already testing ATSC 3.0 for advanced advertising via layered division multiplexing (LDM)—a technology that overlays multiple data streams in a common RF channel—and datacasting with Sinclair Broadcast Group.

“We are already using the pilot station in Rio de Janeiro, using LDM to segment advertising for different areas of the city,” he said. “We have some interactivity, social TV, and we are collaborating and working in close collaboration with Sinclair and other broadcasters here in the U.S. to be part of this big datacasting network.”

Dr. Claire C. Grant, vice chair of the IT-7 Caribbean Team and a founding member of the ATSC Business Advisory Council, updated attendees on the progress of 3.0 in the region, which consists of 30 countries.

Over the past several years, both Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago have adopted the standard, with Jamaica having fired up its first 3.0 transmitter in 2022. There are currently eight 3.0 transmitters in a total network of 22 to penetrate the entire island, per government mandate, according to Grant.

Trinidad and Tobago switched on 3.0 last November and is now running a pilot station.

Grant noted the unique characteristics driving industry and business when it comes to broadcasting in the region. “Generally speaking, spectrum shortage is not an issue,” she said. “The only challenge is that there is no digital dividend to be earned in the Caribbean. There’s nobody to buy any spectrum.”

Grant said one of the main impediments for the region to go all digital is that “there are still people transmitting analog—you have to transition or not transition. If you don’t transition, you will die, because there’s nobody making analog equipment as it stands.”

Grant added that regulatory challenges to end analog are also hindering progress. “There is an eagerness for the state to get to a position of analog switchoff,” she said. “A lot of the Caribbean territories think that we should be able to make that decision now.”

Power in Numbers
In a session on new services and business models enabled by ATSC 3.0, Skip Flenniken from Sinclair Broadcast Group, representing the EdgeBeam datacasting startup, discussed the advantages of combining the resources and coverage of four of the nation’s largest broadcast station groups into one entity targeting the enterprise market.

“We looked around and decided we need to do this together, and so we created EdgeBeam, and we provisioned it with what we think are the tools required to be successful,” he said. “We created a datacasting business, not just for our four companies, but for the entire broadcast industry—so those provisions, those things we think are really required for success.”

EdgeBeam is encouraging other broadcast groups to join in otis effort, touting the power of numbers. “There are approximately 700 stations between the four broadcasters really committed to EdgeBeam, so we can credibly go into datacasting customers and say we can bring you nationwide coverage,” he said, adding that even this number is “not sufficient.”

“What we are bringing to market here is a differentiated edge network, one-to-many completely different capabilities and features than other broadcast networks,” he said, “and just like every other data-distribution platform and method that’s ever existed, demand is going to exceed supply on a permanent basis.

“We’re going to need spectrum from other broadcasters,” Flenniken added. “We really view EdgeBeam as an operating company by which we bring, actualize and create datacasting, not just for the four founders, but for the industry.”

The Promise of BPS
NAB Chief Technology Officer Sam Matheny updated attendees on the efforts the association is taking towards making BPS a reality. The Broadcast Positioning System, which provides precise timing and—with a sufficient number of stations—accurate positioning using 3.0 signals, is being touted as a “complement” and even an eventual backup to GPS.

The importance of satellite-based GPS to the nation’s economy and safety cannot be overstated, Matheny said.

“A potential GPS outage can throw the U.S. economy into free fall … but it’s not just about navigating; GPS has become an invisible utility,” he said. “Over $2 billion a year goes to operating the GPS network, and it has been adopted by everybody.”

BPS was demonstrated at the 2025 NAB Show and, after receiving accolades from a number of government officials involved in the technology who saw the demos, Matheny—who credited NAB Vice President of Advanced Technology Tariq Mondal for his role in leading research into the technology—is optimistic about its future potential.

“We’re engaging multiple agencies and their words can speak for themselves,” he said. “The key thing that they talked about is that the building blocks are already there. We’re already up and on the air and broadcasting in 3.0 [and] what we need to add is really very minimal to be able to offer BPS.”

Although the bulk of the discussions surrounded the promise of new services and business models for NextGen Broadcast, the underlying thread to most of them was the need to end ATSC 1.0 by 2030 so broadcasters can realize its full potential.

​​”We can’t literally do this tomorrow, but we can do it by 2028 and 2030,” Alison Martin, vice president of innovation and strategy for NAB, said. “And then once we’ve committed to it, then everything else is going to fall in place, from the consumer electronics ecosystem to the MVPDs to all of the little details that have to happen at the broadcaster side. We just have to actually commit to doing it, and no individual broadcaster can do this on their own. It's just the nature of our industry. We have to all get together, set a date and follow it.”

The day ended with the ATSC honoring Aldo Cugnini with the 2025 Lechner Award and Clarence Hau of NBCUniversal with the 2025 Mark Richer Industry Leadership Medal.

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.

Proponents of ATSC 3.0 received three pieces of good news in April that bode well for the future of NextGen TV and ancillary services.

The most important development is the release of a public notice seeking comment on the National Association of Broadcasters’ petition for rulemaking that asks the Federal Communications Commission to halt ATSC 1.0 transmission in the top 55 markets by February 2028 and remaining markets two years later.

Broadcasters backing the standard say they cannot deliver on ATSC 3.0’s full list of benefits until the legacy digital TV service is shut off or seriously curtailed and the overwhelming majority of sticks in markets are dedicated to NextGen TV.

I made several inquiries on the floor of the 2025 NAB Show about the manufacturing capacity and tower rigging crews needed to meet NAB’s proposed deadlines and was assured that would not be an issue.

What will be an issue are objections from the Consumer Technology Association, low-power TV broadcasters and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs). The cost of making necessary broadcast and cable TV infrastructure changes, as well as forcing consumers into a non-backwards-compatible transition, will likely be high on the list of concerns in comments they’ll file in response to the public notice.

However, it’s hard to imagine NAB would have sought a rulemaking without proposals that address these issues in its own back pocket.

Second, EdgeBeam Wireless—the 3.0-based datacasting joint venture of E.W. Scripps, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair—appears to be advancing. During a fireside chat, which I moderated at NAB Show, executives from the four station groups reported that EdgeBeam’s executive leadership and sales team will soon be in place; the joint venture will likely secure its first datacasting customer before the end of the year; and other broadcasters have approached EdgeBeam about offering some 3.0 capacity for its datacasting service in exchange for a piece of the pie.

Finally, the 3.0-based Broadcast Positioning System (BPS)—a possible complement to and backup for satellite-based GPS—has logged some successes, which were in focus during the Public Media Venture Group’s TechConnect 2025 conference just prior to the NAB Show, during the NAB Broadcast Engineering and IT (BEIT) Conference and on the show floor at the Futures Park.

There were three big BPS takeaways from the show. First, the NAB and major broadcasters, including Sinclair, talked about successful BPS tests they’ve run or currently are running; second, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is well aware of BPS and its successes; and third, show attendees could see a working demo of BPS, which combined precise timing delivered from an eLoran (enhanced long-range navigation) transmitter to a station on Black Mountain outside Las Vegas that was transmitted as part of a 3.0 signal and received in the West Hall in the Futures Park.

All of this happened against the backdrop of an FCC that opened an inquiry into a GPS complement/backup in March.

While it’s possible any of these three 3.0 developments could be derailed, it’s getting harder and harder to imagine a future in which NextGen TV doesn’t benefit viewers, broadcasters, businesses and even the government for decades to come.

Four of the nation’s most prominent broadcast groups detailed plans to launch EdgeBeam, a joint venture to provide expansive, reliable and secure data delivery services via ATSC 3.0, aka NextGen TV.

The heads of Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group, E.W. Scripps and Sinclair discussed the nationwide network in a session moderated by Phil Kurz of TV Tech.

They touted the business opportunities that could arise by using ATSC 3.0 spectrum to transmit data, comparing the inadequacy of wireless IP with the one-to-many advantages of broadcast.

“The internet is architected for one-to-one streaming of video on high demand, [but] it’s not scaling the way that we hoped it would,” Nexstar’s Michael Biard said. He cited Netflix’s glitchy broadcast of the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight. “Doesn’t happen in a broadcast context where you’ve got one stream going to everybody.”

EdgeBeam will be able to deliver data nationwide to any device with an ATSC 3.0 receiver, such as cars and trucks, drones, marine vessels, phones, tablets or TV sets.

ATSC 3.0 is available to about 76% of the country. To get a nationwide footprint, the executives are hoping for deregulation of ownership rules to help groups better compete with Big Tech and wireless.

“[T]hey’re all allowed to have national footprints, but … this industry is not. National footprints are more efficient,” Sinclair’s Chris Ripley said. “The antiquated rules that the industry lives under stymie innovation. We formed EdgeBeam to solve one of those issues because, together, we do have a na-tionwide footprint.”

Equally important in the advancement of datacasting via 3.0 is the proposed shutoff of ATSC 1.0. The NAB has petitioned the FCC to approve a February 2028 sunset in the top 55 markets.

A shutoff will allow broadcasters to use more of their spectrum, Ripley said. “When you sunset 1.0 in 2028, you go from 9 Mbps in excess spectrum to probably something close to 100, a significant increase in spectrum available for datacasting.”

Biard added that a shutoff in 2028 “is critical to igniting the ecosystem and messaging to folks who haven’t thought about building for 3.0 yet. Once they know that that’s coming, it’s no longer a sideshow; it is the standard through which all of our broadcast stations will operate.”

Adam Symson of Scripps said, “Datacasting represents one of the most important ways for broadcasters to create additional revenue to also help sup-port the role we play in local markets with the news, sports and critical services that we provide in the communities across this country.”

Pat LaPlatney of Gray Media said that by the proposed full shutoff of 1.0 in 2030, more than 90% of the country could be within reach of 3.0.

Copyright NAB 2025.

What makes television spectrum valuable?

The minds of many commercial broadcasters might immediately go to the ad revenue they can earn with it. Others might think of retrans fees.

Public broadcasters, who don’t sell commercial spots (underwriting aside) nor receive retrans, would probably point to something that’s more mission-oriented, such as their spectrum being the means by which they can benefit their local communities and society at large.

While these are good answers, it’s becoming increasingly clear many broadcasters are tuned in to the fact that, at its core, TV spectrum is valuable for its ability to convey data over the air. That data can be video. It can be audio. And, at the risk of being highly redundant, it also can be data.

Since the launch of ATSC 3.0, broadcasters have had the means to deliver that data as IP packets, and over the years some have laid the groundwork to create a wireless data-distribution network and developed a business that exploits the one-to-many strength of broadcasting as well as the ubiquitous use of internet protocol packets to deliver data.

Now, E.W. Scripps, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair are leveraging their combined footprint to give broadcast data delivery nationwide reach and have launched a joint venture called EdgeBeam Wireless to make that a business. They also are inviting other broadcasters to participate.

If successful, EdgeBeam Wireless will create a significant revenue stream for its joint-venture partners and others joining in where there once was none. How much?

An ATSC 3.0-based datacasting scenario put together by BIA Advisory Services in November 2021 forecasted additional annual revenue for the industry ranging from $6.4 billion to $15 billion by 2030, depending upon the number of bits allocated.

Beyond the obvious boon such newfound revenue would be to broadcasters and their shareholders, 3.0-based datacasting offers an achievable path towards building greater TV spectrum value—something any wireless company must account for in their bids if, one day, another incentive auction happens.

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.)

Four of the country’s largest station groups have formed a joint venture to deliver wireless data via ATSC 3.0 transmission for businesses and industries throughout the nation.

The E.W. Scripps Co., Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair have formed EdgeBeam Wireless to provide expansive, reliable and secure data delivery services. Leveraging the one-to-many nature of broadcasting and ATSC 3.0’s inherent internet protocol-based transport, the new venture is taking aim at industries that need to send data to multiple customers, often in real time, EdgeBeam Wireless said.

“The launch of EdgeBeam Wireless is the culmination of many years of technological advancement, market development and, importantly, recognition by government regulators of the expanded services local broadcasters can provide through ATSC 3.0 technology,” Scripps president and CEO Adam Symson said. “Scripps is pleased to join forces with its peer companies to create not just a new company but a marketplace that will allow us to more deeply serve our local communities while providing a wide variety of industries with efficient data-transmission services nationwide.”

Wireless data delivery via 3.0 offers data customers a notably cost-effective solution that complements and enhances current wireless solutions. EdgeBeam will be able to deliver data across the country to any civilian, military or industrial device with an ATSC 3.0 receiver, such as cars and trucks, drones, marine vessels, phones, tablets or television sets, it said.

“With adoption of ATSC 3.0 receivers in television sets continuing to increase with more models available and sets sold every year, Gray Media is eager to join EdgeBeam Wireless to expand the user base for our broadcast signals to a new category of businesses and to spur the wider deployment of receiver chips in an expanded range of handheld units and vehicles,” Gray Media Executive Chairman and CEO Hilton Howell said.

In automotive applications, EdgeBeam could deliver software updates, infotainment, precision navigation and safety enhancements. An internal estimate pegs the annual value of the addressable market for automotive connectivity services as $3.7 billion, EdgeBeam said.

Providing reliable wireless data transport in content delivery network applications, EdgeBeam can improve the experience of customers that stream content without buffering or lag, especially during high-profile live events with large audiences like sports events. The total addressable market for CDN services is estimated at up to $3.65 billion per year, it said.

In enhanced GPS applications, 3.0 can improve location information accuracy from meters today to a few centimeters. EdgeBeam estimates the addressable market for enhanced GPS services at $220 million per year, it said.

“Our long-held belief is that the transmission of high-speed data via our broadcast infrastructure represents a new way forward for the broadcast industry and a new stream of potentially significant revenue,” Nexstar Chairman and CEO Perry Sook said. “Nexstar is pleased that these four broadcast groups have come together to create this important new venture.”

By bringing together the spectrum footprints of Scripps, Gray, Nexstar and Sinclair, EdgeBeam achieves coverage no broadcaster could on its own, bringing the possibility of nationwide 3.0 coverage for data delivery within grasp, it said.

EdgeBeam anticipates partnering with other broadcasters for additional capacity to offer truly nationwide services. A national ATSC 3.0 footprint would enable broadcasters to provide a complementary backup to the existing GPS system, offering a reliable failover in the event GPS satellites experienced interference and helping to secure the U.S. economy, EdgeBeam said.

“This is a groundbreaking development for the broadcast industry,” said Sinclair president and CEO Chris Ripley. “We’re thrilled to partner with other leaders in our industry to chart a new path forward and develop new revenue opportunities. EdgeBeam Wireless will have benefits for the entire wireless ecosystem, helping to relieve congestion while also offering competitive pricing for wide-area data distribution.”

Financial details of the joint venture were not disclosed.

More information is available on the Scripps, Gray Media, Nexstar and Sinclair websites.