ARLINGTON, Va—Earlier this month, some two dozen television industry pioneers, technology leaders and friends gathered to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the formation of the Digital HDTV Grand Alliance.

Three decades ago, May 24, 1993 marked a significant milestone in the evolution of television technology, when seven companies—AT&T Corporation, General Instrument Corporation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Philips Consumer Electronics, the David Sarnoff Research Center, Thomson Consumer Electronics, and Zenith Electronics Corp.—agreed to merge their competing digital HDTV broadcasting technologies into a “best of the best” system, blazing the trail for how we experience high-definition television (HDTV) today.

The Grand Alliance consortium enabled the development and standardization of a new generation of television broadcasting and receivers that would deliver breathtaking picture quality and immersive audio, forever transforming the way we engage with visual content. 

Surpassing each of the previous candidate systems tested at the Advanced Television Test Center (ATTC) located at the PBS headquarters in Alexandria, VA, the new, combined system was then codified into an international standard by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC). The Federal Communications Commission adopted the ATSC Digital Television Standard (A/53) based on the Grand Alliance system on Christmas Eve 1996.

Key consortium figures toasting the milestone—and celebrating the impact of their breakthrough innovations on a generation of viewers, manufacturers and broadcasters—were Robert Graves (AT&T), Robert Rast (GI), Prof. Jae Lim (MIT), Aldo Cugnini (Philips), Glenn Reitmeier and Terrence Smith (Sarnoff), David Arland (Thomson), and John Taylor (Zenith). 

Also present from that era were former FCC Chairman and Advisory Committee Chairman Richard Wiley (considered the "Father of HDTV"), Mark Richer (then at PBS, now President-emeritus of ATSC), Peter Fannon (ATTC), and Craig Todd (Dolby). Technologists Jeff Krauss, Chong Lee, Eric Petajan, Takashi Sato, Paul Shen, and William Zou were also in attendance, along with publicist Pam Golden, and spouses.

In addition to the celebration dinner organized by Lim and emceed by Rast, Grand Alliance representatives participated in an afternoon NextGen TV briefing led by Reitmeier, supported by Cugnini and Taylor, and featuring special guest speaker ATSC President Madeleine Noland.

The ATSC 1.0 standard has been incorporated as an ITU-R Recommendation, and has been adopted for digital broadcasting in the United States, South Korea, Canada, and Mexico. Building on the pioneering efforts of the Digital HDTV Grand Alliance, the newest, next-generation digital broadcasting standard called ATSC 3.0 has also been incorporated as an ITU-R Recommendation, and is now being deployed in the United States, South Korea, Jamaica and the Republic of Trinidad & Tobago. 

WASHINGTON D.C.—The Advanced Television Systems Committee honored TV engineer and visionary Glenn Reitmeier June 14 with its Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award and Saankhya Labs with its Mark Richer Industry Leadership Medal during its awards presentation ceremony on day two of the NextGen Broadcast Conference.

Reitmeier, who founded the GlennReitmeierTV consultancy after serving as NBCUniversal vice president of Advanced Technology and then as senior vice president, Technology Standards and Policy, played an instrumental part earlier in his career while at Sarnoff Labs and a Sarnoff incubator company in the development, testing an ultimate standardization of digital HDTV and the subsequent A/53 ATSC standard (now called ATSC 1).

Later, he advocated to the ATSC board for a next-generation digital TV system. That suggestion, which he has described as a “What? You’re crazy” proposal, ultimately grew into the ATSC 3.0 suite of standards.

ATSC honors a member annually who has made invaluable and exemplary contributions to ATSC through his or her technical and leadership with its Lechner award.

Saankhya Labs CEO Parag Naik and vice president of sales Prashant Maru accepted the Mark Richer award on behalf of the company. That award is bestowed annually on an individual or team that demonstrates exemplary leadership in advancing the committee’s mission and epitomizes the vision and leadership qualities of Mark Richer, former ATSC president for whom the award is named.

The fabless semiconductor solutions company based in Bengaluru, India, is believed to have produced the world’s first cognitive Software Defined Radio (SDR) chipsets. Those chips have helped to accelerate NextGen TV adoption, offering tech manufacturers a flexible and affordable way to build reception of ATSC 3.0 as well as other television standards into their products. The low-power consumption version of that chipset is at the heart of the Mark One NextGen TV smartphone, made available in production samples in October 2020, that is being used to test and demonstrate the viability of NextGen TV reception in mobile phones.

Saankhya Labs and ONE Media 3.0, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sinclair Broadcast Group, have teamed up on development of Cognitive SDR chips for 3.0 reception as well as agreed to work together to accelerate development of 5G Next Generation Broadcast to serve as an offload platform for wireless video traffic.

More information is available online. 

Broadcast consultant Glenn Reitmeier released a series of never-before-seen videos on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the April 10, 1995, Grand Alliance World Premiere Demonstration and Press Conference in Las Vegas at the 1995 NAB Show.

Among the new clips are: the introduction of the first demo; the press conference presented in three parts; various questions and answers about the new digital HDTV system; and footage of the Grand Alliance interoperability demonstration and encoder tour from November 1995.

Reitmeier has also created a Grand Alliance history page with these clips, photos and documents, including the Grand Alliance press release announcing the debut of the Grand Alliance digital HDTV system.

Reitmeier was among the engineers who developed the Grand Alliance digital HDTV system.

The newly available video clips of the Grand Alliance digital HDTV rollout are available online. These videos are in addition to what Reitmeier previously released on the completion of the HDTV systems’ integration at the Sarnoff Field Lab.

PLUS: Richard Wiley Recalls the Grand Alliance on Its 25th Anniversary

The clips, photos and documents are available on the Grand Alliance history page.

WASHINGTON—Advanced Television Systems Committee members have voted to re-elect two currently serving board members and two previous board members term-limited in 2018 to three-year terms beginning in January 2020, the committee announced today.

Two other directors were appointed to the board by their respective professional associations, it said.

The current board members elected to new terms are Dr. Jong Kim, senior vice president at LG Electronics and president of Zenith R&D Labs, and Pete Sockett, director of engineering and operations at Capitol Broadcasting.

The previous board members who are returning include Richard Friedel, executive vice president of operations and technology for Fox Television Stations, and Glenn Reitmeier, former NBCU senior vice president, technology standards and policy, and now president of GlennReitmeierTV LLC.

The Society of Motion Pictures & Television Engineers (SMPTE) appointed Dave Siegler, who previously represented Cox Media Group on the ATSC Board, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) named former ATSC Board Chairman Wayne Luplow to the board, ATSC said.

Current members whose terms will continue in 2020 include:

• Lynn Claudy, SVP, technology, NAB, who is ending is term as ATSC Board Chairman at year’s end;
• Mark, Corl, SVP Emergent Technology Development, Triveni Digital;
• Jim DeChant, VP of Technology, News-Press & Gazette Company;
• Jon Fairhurst, principal standards engineer, Samsung;
• Ira Goldstone, VP Next Gen Broadcast Solutions, Cobalt Digital;
• Brian Markwalter, SVP Research & Standards, CTA;
• Anne Schelle, managing director, Pearl TV;
• Andy Scott, VP of Engineering, NCTA-The Internet and Television Association;
• Craig Todd, SVP and CTO, Dolby.

Thomas Bause Mason, director of standards development, at SMPTE; Dr. Paul Hearty, owner, Technology Advisors; and Dr. Yiyan Wu, CTO, Communications Research Centre will complete their board terms at the end of 2019. A new board chairman will be elected during the board’s first meeting after the first of the year, ATSC said.

“The strategic direction and insights of our talented board members are especially important at this critical time as ATSC supports the commercialization of Next Gen Broadcasting in the U.S. and around the world,” said ATSC President Madeleine Noland. “I recognize and appreciate the board’s expertise and support for balancing progress and stability as ATSC 3.0 standards are updated and preparing for our future continues in the months and years ahead.”

Glenn Reitmeier, former senior vice president, Technology Standards and Policy, at NBCU, sees his long career in R&D with Sarnoff Labs and senior technology positions at NBC Universal as a prelude to the next phase of his professional life.

Taking the technology, business—and even legal, in the sense of working closely with lawyers—experience he has amassed over his more than 40-year career, Reitmeier has formed GlennReitmeierTV, a consultancy devoted to helping those who call the shots in the industry navigate their way to success.

In this, the second of TVTechnology’s two-part interview with Reitmeier, the tech visionary talks about the highlights of his time in R&D at Sarnoff and at NBCU, lessons he learned along the way, the future prospects for television and how the tension between traditional broadcast engineering and the onslaught of IT tech and specialists will likely play out and a future in which transition is the order of the day.

(An edited transcript.)

TVTechnology:When you look back at your career it seems like, generally speaking, the first half was devoted to R&D and the second half was spent as a broadcaster. How would you compare the two? And did you ever find yourself at NBCU thinking, “I wish I would have had this or that insight when I was involved in this or that R&D project?” If so, can you give me an example?

Glenn Reitmeier: It might seem like I had two very different careers, but they were more similar than you might expect. If you think about a “technology maturity spectrum” as a left-to-right progression of R&D, advanced development, product design, product manufacturing and user application of products, my Sarnoff and NBCU roles would appear to be as far apart as you can get. But if you take that straight line and wrap it around in a circle, then R&D and user applications become adjacent, and it’s a small step between the two.

How can that make any sense? Well, at Sarnoff we started with technology experts from many different disciplines, and we attempted to come up with R&D projects that would create commercial value—think of that as a “technology push.”

In my role as a technology leader at NBCU, I was able to start with an understanding of our business challenges and attempted to identify technologies and drive the creation of standards that would provide solutions. Think of that as a “technology pull.” So, in both roles I was always trying to “connect the dots” between business needs and technology solutions.

In our Sarnoff R&D efforts, we had to rely on our project sponsors and partners to help provide the deep business insights and context that we lacked. For example, in the Advanced Digital HDTV effort, having NBC’s insights as a broadcaster combined with Thomson and Philips insights as TV manufacturers was extremely powerful. But I have learned that it’s extremely difficult to get business leaders and technologists to collaborate productively. They often have very different perspectives and “speak different languages” that need a translator. Now add lawyers to the mix and there is another whole set of perspectives and vocabulary. The ability to be conversant in the business, legal and technology domains and to “connect the dots” among them is where I hope to create value in my consultancy.

An example of an insight that I wish I had during the Grand Alliance effort is the importance of audience measurement. It was assumed that however audience measurement worked in analog, it would work in digital. In retrospect, maybe we could have done some things that would have advanced the art of audience measurement and commercial relevance in ATSC 1.

TVT:How long will broadcast TV remain viable?

GR: The answer is it’s all up to the broadcasters and the business leaders. If the broadcasters have the commitment to be technology leaders and they continue to innovate and provide valuable services, the services may change and morph, but broadcasting TV as an industry has the opportunity to survive and prosper. If you find yourself painted in a technological corner, if you are at a dead end, or you fail to innovate, then you are in big trouble. I think it is all about vision and leadership.

TVT:How do you see the back-and-forth between broadcast engineers and IT specialists ultimately playing out at stations, groups and networks?

GR: I think in the short-term, it will take a lot of dedicated teamwork. I don’t think we can, nor would we, escape the IT transformation and IP infrastructure changes that are coming over the industry. Short and medium term, teamwork, collaboration and bringing multiple skills to bear will be a necessity.

I think over the long-term, how we think about a broadcast engineer is going to change, and I think there is going to be a little bit of a subset of the IT world that has to deal with real-time signals and real-time computational performance. I think, not just for broadcasting, but for other applications of video, audio and media or lots of things, I think the IT world will become more real-time sensitive.

TVT:What do you see as your top technical contributions during your 25 years at Sarnoff, rising from an entry-level research associate to VP, HDTV and Multimedia Systems?

GR: Early in my career, I was fortunate to play an important role in establishing the ITU-R BT.601 Component Digital Video standard, which was the basis for the SMPTE 259 Serial Digital Interface standard that became ubiquitous and made digital production and broadcast facilities a practical reality. For broadcast equipment, I worked on TV special effects algorithms, the D1 and D5 VTR tape formats and associated error correction and concealment. I worked on digital ICs that miniaturized camera timing and signal generation. For consumer electronics, my team pioneered the use of on-screen display graphics and left-right-up-down/select button navigation for TVs.

We were working on a precursor to the internet in the late 1980s, developing advanced dial-up modems and wavelet-based image compression. That led me to the “crazy” idea that an all-digital TV system might be possible and a skunks-works project that eventually became the Advanced Digital HDTV proposal. Its core concepts of a layered digital system architecture, a packet data transport for service flexibility and support for multiple video formats eventually became core elements of the Grand Alliance system and ATSC 1.0. I’m very gratified that my work at Sarnoff resulted in over 50 patents.

TVT:What about the highlights of your 17 years at NBCU as VP, Advanced Technology, and SVP, Technology Standards and Policy?

GR: At NBCU, I contributed to launching Universal-HD—NBCU’s first HD cable channel—and Weather+, the first national broadcast multicast channel, the first use of real-time video fingerprinting to combat piracy for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the development of subscriber authentication for TV Everywhere access to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and the 8K-video-over-Internet2 demonstration for the 2012 London Olympics that we did in collaboration with NHK and BBC. And, of course, a lot of effort went into ATSC 3.0 and to establishing A3SA, the ATSC 3.0 Security Authority.

TVT:Any parting thoughts?

GR: The technology changes that have taken place over the course of my career never cease to astound me. While I’m proud of the contributions I have made, I am extremely grateful for the many talented colleagues that I have had the pleasure to collaborate with over the years.

One final observation. Both time and technology advance relentlessly. The incredible longevity of the analog NTSC standard led many industry leaders to believe that the ATSC 1 standard would similarly last for more than 50 years.

They thought that they just had to endure a single transition, and then technology would remain stable. As we have seen in the span of ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0, the pace technology advances is too fast for that model. There will certainly be an ATSC 3.1, 3.2 and eventually a 4.0 and beyond.

So, to the contrary: If you aren’t moving forward, you are falling behind. In an environment of rapidly changing technology, a constant state of technology transition is the new normal. Simply put: If you’re not in transition, you’re in trouble.

More information about GlennReitmeierTV is available online.

Read the first part of the TVT's interview with Glenn Reitmeier.

For a comprehensive source of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see ourATSC3 silo. 

YARDLEY, Pa.—After 17 years at NBCU in key senior technology positions, Glenn Reitmeier recently left the network to form GlennReitmeierTV, a consulting service with a focus on helping industry thought leaders at the intersection of technology, business and legal issues.

Reitmeier, who rightly could be considered one of the founding fathers of digital high definition television, played a key role in the development, testing and ultimately standardization of the digital HDTV system that eventually became ATSC A/53 (subsequently called ATSC 1).

(Those interested in a retrospective on The Grand Alliance may wish to read “Richard Wiley Recalls The Grand Alliance on Its 25th Anniversary.”)

After spending more than 20 years with Sarnoff Labs and a Sarnoff incubator company, Reitmeier joined NBC Universal as vice president, Advanced Technology, and subsequently was promoted to senior vice president, Technology Standard and Policy, at the network.

During that time, Reitmeier planted the seed among those serving on the board of the Advanced Television Systems Committee that a next-generation digital television system was not only doable but necessary. That “What? You’re crazy” proposal, as Reitmeier describes it, ultimately grew into the ATSC 3.0 suite of standards.

In this first part of a two part interview, Reitmeier opens up about his new consultancy, compares ATSC 1 and 3.0 standardization, sheds light on the transmission system chosen for ATSC 1 and why it was the best solution at the time, discusses 3.0 vs. 5G rollout, talks about where broadcast management stands with NEXTGEN TV and puts future industry advancement into context.

(An edited transcript.)

TVTechnology:Glenn, you recently retired from NBCU and started the GlennReitmeierTV consultancy. Tell me about your plans for your new company.

Glenn Reitmeier: I believe I can provide unique expertise and value at the strategic intersection of business, legal and technology issues. It’s amazing how intertwined they have been throughout the course of my career. Any media business or any business in the supply chain is inherently dependent on technology to create and deliver content, and that content itself is intellectual property that needs to be protected.

So technology and intellectual property become key considerations in the strategic plan of any business in the media supply chain. Likewise, technology is often an explicit part of agreements for affiliation, distribution and other content uses—as well as government regulation. I am looking forward to operating at that intersection and being a resource for the industry thought leaders who will find advantage from combining those elements in the right way.

TVT:You were a part of the engineering team that helped usher in the first era in digital TV, specifically digital HDTV, and you played an important role, including being an ATSC board member, in helping to make ATSC 3.0 a reality. How would you compare the two, and what lessons, if any, from the ATSC 1.0 experience helped in 3.0 standardization?

GR: Boy were they different. In ATSC 1, we had broadcasters petitioning the FCC and the formation of an advisory committee in 1987. The FCC’s Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS) provided intense oversight and rigorous testing of proposals for a new television system.

ACATS developed 10 selection criteria, and the premise was that a single winning system would be selected based upon the test results. A fierce competition raged among proposed systems. By 1989, there were, I think, 23 proposed systems, all of which were analog.

The digital proposals emerged after FCC Chairman [Alfred] Sikes really raised the bar. He said, “No, we don’t have enough spectrum for a multiple channel HDTV approach. We want full HDTV, not anything less, and there’s only one 6 MHz channel.”

Lo and behold, within six months we had the four digital proposals emerge, and they slugged it out for a few years. And after testing and sort of a stalemate, we formed the Grand Alliance in 1993 and began the collaborative phase of the process, confirmed and validated by ACATS testing that we had met the best performance attributes from all of the four previously tested digital systems.

And in those days, the role of the ATSC was to document everything and make sure there was an open standard that could be implemented by all of the manufacturers in the ecosystem. It was government regulation that kind of paced the launch of 1.0 on both the broadcasting side and the receiver side.

ATSC 3.0 couldn’t be a more different story. I think I was probably the first person to begin to talk about the need for a successor standard. Seeing the Grand Alliance system being a decade old and seeing the development of new video compression and advancements in communications, I started with a white paper that I submitted to the ATSC board in 2006.

Sometimes it feels like the history of my career is people saying, “What? You’re crazy.” I heard that a lot in the early days of the digital proposals. After a couple of years of hearing that about a next-generation digital system, the idea started to get some traction in 2009 when we had the digital transition complete and the NTSC analog service was shut down.

In 2010, the ATSC board created a planning team to investigate the viability of new technologies and whether they would substantially advance the prospect of a next-generation standard. In 2011, after the team reported that there were significant new developments here that were substantially advanced from the technologies of ATSC 1.0, the board agreed and realized that it would take time to do the work of setting a new standard.

So, the board formed the new TG3 group, called for input and began the standard setting process. The standards were completed and approved by the FCC in 2017, and the commercial launch of 3.0 is being paced by voluntary industry efforts.

As far as lessons learned, first, on a technical level, we learned that hardware testing was unnecessary for a modern digital system design. You do that these days with rigorous simulation and evaluation, which allows you to avoid the long and costly process of hardware development.

TVT:Right, because when you were doing 1.0, there was nothing. You were starting from scratch.

GR: Oh, yeah. We were completely starting from scratch, and to be fair there was a degree of skepticism about whether a digital system would be viable at all. “What? You’re crazy. Those many racks of research lab hardware are going to become affordable broadcast equipment and consumer receivers?” Well, with a little help from Moore’s law and thanks to the work of many terrific engineers who designed generation after generation of ATSC 1 products, that’s exactly what happened.

Be that as it may, obviously the process of building a system and debugging and fine-tuning the performance of real-time hardware can be done much more quickly and efficiently in the software simulation environments we have today.

At another level, I think we made a step forward because people realized that the industry is capable of cooperating to create its own voluntary next-gen standards and that we didn’t necessarily need the oversight of an FCC advisory committee. This wasn’t a once-in-50-years event anymore.

I don’t mean to say that the advisory committee was burdensome, nor that there was government interference in the industry. I consider Chairman Wiley one of my role models and mentors for his tremendous leadership during the advisory committee process. But I think we learned that we could do the work in ATSC. That was certainly one of my messages, which I have championed, that we are capable of coming together and doing the work and setting the standard.

But at the highest level, I think that we tried to repeat the ACATS formula of establishing goals and requirements, soliciting competing approaches, rigorously evaluating them, recognizing the best virtues of various approaches and then fostering the collaboration needed to combine the various elements into a complete system.

In retrospect, the ACATS process and the Grand Alliance achieved a truly revolutionary result with ATSC 1.0—it was the world’s first digital television standard. Time will tell how we have done with ATSC 3.0.

TVT:How did 1.0 end up with 8VSB?

GR: It turns out that how the analog signal played with the digital signal was absolutely the lynchpin. [Editor’s note: OTA DTV had to exist in an environment that maintained NTSC transmission for more than 10 years, until analog’s eventual turn off.]

It was finding that knife’s edge balance between the coverage area performance of digital systems and its interference impact on existing analog service. It was absolutely critical to enabling the simulcast transition that we had.

The example I like to use is to achieve that [avoiding interference into a neighboring station’s NTSC service], the digital signals were actually one-sixteenth of the power of the analog signal. So, I have to drop the digital power a factor of 16 in order to not make noise, ghosts and artifacts in the analog service, and at the same time at one-sixteenth the power I have to replicate the coverage of the analog signal in the presence of interference from a high-power, high-tower analog signals all around [i.e., the RF environment].

So, digital signal carrier-to-noise ratio for random noise was a primary attribute in determining coverage, and that’s actually what drove us toward QAM or VSB alternatives. We had to meet that challenge.

I don’t think many people know this, but before the Grand Alliance, we at the Sarnoff-Thomson-Philips-NBC team had actually built both OFDM and QAM transmission systems. We had them both running in the lab, and there was a substantial noise level disadvantage to OFDM at the time that just made it unsuitable for a simulcast environment. At the time of the Grand Alliance, VSB had about a 9db power advantage compared to OFDM, which made a huge difference in our ability to get the largest possible coverage with a digital signal.

Now there are many benefits [to OFDM] like single frequency networks, and the OFDM implementations have gotten substantially better over time, and it obviously was the right choice for ATSC 3.0, but those system choices are highly dependent on the simulcast environment and the transition environment that we are trying to operate within. There are a big set of constraints on the system parameters that you have to choose and balance.

It’s not just the new system and its parameters; it’s the old system and its constraints. You can’t destroy the old business while you are launching the new one.

TVT:What do you think will be fully rolled out first, 3.0 or 5G?

GR: I believe that ATSC 3.0 will be fully deployed before 5G. When you talk about 5G, there are often a lot of assumptions being made. But are you talking about 5G at 900 MHz or mid-band spectrum deployments of 5G? Obviously, as you go up to higher frequencies, you gain higher capacity, but your propagation and coverage area shrink.

To your point, if you are going to be using mid-band and higher frequencies, the cell sizes are going to have to shrink pretty radically, and of course that’s going to require time and investment to build out those higher density cellular networks. You have to compare at least an order of magnitude more cell sites than there are broadcast towers.

When you look at the infrastructure and the investment, I think it becomes a pretty easy conclusion that ATSC 3.0 can be fully deployed before 5G when you look at it on a nationwide basis.

TVT:I ask because it seems as if, like it or not, broadcasters have a relatively narrow window in time to make the most of their spectrum before they face unprecedented competition when it comes to wireless delivery of entertainment and likely regulators and lawmakers who may push for more TV spectrum in a future auction. Is 3.0 the tool to that can help broadcasters remain competitive and stave off further spectrum auctions?

GR: Leaving the spectrum policy questions aside, I will just observe that spectrum is already a scarce resource. ATSC 3.0’s improvements in efficiency, the flexibility to configure signals to achieve coverage and reduce interference, as well as the single frequency network capabilities will all be important in any scarcity of frequency environment, whether today’s allocation stays intact and unchanged or there are further spectrum auctions. I think broadcasters and the country are going to need those improvements in the RF characteristics that 3.0 brings in order to provide reliable service and exist in a crowded spectrum environment.

TVT:From my point of view, the television engineering and academic brain trust of the industry have given the television industry 3.0 with many possibilities and a new level of performance. How would you assess where TV broadcast management is in terms of its interest, understanding and plans for 3.0?

GR: I’m very encouraged and excited about the level of industry support and commitment that is already evident in the 3.0 rollout. Obviously, it is thought leaders who are most intensely interested and moving forward and making ATSC 3.0 deployments and tests.

But there are always leaders and followers when it comes to any new technology or industry change. I look at it like this, here we are just about two years after the standard was approved by the FCC, and we already are seeing voluntary industry lighthouse efforts and transition plans and an industry looking at how to move forward.

Compare that to ATSC 1 two years after the standard was set at the end of 1996, we were just seeing the launch of commercial receivers and there were a handful of stations on the air. But really, in a sense, the industry all looked to the FCC to set rules and requirements and we had the [Michael] Powell plan thanks to Chairman Powell’s leadership.

In ATSC 1, we were all waiting for the government to tell us what to do, and here we are with ATSC 3.0 and the industry leaders who get it are trying to move us forward. I applaud the initiative that is being taken on the commercial front. So, I am encouraged.

TVT:How do you think 3.0 will play out at Comcast/NBCU?

GR: No comment.

Part two of TV Technology's conversation with Glenn Reitmeier will be published next week.

More information about GlennReitmeierTV is available online. 

For a comprehensive source of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see ourATSC3 silo.