WASHINGTON, D.C.—The broadcast standards group ATSC has announced that John I. Taylor of LG Electronics USA has been elected 2025 Chairman of the ATSC Board of Directors.

The news comes at a time when broadcasters have been pushing for more NextGen TV/ATSC 3.0 capable sets to hit the market. LG was one of the companies instrumental in developing the ATSC 3.0 standards, but it stopped selling sets with ATSC 3.0 receivers in the U.S. after it lost a patent dispute case in 2023. LG is appealing the ruling.

“John Taylor is a respected industry veteran who has been at the forefront of key advancements in the television and broadcast industries for decades,” said ATSC president, Madeleine Noland. “His vast experience, strategic insight, and passion for innovation will be invaluable as ATSC continues to drive the next era of digital broadcasting.”

Longtime ATSC board member and Communications Chairman, Taylor brings a wealth of experience and leadership to the role. In his current position as senior vice president of LG Electronics USA, he serves as the most senior U.S. government affairs, corporate communications and industry relations executive for LG Electronics.

He has been an influential figure in shaping the digital television landscape in the U.S. for decades. Taylor’s contributions to the television industry include co-founding the Digital TV Transition Coalition during the 2000s, a pivotal effort in the U.S. digital television migration. Additionally, he served as Public Affairs Chairman of the Digital HDTV Grand Alliance in the 1990s, helping to shape the next generation of television technology at the heart of ATSC standards.

As the founding member and current Chairman of the AWARN Alliance, Taylor continues to advocate for innovation in advanced television broadcasting. He also serves on the boards of The Media Institute and the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation as well as the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. Active for years in the Consumer Technology Association, Taylor is a member of the CTA Board of Industry Leaders, and he is the longest-serving member and former two-time Chairman of the CTA Video Division board. He has previously chaired various committees, including the CTA Communications Committee and 4K UHD Working Group.

“I look forward to working closely with President Noland, our Board, members and industry stakeholders to advance the development and deployment of ATSC 3.0 standards in U.S. and around the world, while continuing to assure ATSC’s key role in the rapidly evolving media and technology landscape,” said Taylor.

Noland thanked outgoing Chairman Richard Friedel for his ATSC Board leadership since 2022. Friedel continues as a member of the ATSC Board in 2025.

As TV Tech’s Phil Kurz has previously reported, LG decided to sit out selling NextGen TVs in the United States in 2024 after it was ordered in 2023 to pay nearly $1.7 million and $6.75 for every future NextGen TV to Constellation Designs for patent violations. LG appealed the ruling, and in August, Pearl TV filed an amicus brief with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in support of LG, saying that the damages would force LG and other CE vendors to stop selling ATSC 3.0 TVs. The appeal is expected to be decided in 2025.

WASHINGTON—The AWARN Alliance has elected its 2021 Steering Committee, the organization’s governing body that provides guidance to the AWARN Alliance and its executive director.

For the first time, the membership elected a chair and vice chair for the AWARN Steering Committee, which will help streamline governing activities at the Alliance. John Taylor, senior vice president, public affairs, LG Electronics North America, was elected chair. Jim DeChant, vice president of technology, News-Press & Gazette Broadcasting Co., was elected vice chair.

“Advanced emergency alerting and messaging has been clear use case for ATSC 3.0 from the very beginning. AWARN has positioned the broadcasting and consumer electronics industries to use this powerful new technology for voluntary, cross-industry solutions for addressing some of our country’s most pressing public safety communications needs,” said newly-elected chair Taylor. “Our governance structure has evolved to meet the challenges and opportunities we face, and I’m honored to be serving on the Steering Committee with my esteemed colleagues.”

ATSC President Madeleine Nolan, who serves as an ex officio steering committee member, applauded the AWARN Alliance for “major strides made to date, forging strong connections with the broader emergency management community and educating key stakeholders about the capabilities of advanced emergency messaging powered by ATSC 3.0.” She added, “I am excited about AWARN’s goals as articulated in its ‘Vision and Mission’ statements and look forward to continued close collaboration with the entire AWARN team as we work toward common goals.”

2021 AWARN STEERING COMMITTEE

· Chair: John Taylor, Senior Vice President, Public Affairs, LG Electronics North America

· Vice Chair: Jim DeChant, Vice President of Technology, News-Press & Gazette Broadcasting Co.

· AWARN Executive Director: John Lawson, President of Convergence Services, Inc., which manages the Alliance

· Public Television Representative: Tim Bischoff, Chief Technology Officer, Kentucky Educational Television

· Small Broadcaster Representative: Pete Sockett, Director of Engineering and Operations, Capitol Broadcasting Co. – WRAL/WRAZ/WILM

· Joe Di Scipio, Senior Vice President, FCC Legal & Business Affairs and Assistant General Counsel, Fox Corp.

· So Vang, Vice President of Emmerging Technology, ONE Media 3.0

· Anne Shelle, Managing Director, Pearl TV

· Yoshi Tsurimaki, Producer of Business Development, T-NET Japan

Ex-Officio Advisors:

· Madeleine Noland, President, ATSC

· Luke Fay, Senior Manager of Technical Standards, Sony

· Kelly Willams, Vice President, Engineering and Technology Policy, National Association of Broadcasters

LAS VEGAS--As Yogi Berra might have observed about this year’s CES, “It was déjà vu all over again,” (at least with regard to the next-gen TV sets being displayed by both large and small manufacturers.)

Last year, with the ink still drying on the 3.0 standard and the FCC’s green-lighting of its use by the nation’s TV stations a couple of months earlier, ATSC, NAB and CTA industry officials gathered to celebrate its arrival with a champagne toast on the opening day of the CES. However, there was not a single 3.0-capable set to be found among the super-bright, super-big, super-colorful, super-intelligent, (and, in some cases, super-expensive) television receivers that literally reached the ceiling of the Los Vegas Convention Center which hosted the 2018 show.

Fast forward a year—has there been any change in the 3.0 situation?

In a word, no! If anything, there was less ATSC 3.0 presence this time, as one TV manufacturer did put up a sign in its 2018 CES display space that touted the benefits of the new DTV transmission standard. Not even the sign was there this time.

CRITICAL MASS

While most of the TV set exhibitors quizzed about the lack of ATSC 3.0 product (which has been available since 2017 in South Korea) were silent about its absence at CES, John Taylor, senior vice president of public affairs for LG USA did offer an explanation.

“You’re a year or so early,” he said. “We’re trying to time the introduction of the product with the critical mass of Next-Gen TV broadcasting, and the whole industry seems to be moving toward a 2020 product launch.” Taylor did seem fairly certain that the 3.0 sets would be populating manufacturers’ exhibit spaces at the 2020 CES to “prime the pumps” of buyers who would be at that show to decide what to stock their stores with for the 2020 holiday buying season.

And while others in the industry have hinted that there may be a problem with delivery of some of the components needed for 3.0 sets, Taylor was quick to state otherwise.

“There’s no technology issue at all,” he said. “It’s a business marketplace consideration about the right time to introduce the product in the U.S. market. We could ship the product today. As you know, we’re shipping ATSC 3.0 TVs in Korea, but it has to make sense for the U.S. market and that’s heading towards 2020.”

Taylor noted that LG and its Zenith R&D subsidiary are providing receiver products and technical support for some of the U.S. ATSC 3.0 field trials.

THE VIEW FROM OVERSEAS

Peter Siebert, head of technology for the DVB (Digital Video Broadcast organization, a Swiss-based consortium that sets digital broadcast transmission standards for Europe, and is roughly the equivalent of the Advanced Television Systems Committee), was at the show and had a slightly more pessimistic view when asked about the appearance of ATSC 3.0 TVs at the 2020 edition of the “world’s biggest consumer electronics show.”

“I don’t think so,” said Siebert. “And the reason why I don’t think so is that there has to be a strong commitment from the broadcasting community to say ‘we will introduce the service,’ and personally from a European perspective, I don’t hear this message from the North American broadcasters.

“It’s a typical ‘chicken and egg’ problem and there must be somebody breaking it,” he continued. “The broadcasters must say ‘we offer a service.’ It doesn’t help that the industry develops products first. For example, when I look at the televisions, there are many 4K televisions on the market. However, this doesn’t mean that we have 4K broadcasts. I think the broadcaster has to make a firm commitment to introduce the service and then the receiver industry will follow.”

Siebert noted that when the United Kingdom decided to migrate from the original DVB-T (terrestrial broadcast) standard, which was struck in 1997, to an updated version, DVB-T2, which was completed in 2008, there was no “chicken and egg” situation because there was a clear commitment from the BBC for a rollout of the improved HD service via DVB-T2.

“It can go very fast if well planned,” he said, noting that the transition was accomplished in Ukraine in a single year and in two years in Germany. Siebert did admit that the move to DVB-T2 didn’t go quite so fast in every European nation, explaining that “typically, the more a country is relying on terrestrial television, the longer it takes, because you have a much bigger legacy of receivers that you have to update before you can start a new service.”

However, lack of suitable receivers didn’t seem to be an issue in the DVB-T2 transition.

“In Germany, when we went from DVB-T to DVB-T2, we had all stakeholders sitting together at a round table and making a plan on how to introduce T2,” said Siebert. “It was very clear. The broadcasters said on this date we will switch our transmissions to the new DVB-T2 specification. And it was also very clear that the consumer industry [would be] ready way before this, providing the necessary equipment. So, at the time the switchover happened, quite a high percentage of receiving equipment was ready. I think it is necessary that all stakeholders sit together, to agree on a plan and then stick to the plan.”

THE VIEW FROM SINCLAIR

Since ATSC 3.0’s inception, one of its biggest backers has been the Sinclair Broadcast Group, and for the past several years the broadcast station group has been at CES to promote the standard, even operating a transmitter on Black Mountain south of Las Vegas to provide TV set exhibitors with 3.0 signals to demonstrate reception of OTA UHD video at the show. Sinclair has also hosted demonstrations of 3.0 technologies a few blocks away from the convention halls in a suite at the Wynn Hotel.

Mark Aitken, Sinclair’s vice president of advanced technology, was on hand this year to offer his take on the absent ATSC 3.0 hardware.

“I think it’s very simple,” said Aitken. “There two issues. The difficult one is content protection, and this issue has not been answered. You’ve got a lot of dancing around on the part of the networks with respect to what their requirements are for content protection, and not a single solution that has been put on the table has been supported by all of the content providers—and I might add content distributors or MVPDs. So, you have a bit of a stalemate. For me, it’s a fairly easy one to resolve. I look at it and say as a starting point ‘if Widevine [DRM] is good enough for Netflix, why isn’t it good enough for broadcast?’

“The networks will always try to extract the broadcaster from out of the middle of the relationship with the consumer,” continued Aitken, noting that reluctance of networks and program providers to allow their content to be transmitted by affiliates deploying ATSC-M/H [aka Mobile DTV] was one of the reasons for that mobile initiative’s ultimate demise.

“I think there’s been a soft promise made on the part of broadcasters that we’re willing to come to a solution. There’s been an unwillingness on the part of the large content players to sit down and really try to solve that problem, at least with Sinclair. They have their own views and their views are not shared equally with all broadcasters. And so, for the very same reasons that we ended up with Dolby AC-4 as an abstraction of the Atmos production environment in Hollywood, the issue of content protection is being driven by those same Hollywood entities, which for a broadcaster is driven through the network.”

Aitken summed up the situation by stating: “It is a political problem, absolutely.”

Aitken said that Sinclair will light up 26 markets by the end of 2019.

“There’s a requirement by the FCC that there be some replication across ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0,” he said. “There may have to be an opportunity to force that issue at a regulatory level, which nobody really wants. But at the end of the day sometimes you solve problems by spilling a little blood first.”

THE CHIP

Despite his disappointment with this stalemate in the rollout of 3.0, Aitken was in a celebratory mood as he announced the release of an integrated circuit specially designed and fabricated for Sinclair. The chip’s unveiling marked the end of a nearly two-year journey that began with a pledge to supply free ATSC 3.0 demodulator chipsets to any company manufacturing smartphones or other handheld viewing devices that would commit to including them in their products.

Explaining the genesis of the project, Aitken—who is a firm believer that broadcast television’s future lies in mobile devices—said that after surveying existing 3.0 chip products, he quickly came to the conclusion that none were really satisfactory for mobile device applications.

“We knew what sort of power the available chips consumed,” said Aitken. “It’s easy enough to guess the power requirement specs, because it’s almost like a curling iron if you’ve ever put your finger on one. If we were ever going to have a mobile-enabled device—something that was suitable for embedding in phones, something that could couple-up to a cellphone without draining the life out of the phone—we would have to create it.”

Frustrated that none of the large consumer electronics firms showed much interest in mobile TV products, he decided to go it alone.

“We went literally to the top of the ladder, and at the end of the day, they saw the world the way that they choose to see the world,” he said. “They saw no place for mobile ATSC; certainly not at this time.”

Aitken recalled an Indian company with a reputation for low-power consumption specialty integrated circuit design—Saankhya Labs—from his involvement with ATSC M/H—and contacted them.

“I decided to pick up the phone and have a conversation with Praag Naik, who is the president,” said Aitken. “We had a conversation, and it became evident that we shared a much higher-level understanding of what was possible, so Sinclair invested.”

The result was the creation of a very low-power consumption chip that can easily be incorporated within a mobile viewing device without substantially decreasing its battery life or increasing its physical profile.

NOT JUST FOR ATSC 3.0

Aitken said that as Saankhya had an established reputation in software-defined radio (SDR) technology, it was decided early on to create a chip that was signal agnostic, with software dictating which of a dozen or so digital TV signals it will decode, including ATSC 1.0 and the European DVB-T2 standard.

“We’re not building an ATSC 3 chip,” he said. “We’re building a chip that can go in set-top boxes, in televisions, in tablets, for any global broadcast standard, including digital radio. You level your risk by having a multistandard chip.”

Aitken says that at present about 1,000 of the chipsets have been created, and the foundry is ready to roll out millions more. Asked about takers for the free devices, he acknowledged that this has been a bit of a hard sell, but sees some light on the horizon.

“We’ve offered a major carrier five million chips. We’ve also offered the engineering of that chip into the device and we’ve offered the availability of the IP data stream, but that has not been enough to entice them to do that yet, but we are knee-deep into discussions with a USB manufacturer.”

Aitken views this as a first step to getting the chips into mobile devices, explaining that they would be part of a USB-C “dongle” equipped with an embedded antenna and designed to plug into mobile devices. And by the chip’s not being specific to ATSC 3.0, the dongle could be used virtually anywhere that digital over-the-air broadcasting is taking place.

“It would host DVB-T2, ISDB-T, ATSC 1, and other standards just by changing the software,” said Aitken. “It could be used in any part of the world.” 

For a comprehensive list of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see our ATSC3 silo.