With less than three weeks before the 2026 NAB Show, TV Tech Content Director recently spoke with Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen, CEO of Appear about the company's latest news and plans for Las Vegas.

TV Tech: Since Appear’s successful IPO in late 2025, how has the transition to a public company influenced your long-term R&D roadmap and where are you focusing your 2026 investment to build on your present momentum?
Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen: The IPO was an important milestone for Appear, not because it changes our R&D roadmap, but because it reinforced the momentum we have built and gives us even greater scope to accelerate. The successful IPO and our market momentum reflect customer confidence in our business, the market opportunity ahead of us, and the role Appear is playing as one of the real success stories in this sector. There is a great deal of positive energy around the company, both internally and externally, and that comes from the fact that customers are responding very strongly to our strategy, our innovation and the results we are helping them achieve.

For 2026, we are investing to build on that momentum in areas where we see the clearest customer demand and the strongest commercial opportunity. The common thread is bringing scale, performance and agility to live event production. Customers are increasingly looking for the flexibility to operate across hardware, software and cloud in hybrid environments, while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, latency and efficiency. This means continued development of our award-winning X Platform for the most demanding live production and contribution environments, expansion of our all-software-based VX to support hybrid and cloud-based workflows, and the delivery of X5, extending the application of our X Platform to a wider range of production use cases.

TVT: There is an industry-wide shift toward IP-based live production. How is Appear helping broadcasters bridge the gap between traditional SDI workflows and the "all-IP" future?
TBJ: The reality for most broadcasters is that this is not an overnight shift. They are managing a mix of legacy infrastructure, new IP investments and growing pressure to become more flexible and more efficient. Our role is to help them move at their chosen pace.

We help customers transition from SDI to IP in a way that preserves operational continuity, while opening the door to newer workflows based on standards such as ST 2110, alongside low-latency transport and processing technologies that support modern live production.

Our customers demand the flexibility to respond to the requirements of each event production. They value the features and performance density of the X Platform as their agile enabler to acquire, process, format convert, encode/decode and transport live video, audio and data in the most demanding scenarios.

TVT: Appear was selected to support NBC Sports for the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Milan Cortina. What specific technical challenges does a multivenue, high-stakes event like the Winter Games present for your X Platform compared to standard seasonal sports?
TBJ: An event like the Winter Olympics is different from seasonal sports in both scale and complexity. You are dealing with multiple venues, a very high concentration of simultaneous live feeds, a broader mix of production requirements, and a level of operational scrutiny that leaves no room for failure.

For NBC Sports, the challenge was not only transporting more content, but doing so with the quality, resilience and the timing precision expected of a global event of this scale. That includes supporting fibre and satellite contribution workflows, efficient bandwidth usage, high-quality video delivery including HDR, and the growing role of remote and distributed production across the enterprise.

The X Platform really stands out when it is faced with these types of high-density, high-stakes live environments, where customers need flexibility and scale as well as robustly proven performance for the most prestigious events.

TVT: You’ve said the YouTube partnership was driven by direct customer demand from a major European broadcaster. How are real-world customer requirements like that shaping and accelerating the X Platform roadmap, and what does YouTube SRT verification say about the growing role of low-latency, pro-grade IP delivery for both traditional distribution and direct-to-platform streaming?
TBJ: This is a very good example of how our roadmap is shaped in practice. The YouTube verification did not begin as a theoretical product exercise. It came directly from a major European broadcast platform that wanted Appear encoders to support its production pipeline. That customer requirement helped trigger the collaboration with YouTube and ultimately led to official verification of the X Platform for SRT live streaming.

For us, that is exactly how the best innovation happens. When a customer comes to us with a clear operational need, it validates the use case almost immediately and helps accelerate development in the right direction. In this case, it reinforced the importance of giving broadcasters and rights holders a seamless, resilient and low-latency way to deliver high-quality live content not only through traditional broadcast chains, but also directly to major digital platforms.

What the YouTube SRT verification shows is that professional-grade IP delivery is now firmly extending beyond traditional contribution and distribution. Broadcasters, sports organisations and production teams increasingly want one reliable, broadcast-quality workflow that can support linear, OTT, FAST and direct-to-platform delivery. That is exactly where the market is heading, and it is why customer-led developments like this are so important to the evolution of our solutions.

TVT: What will we see at Appear's booth at the NAB Show?
TBJ: At NAB, the conversation will no longer be about choosing between hardware and software, or between on-prem and cloud. It will be about combining these choices intelligently to create more scalable, more efficient and more future-ready live production workflows.

We will enable this by showcasing how Appear technology enables sports leagues, broadcasters, and service providers to address key industry trends and needs, including satellite-to-IP migration, scalable remote production (REMI), and hybrid edge-to-cloud operations. Appear will launch new advances across the X Platform, a high-capacity, ultra-dense, low-latency media processing and gateway platform for live contribution, production and distribution, alongside the commercial availability of the X5, which brings X Platform performance to smaller-scale live productions, delivering Appear quality and core capabilities in a compact, energy-efficient chassis.

At NAB our objective reflects our mission – working daily with customers and the industry to enable the future of live production through innovation and proven technology performance from Appear.

In October 2025, Kenna Hilburn, a former television producer, was promoted to Chief Product Officer for Avid, succeeding Tim Claman. TV Tech spoke with Kenna at IBC and recently caught up with her to talk about her new responsibilities and Avid's plans for the 2026 NAB Show.

TV Tech: Can you provide us with an update on Avid Content Core? Can you characterize what types of customers you expect to use it?
Kenna Hilburn: Avid Content Core addresses the real challenges media teams are encountering today in a fast-evolving media economy. It provides a cloud-native foundation to help teams manage, find, move, and understand their content across both linear and digital platforms. Content Core is about connecting the systems customers already have – not asking them to rip and replace what’s working.

As we work through proofs-of-concept, together with our customers, we see Content Core resonate strongly with broadcasters, news organizations, and enterprise media teams operating in hybrid environments. These are organizations that require coordination across people, tools, workflows, and global teams – especially as they work to do more with less, across more formats and with more complexity than ever.

TVT: Where is Avid applying artificial intelligence today in ways that actually save time or reduce friction – while still protecting creative control and editorial intent?
KH: We’re deploying AI very specifically and very strategically to remove friction in the workflow. That means focusing on areas where teams historically spend a lot of time – like transcription, search, and metadata. For example, we’re using AI to automatically transcribe and tag incoming footage so journalists can find what they need in seconds instead of scrubbing timelines.

If it doesn’t save time or reduce friction, it doesn’t belong in our workflows.

At the same time, we’re designing AI as an assistant rather than as the creator. Creative control always comes first. We design AI tools to be transparent, predictable, and optional – especially in environments like news, where precision and trust are non-negotiable. Editors and journalists can see what the system is doing, accept or reject it, and stay in control of the final output.

AI should make skilled professionals faster and more confident in their work – not distance them from it.

TVT: You've been with Avid as Chief Product Officer and were Senior VP of Product for 10 months before that. How are you making your mark on Avid's product strategies? Are you implementing any new approaches or direction?
KH: I started my career in media production – I went to college for television and film production – and I’ve always seen myself as a person who loves storytelling. Stepping into this role has given me the opportunity to come back to my storytelling roots.

When I started, I asked a simple question: What’s the story we’re actually trying to tell – to customers, to partners, and to our own teams? You’ve got to start there and then line up all the people and the work behind that vision – and show how you’re bringing it to life at every step of the way. That’s how you create culture, and how you help teams feel what they are doing is a meaningful part of the greater whole.

At the same time, we can’t just tell stories – we have to deliver. That’s meant simplifying our portfolio, being explicit about who each product is for, and prioritizing execution over ambition.

The craft has only gotten more complex as technology has evolved – and we’re at a tipping point where technology can actually get in the way. We see a simplification moment. Our job is to deliver the next era of tools that re-simplify the process, so creativity can be in the driver’s seat.

One of my strengths is translating real customer problems into clear product direction – and then holding the organization accountable to delivering against it. We’ve become much more explicit about outcomes, not just features, and about how each product fits into a broader solution rather than standing alone. Success isn’t defined by how ambitious a roadmap looks; it’s defined by whether we deliver the right solutions and customers see the value.

TVT: What are Avid's plans for NAB and are trade shows still vital to the company's business strategy, given that there are many more options and other competing events?
KH: NAB remains important for us, but the way we approach it has evolved. It’s less about big announcements and more about having meaningful conversations – showing real workflows, listening to customers, and getting feedback.

NAB and other trade shows bring the industry together in one place, creating a vital moment to hear what’s happening on the ground and help customers navigate an increasingly complex media landscape. But it’s part of a broader approach that includes more continuous engagement – direct customer collaboration, regional events, and ongoing digital touchpoints. It’s about continuity, not a single moment. And about showing real progress, not promises.

TVT: Are there any new developments in Avid's news production products and how would you assess the state of TV news production currently, especially considering the push for more station group consolidation?
KH: Newsrooms are under enormous pressure. Budgets continue to tighten, teams are being asked to do more with less, and the news-gathering process has become far less structured. Twenty years ago, a tip came in through the news desk. Now it can come in via tweet, a phone call, or a Facebook post as the story evolves in real time.

We’re hearing from customers that this creates huge strain. Producers are building the broadcast story while the social team is already posting, and everyone needs multiple versions immediately – often while names, facts, and footage are being revised.

We’re bringing all those disparate pieces together into one connected ecosystem, so an entire news operation can work together seamlessly – whether they’re in the newsroom or on location. That’s the strategy we’re executing with Wolftech News and iNEWS: enabling planning, gathering, uploading, sharing, editing, reviewing, and approving in one place.

TVT: At IBC, we discussed the "content creator economy" and Avid's role in that. Can you update us on Avid's approach and plans to address that market?
KH: The lines of content creation are blurring – whether you’re talking about an individual creator publishing online, a global studio, or a major broadcast network. Those worlds are coming closer together.

Our approach to the creator economy is to meet people where they are today, support where they’re going, and position professional tools like Pro Tools and Media Composer to take their craft to the next level.

We’re not looking to chase the latest trends or compete on novelty. We’re focused on supporting creators who want to build something sustainable – and giving them a clear path from emerging talent to professional scale as their needs evolve, without forcing them to abandon professional standards as they grow.

TVT: In an interview with our sister brand TVBEurope, Avid's CTO talked about customer demand for more "hybrid workflows." How is that impacting product development?
KH: Hybrid workflows aren’t a transition phase – they’re how many of our customers are operating today. We see a world where customers will still need some systems on-prem – while also needing the flexibility and scalability the cloud has to offer.

So rather than forcing an “all on-prem” or “all cloud” approach, we’re bringing those two infrastructure models together. That’s what customers are asking for, and it’s shaping how we prioritize product development. It’s all about giving them the freedom to evolve at their own pace while maintaining stability in day-to-day operations, which is critical in live and deadline-driven environments.

TVT: How have changes in technology impacted how Avid promotes its product solutions to customers and have trade shows had any impact on that?
KH: Technology has changed not just how products are built, but how customers evaluate them. They have more information, more options, and less patience for hype. They want to see real-world examples that actually make their work easier. Credibility now comes from execution - customers can see very quickly whether a product actually makes their work easier.

Many U.S. broadcasters have refused to see mobile as an important part of their future, Sinclair senior vice president of advanced technology and ONE Media Technologies president Mark Aitken says. But he hasn’t.

Sure, the path to linear NextGen TV on mobile phones will be difficult, especially as carriers and device makers control the device ecosystem. But that hasn’t dissuaded him.

Returning from IBC in September, Aitken said he had conversations with fellow broadcasters from Brazil and India that illustrate the challenges of getting linear TV onto cellphones, as well as a possible solution.

In this interview, Aitken discusses the lessons broadcasters can learn from the ISBD-T SEG-1 mobile phone experience of Brazilian broadcasters, the role India and its direct-to-mobile (D2M) strategy may play, the growing ecosystem of ATSC 3.0-enabled consumer devices, and other key business opportunities that 3.0 offers U.S. broadcasters.

(An edited transcript.)

TV Tech: Broadcasters are on the cusp of greater certainty with respect to an eventual shutdown of 1.0 and, ultimately, 3.0 finishing the transition. Is there any reason to think that the wireless carriers and their device vendors will enable linear TV to be received on mobile phones?
Mark Aitken: I think the answer to that is no. Not linear TV, but what we have to offer through ATSC 3.0 that is not TV in the conventional sense they will, over a relatively short period of time, come to understand that the multicast broadcast capabilities of ATSC 3.0 can work to their advantage.

TVT: Let’s set datacasting aside for a moment and focus on linear TV to mobile phones and devices offered by carriers. Why won’t that happen?
MA: I think the issue of controlling the device is a very real issue. One example came out during conversations at IBC with some Brazilians. As you know, Brazil recently adopted ATSC 3.0 for their terrestrial television.

Part of the Brazilian experience brought to light what ended up happening as it relates to ISDB-T. Previously, they elected to use ISDB-T for their physical layer and ended up doing their own version of some of the middle layers of the ISO stack, but they wanted mobility.

They were very aspirational and saw a future that U.S. broadcasters have long refused to see as a future. They see mobility as being an important part of their future, and they made the decision for ISBD-T.

[Editor’s note: Brazil officially adopted ISDB-T in June 2006. In August 2025, it adopted the ATSC 3.0 physical layer for its next-gen DTV+ system.]

And just as use of their linear mobile channel was available and a flood of devices that came to the Brazilian market—because the other alignment for ISDB-T was Japan, as Japan already had it—you had a large number of mobile device manufacturers that were already building ISDB-T 1-SEG-enabled mobile devices.

As they started to come into the market, suddenly other options for delivery of video came along, and that was the business of the carriers, and the broad availability of these free-over-the-air-capable phones suddenly dwindled down to just a couple of devices that were available, squeezed out by the mobile network operators.

It's clear. They’re in the business of making money. People want to watch relevant content. There was and continues to be a large amount of relevant content that TV broadcasting delivers, whether it’s local news or sports.

But they squeezed ISDB-T as a free service out of existence because they control the device universe. When someone like Qualcomm makes the statement: “We have no intent to build separable chips for broadcast services. 5G Broadcast is part of our silicon,” you know what they are making very clear is that the services and capabilities that the mobile network operators are demanding at the core of the devices that serve their consumers at the end of the day they will control.

Just because 5G exists as a small area on a 7nm chip structure in the middle of a phone doesn’t mean the carriers are going to allow its use. There are lots of ways to figure that one out.

In the U.S., you can use MediaFLO as an example. At the end of the day, Verizon could never come to business terms with a separate entity to operate the MediaFLO network.

(Read: Opinion: Why European broadcasters need to gain control of the mobile device ecosystem)

Verizon tried to operate it themselves, and they began to realize there’s a lot to this business that they didn’t understand. There’s a lot to the licensing side. There’s a lot to the IP royalty side.

This all enhances at least this one guy’s opinion: Thinking that Qualcomm and the mobile network operators are going to allow broadcasters to continue in the business of operating free-over-the-air television to mobile devices, it's insane to imagine that that's going to be the case. And I believe it’s a trap.

Will ATSC 3.0 ever make its way onto a system on a chip at the heart of a phone? I think that, again, it comes back to having success in showing a plentiful device universe.

TVT: Where does development of that universe stand?
MA: Well, I think that some years after we have success in showing a plentiful device [ATSC 3.0] universe is when 3.0 as a system on a chip may emerge.

By the way, we showed smartphones, tablets and obviously television sets, USB dongle devices and feature phones [with 3.0 receivers] at IBC in September.

Feature phones are a class of devices that I would venture to say you will never find Qualcomm engaged in supplying because the economics aren’t there.

We see that as an opportunity, particularly in a country like India or any number of developing nations, and we’re clearly going after some of those market opportunities.

My point is, we’ve had discussions with MediaTek and Qualcomm. By the way, MediaTek provides more SoCs [system on a chip] in the mobile phone market than Qualcomm—more than anybody in the world.

They are very clear. Show us a market that wants ATSC 3.0 and it’ll be on the SoC.

Until then, we've got a more than capable chipset. The fact that I can show you a half-dozen different types of devices that fill out that ecosystem shows that if we can do it, I would venture to say just about anybody can.

It's not our core business, but we feel that strongly about mobile that we’ve put in much effort to make that happen.

TVT: You brought up India, which has announced it favors a direct-to-mobile (D2M) strategy but hasn’t yet selected how it intends to make that happen. Where do things stand with ATSC 3.0 as the solution?
MA: Look, you know, if India adopts ATSC 3.0 for D2M and every imaginable device, that would be huge.

At IBC, we spent a lot of time with the chairman of Prasar Bharati, the public broadcaster in India, discussing exactly the future in India.

Has ATSC 3.0 been chosen? No, not yet. You’ve got a bureaucracy that’s being navigated. At the same time, you have other interests that don’t see that it’s to their benefit that ATSC 3.0 is chosen. So, we don’t have a slam dunk in India, but at the same time, most stakeholders in broadcasting have been engaged in support of ATSC 3.0.

Will a minority faction win out? Well, I guess some of that will come down to money and how much people are willing to lie. And you can quote me on that.

TVT: You mentioned how important feature phones with 3.0 reception will be in developing markets like India. Are there any other devices?
MA: I did leave out another class of devices. Intel now has a reference for ATSC 3.0 on their laptops. One of the reasons for that is remote learning, which is an exceptionally important piece of the puzzle in India. I can tell you that there is a another very large, well-known PC manufacturer that is moving to integrate ATSC 3.0.

TVT: Earlier, you said you believe carriers ultimately will recognize the multicast broadcast capabilities of ATSC 3.0. Why?
MA: This is because of the IP nature of the standard and the work that is going on openly now in ATSC with B2X [broadcast to everything.]

B2X is a two-stage program. It’s activity that ONE Media started and has been engaged in for more than three years. For more than the last year, it’s transitioned to a small group inside ATSC. The membership knew about it, but now it has become public-facing. ATSC has broadcast to the rest of the world that this activity is underway and is inviting folks from across the spectrum of telecom to participate.

What ATSC 3.0 has to offer is its unique multicast broadcast capabilities lend themselves to providing an economic incentive for large mobile network operators to contract capacity inside of our spectrum. Sinclair and ONE Media have been public about some of that activity. We've done webinars with a large focus on automotive.

I can tell you that it was a learning experience. It was one of the reasons that we internally decided to develop B2X broadcast-to-everything because we began to understand the needs of those folks who we saw as being potential clients in that datacasting activity.

We’ve also talked about CDN [content delivery network] offloads. When you dig deep into those verticals, it’s certainly not the same vertical we’re in as televisioners, but you begin to understand the unique relationship they have with the carriers and the uniqueness of that carrier infrastructure.

To be really attractive to them as a carrier of their bits, our bits and their bits need to be equals in the way they are formed, and the way that they are received and processed. That’s what B2X is all about. It is a bridging technology that’s nearing completion.

As part of its mandate, the Advanced Television Systems Committee—the U.S. organization tasked with developing advanced broadcast TV standards—promotes ATSC 3.0 as a global standard. Promoted in the U.S. as “NextGen TV,” 3.0 has been adopted by S. Korea, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago and is also being tested in India and Canada. In the U.S., approximately 76% of U.S. households are within reach of a 3.0 signal.

One year ago this month, Brazil announced that it was adopting the “physical layer” portion of the standard for its “TV 3.0” advanced TV standard (the physical layer defines how data is transmitted over a 3.0 signal).

The decision to adopt a key part of the 3.0 standard is expected to have a significant impact on global adoption of the standard, as Brazil is not only one of the world’s most populous countries with the largest economy in Latin America, it also has a comparably larger portion of consumers who view TV over the air than in other countries that have adopted 3.0.

The ATSC’s close ties with Brazil was brought into sharper focus recently with the announcement that Luiz Fausto, a former tech executive with Globo TV, Brazil’s largest TV network, will be the new vice president of standards development for the ATSC. Fausto, who was most recently Globo’s technology regulatory specialist, was also technical module chairman of the Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão Digital (SBTVD) Forum, which made the final recommendation to the Brazilian Ministry of Communications that resulted in the adoption of 3.0. Fausto is succeeding Jerry Whitaker, who served in the position for 25 years and is stepping down in August.

Fausto will oversee standards development processes, guide industry adoption and foster relationships with global stakeholders, the ATSC said in its announcement earlier this month.

TV Tech recently spoke with Fausto and ATSC President Madeleine Noland about his new duties. Here is an edited transcript:

TV Tech: Congratulations on your new position, why did you apply?
Luiz Fausto: That's a good question. Well, maybe the best point to consider is that ATSC has a great potential for reaching many countries. I was previously working with the SBTVD Forum, which standardized digital TV for Brazil and for Brazil only. But that doesn't prevent other countries from adopting the same standards, and the SBTVD Forum promotes that.

But the Forum does not have its own representative of other regions or other countries—it's basically focused on Brazil. As we got to know the ATSC 3.0 candidate standard as the most flexible and powerful set of technologies, I personally believe it has the potential to reach many other countries and territories—as it did with Brazil—because the way the system was conceived and designed is an extensible way; it's designed to evolve over time and to accommodate future evolutions. It’s such a flexible toolbox that we can make it fit with the different requirements that different countries may have for the future of digital terrestrial television. So that's what's most exciting about joining ATSC, the opportunity of bringing this evolution to countries other than Brazil.

TVT: You have some big shoes to fill. How will you be able to continue the excellent work done by your predecessor?
LF: I think ATSC has done a very good job in designing a very powerful and very flexible system, and also very efficient in terms of spectrum usage and energy usage, and these things are really important these days.

But the current issue I see with ATSC 3.0 is that many countries consider this to be a standard for the United States and not, for example, a ‘global standard.’ It’s a pity that digital television didn't evolve in such a way that it converged worldwide to a single framework of systems.

So we have different families of systems around the world, but I do believe ATSC has a lot of potential because of the way it was designed. Of course, the system will continue to evolve over time, but I’d like to make this system and its characteristics and features known to different countries, and also to listen to them and understand what are their requirements, so that we can use the flexibility of 3.0 to provide, for example, a tailored solution for them.

TVT: Madeleine, how impressed were you with Luiz? And what does bringing him onboard say about the ATSC’s efforts to promote 3.0 as a global standard?
Madeleine Noland: Luiz was the most qualified candidate, and he has a terrific enthusiasm for what ATSC is. He has a great understanding of how standards development is done and how the international standards development community operates. He's already well known on the international stage, so we found in Luiz the strongest candidate among, quite frankly, a lot of really, really, really good candidates, it was not an easy choice.

The fact that Luiz is coming out of Brazil certainly does make a strategic statement. And it's a testament to the entire hiring team that we would look at candidates who are not from the United States. It wasn’t a strategic move to specifically look for someone outside of the United States, but I think that it's an indication of the way ATSC sees itself, that we would entertain candidates from outside of the United States. I think there might have been a time in the organization when they would not have, but Luiz is our guy.

TVT: Luiz, what would you say is your top priority over the next 12-18 months?
LF: I still have a lot to learn but I'll be lucky enough to work in parallel with Jerry for a month while he's still full time at the ATSC. I have to learn about the inner processes and I hope that I can add to that with some international experience and how to approach the international standardization community and potential adopting countries over time.

TVT: You were heavily involved in evaluating ATSC, 3.0 for Brazil’s TV 3.0. What was it about the evaluation process that made you interested in seeking out this new position?
LF: Yes, it was a long process that is still ongoing in a sense; not the technology selection, but now the process of publishing the standards and the regulations. But it was a process that we started formally in 2020 and Brazil decided to open an international call for proposals. And this call for proposals was designed in such a way that we would receive proposals for our candidate technologies for each of the system components.

So we designed an architecture of the system and the set of requirements for each component; then we would evaluate candidate technology, more or less separately for each component. We were aware that this strategy would potentially result in a system that would be a mix and match of different systems

But we also needed to make sure that these components worked together as a system and at that stage we didn’t expect that one particular system would be dominant over the majority of components but somehow it ended up happening with ATSC.

Of course, we had the opportunity to because the original 3.0 standard is about eight years old but has kept evolving over time. For example, when it was designed for the United States and South Korea, the best video codec available at the time was HEVC and nowadays the best codec available is VVC.

But as I said, we could have ended up having a system so blended with a mixture of different systems that it could not be easily identifiable as a variety of one system, it could be a different thing with a different set with an independent set of technologies. But it was a good surprise that most components were selected from the original ATSC proposal, and it made our lives easier in the sense of making sure the components work together as a system, because we had only to replace a few things.

It was not only the technical standards that we were evaluating; we were doing real laboratory and field tests with the candidate technologies and ATSC proved to have excellent performance and it ended being selected for the majority of the components in such a way that the SBTVD Forum is looking to establish a stronger partnership with ATSC to keep the evolution of this system harmonized from now on with ATSC.

We see TV 3.0 as a variant of ATSC 3.0 that we want to harmonize with the global ATSC 3.0 standard. And that's how I see ATSC 3.0 going forward: not as a closed box where you would need to choose everything or nothing, but flexible enough to accommodate small variations within the same framework and still be seen as a single family of standards.

If you look for example, at DVB T and DVB T2, there are many variants of DVB-T and DVB T2 used in different countries, in Europe and so on.

TVT: Madeleine, how has the role of VP of Standards Development for ATSC evolved over time?
MN: The role has always required a certain range of talents. And by that, I mean it's not so easy to find people like Jerry and Luiz who, on the one hand, can prepare documents and check the formatting and dot the i's and cross the t's, and on the other hand, can think strategically and get in front of audiences and promote the standard and think “big picture.”

It's really hard to find a person who's interested and capable of fulfilling that range of tasks. And we've been very lucky with Jerry, and we're very lucky again with Luiz, to find someone who can do those things. So that aspect of the role has not changed, but the technology that lives underneath it has. The processes by which standards are being developed is changing. What is the role of AI in standards development going forward? That's something that's on ATSC's strategic roadmap right now.

Are we going to think about this as a very flexible standard where you've got a toolbox of things; the DVB project has been doing that for many, many years, but ATSC, not so much. I think that the job has definitely changed, but I think the underlying need for a person who can know the intricate details of a Microsoft Word document all the way to understanding the big picture remains the same. And we were lucky to have Jerry for some 25 plus years, and I can just see Luiz picking up where Jerry left off.

TVT: Madeleine, what will be in the stack of papers you hand to Luiz on his first day on the job? What big projects do you expect him to be working on first?
MN: We have quite a number of active groups, and I would say that there are a few projects that stand out over the others. There's a couple of aspects to this—what is actually being worked on in the groups and then the other question is, how do the groups get work done?

So in terms of what the groups are actually doing, I think that there are some really interesting projects, including the “Broadcast to Everything Project" (B2X) which is just now taking on the core network effort, is a really interesting project. It's working to align the ATSC 3.0 physical layer more closely with the 5G physical layer, as well as taking in what we've done with the broadcast core network so far, and looking at alignment with the 5G core and a potential future 6G core. It's right on the cutting edge of technology, of what's being developed for broadcast.

We also have development going on where people want to put all kinds of stuff over ATSC 3.0, so now, yeah, you can carry linear video services, and you can carry radio services, and you can carry emergency services for public or private audiences, and datacasting services. Now we have a project where they want to carry Digital Radio Mondiale (a set of digital audio broadcasting technologies designed to work over the bands currently used for analog radio broadcasting) services over 3.0 and they're working on that.

So what the groups are working on is very exciting and interesting, but I also think that where Luiz is going to be focusing his time is how the groups get work done. Can we use AI to find inconsistencies in a standard or areas where clarification is needed? Can we use AI to make sure that all the acronyms are defined the same across all the standards? We use AI to help implementers understand the standards more quickly and more accurately. Can we use AI to help our group chairs manage the work of the group? These are other areas where I think we need to develop.

In addition, a lot of the implementation of these kinds of digital terrestrial standards is software based, whereas in previous times, it was very much hardware based, and that also impacts how we might develop standards.

LF: Yeah, I think Madeleine made some excellent points and just to bring one practical example that is already to some extent being used in ATSC and also now in our Brazilian TV tutorial, is that instead of defining everything you want in the standard in—let's say natural language—we say that the one piece of the system should be in compliance with the format which is in the front, which is defined in a file, and the file itself. So it's kind of a normative part of the standard.

So with natural language, sometimes you can have ambiguities and differences in interpretation and so on, but when you go to the file, the file is clear in the sense that there is no possibility of understanding it differently, the syntax, the semantics and so on. And as Madeleine said, as we're moving more towards software instead of hardware, our standards will be more and more filled with files as references instead of text, and that would make the implementer's life easier, because they have to check if their implementation is in compliance with the standard, which means at the end of the day, less problems with interoperability.

That is an issue that happens when you introduce new technologies and you have different implementations and they are not perfectly interoperable, and then some things don't work as they should. But as we can make the standards more precise and clear, these ambiguities will be reduced. That's a good thing, because, of course, the complexity of the standards is getting higher and so the chances for human errors are getting higher. And if we can get the standards more precisely defined, we can get these human errors low again.

In some parts of the world, there is this sense that maybe digital terrestrial television will not continue to evolve, and maybe it will be replaced by the internet or something else. But so far we haven’t seen anything capable of having an efficient delivery for hundreds of millions of people or billions of people to watch the same content live at the same time.

So there are lots of opportunities where the broadcast system is, let's say, a tool to transport bits in a broadcast or fill gaps in the current infrastructure for the internet, which is limited by its unicast nature. So broadcast can fill those gaps with this capability of delivering simultaneously the same bits to lots of devices. And there are lots of use cases for that now, and there will be lots more in the future. So for me, there's nothing better for this particular use case—to deliver the same data to a huge audience at the same time—and for many other use cases, it's proven to be very attractive as well.

As word spread of LG Electronics’ decision to suspend ATSC 3.0 as a feature in its 2024 models in the U.S. following the loss of a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Constellation Designs, ATSC responded with a bulletin to members and interested parties on the “progress and growing pains” 3.0 has experienced as of late.

In it, ATSC president Madeleine Noland sought to reassure readers that the impact of the situation “is likely very limited,” citing “one prominent electronics industry market analyst.”

At the core of the issue is how digital symbols are transmitted in ATSC 3.0. The NextGen TV standard uses non-uniform constellation (NUC) to optimize inherent channel capacity. Constellation Designs' complaint arguedsthat Maged Barsoum and Christopher Jones—two of the company’s founders—developed this technique in 2007 while at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The complaint further quotes a Samsung press release underscoring NUC as a “key component” in the A/322 Physical Layer, saying it is critical to “generating the modulated symbols and optimizing the transmission capacity for all reception conditions.”

In July, a jury in the Marshall Division of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas found LG willfully infringed on four Constellation Designs NUC-related patents and awarded the company $1.68 million—some $6.75 per 3.0 unit sold.

The decision raises questions about what this might mean more broadly for the industry as it rolls out 3.0 as well as how something like this happened when ATSC has a patent policy in place. 

In this interview with Noland, the ATSC president talks with TV Tech Contributing Editor Phil Kurz about this and other questions raised by these growing pains and the progress the standard is making both at home and around the world.

(An edited transcript.)

TVTech: Let's start off with the basics. What was ATSC’s reaction to LG’s filing with the FCC informing the agency it will suspend sale of NextGen TV for the 2024 model year following its loss of the patent infringement case brought by Constellation Designs?
Madeleine Noland: Well, that did not come as good news. We recognize at the launch of a major new technology, there's definitely going to be bumps on the road, and there have been with this.

But I think the thing we need to remember about this is there's not a lot of information out there right now, and the information that is out there is rather scoped to a very niched spot for what's happening. I think the other thing ATSC keeps in mind is that history suggests that the marketplace works these types of things out.

You never know what's going to happen with any given situation. But we're hopeful that the marketplace will find its way forward and pursue paths that are going to be beneficial for the whole ecosystem.

TVT: I think one major concern involves the larger implications. When I asked the representative of the legal team representing Constellation Designs whether or not Constellation Designs had filed similar suits with regard to Sony, Samsung or other companies offering ATSC 3.0 enabled receivers, the answer wasn’t yes or no. It was basically "none of these players have secured licenses for use of the company’s non-uniform constellation technology." So, I think the bigger concern for the industry is, are we going to get muddled in some sort of legal morass that ultimately will impede the broadcast industry’s ability to advance its rollout of NextGen TV?
MN: It's so hard to predict what's going to happen, and from my perspective until there's something that demonstrates that the scope of this is changing my feeling is let's keep on our path. We are expecting to have New York City launched soon. We're excited about the new set-top boxes that are coming out.

I think it's a little bit counterproductive to speculate about what might or might not happen—the good, the bad or the ugly. We just don't know yet, and we have a lot of progress being made. We're going to keep making that progress. It's too early to say what may or may not happen, and we need to go on the facts that we have today in front of us.

TVT: How does something like this happen? According to the Constellation Designs legal filing, the company’s non-uniform constellation technology is fundamental to the physical layer of ATSC 3.0. How did the industry get to this point?
MN: ATSC’s patent policy requires all the participants to disclose their patents and to either agree to RAND [reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing] or that they don't agree to RAND and disclose that. That gives the ATSC membership and board of directors an opportunity to decide whether or not a given technology should or should not be in the system.

Patent policy relies upon the compliance of the participants. So, from ATSC’s point of view, we rely on our members and all the participants to disclose the patents that they have and to include them on the website. It's always possible that one of our members or participants has not. For whatever reason, something came out of the woodwork that they didn't anticipate. It can happen. So, I think that when things like that do happen again it's just a question of working through it with the parties involved and seeking a solution that's going to work for the ecosystem.

TVT: Is Constellation Designs a member of ATSC?
MN: They are not.

TVT: Is there a provision to deal with patents that are relevant to the standard that are held by non-members?
MN: The ATSC patent policy recognizes that ATSC itself is not in a position to do deep patent searches on all the patents that are coming out for a given standard, so, the patent policy relies on its members to do this due diligence. As I say, you know, it happens that a due diligence search may or may not have turned up absolutely everything, in which case, we do look to those members who are impacted to work with the marketplace and figure out the best next steps.

TVT: Is there any movement by the ATSC working group, committee or sub-group responsible for patent policy to revisit the organization’s patent procedures to protect against a similar situation in the future?
MN: Certainly, the ATSC board of directors is watching the situation very closely. We've had conversations about the patent policy, and we would adjust the patent policy if at the end of the day, the board of directors feels it's necessary. The patent policy and other policy documents are the purview of the board. And the board is, as I say, keeping a close eye on what's happening here.

TVT: What's your message to broadcasters as they're watching all this play out when it comes to planning their future deployments and business models?
MN: Interestingly, we have found that the broadcasters are moving forward as before. I have not heard broadcasters talking about changes of plans or changing directions as a result of this.

Again, my feeling is both for broadcasters as well as others need to take it for what it is at face value right now. We simply don't know what may or may not happen in the future. And the plans that the broadcasters had to launch in New York and a few other markets, including Chicago, hopefully soon, seem to be rolling forward as before, to my knowledge.

So, in a way, I think that we can all follow suit with the broadcasters rather than us trying to send a message to the broadcasters. We can watch what the broadcasters do, and they're just going forward. I think that they see that this is going to ultimately have a solution that's going to work and that their plans are going ahead.

TVT: What can you tell me about the New York launch of NextGen TV?
MN: I'm excited about New York because we are going to have our public broadcast station WNET up and running. What's also exciting about New York is that a second transmitter is scheduled as well. So, the first transmitter coming online will be the public broadcaster, and then later on there's another transmitter that's scheduled. I think both are supposed to be lit up this year. 

TVT: What’s the latest developments from Brazil?
MN: I’m very excited about Brazil. Brazil started their process of defining their second generation, what they are calling their "TV 3.0" digital system. They started that process back in 2020, and since then they've gone through a development of requirements, a call for proposals, combing through the responses to all the proposals. ATSC 3.0 was among them.

(Read: Where in the World is ATSC 3.0?)

Basically, they are selecting layer by layer which technology that they're going to use. They weren't sort of doing one-stop shopping. They were saying: “Let's pick the best video.” “Let's pick the best audio.” “Let's pick the best transport.”

We're pretty excited that they have so far chosen almost all ATSC 3.0 technologies. There are two exceptions. So far, they've chosen ROUTE/DASH for transport, MPEG-H audio, ISMC1 caption and ATSC emergency messaging.

The one that they are going to do is have VVC instead of HEVC, which is logical because they're coming a little bit after ATSC. But we're going to catch up to them. We're adding VVC, too, to the 3.0 standards. So, it'll all be one, pretty soon. Then the other one is their interactive system. They are keeping their homegrown system that they've been using for years. So that was never really on the table for a new proponent to come in. 

So, the last piece is the physical layer. There were four proponents for that. At one point earlier this year, one of the proponents withdrew, which took it down to three. Three proponents were in lab testing. Their plan was that when the lab tests concluded that they would take two of the three proponents to testing in the field. 

I'm very pleased to announce that ATSC 3.0 is one of the two systems that's advancing to the field. So, we will be undergoing field testing with one other system. The expectation is field testing will conclude late in Q1 next year.

By then, they will have recommended their full suite of layer technologies, and we'll be moving forward from there. So, we're excited by what's happening. 

TVT: Is there any concern that this whole patent issue related to non-uniform constellation modulation, which is an integral part of the physical layer, will have a negative effect on Brazil’s decision about what to choose?
MN: Interesting question. By no means is ATSC a patent attorney, and we are not in a position to predict what is or isn't going to happen. However, we have researched the matter.

There are a couple of data points I think are worth mentioning. One is that looking at an international patent search for Constellation Designs, and not having done a completely deep dive, but at least looking at a reasonable level, it appears that the patent is granted in five countries. Brazil is not one of those countries.

What that exactly means, I'm not 100% sure. But ATSC is working with its counsel to try to understand the nuances.

I think the other thing that's worth mentioning is that one of the countries that they do have it in is Japan, which is the source of the other physical layer standard that's being tested [in Brazil]. Presumably, and I can't say this, for sure, but I would think that it's entirely possible that that standard also has non-uniform constellations in it.

So, when you look at the landscape as it stands right now, it would seem that a couple of things are happening: If non-uniform court constellations are in the other system, which is originating out of Japan, there may be a similar situation. I don't know.

The other thing is that the patents don't appear, at least not at this moment, to exist in Brazil. So, I don't know how it's going to impact things. But these are the things we've been able to uncover so far, and we're communicating transparently with the Brazilians about what we're finding.

TVT: Finally, what’s the update on ATSC 3.0 in India?
MN: Funny you should ask. I was up at 3:00 in the morning Pacific Time today to do a webinar at a TSDSI [Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India] technical deep dive conference talking about converged networks.

In India, what's happening is the TSDSI, which is their telecommunication standards development organization and a partner of the 3GPP [mobile broadband standards group] have adopted or transposed –I forget which terminology they exactly use—ATSC 3.0 as their own.

Currently, the Indian regulatory authorities are in a comment period to help decide whether or not to make ATSC 3.0, as adopted by TSDSI an Indian national standard. If they do that, that paves the way for ATSC 3.0 to be deployed in India.

Right now, it is deployed on an experimental basis. There's a major proof of concept field trial going on in Delhi. But I think that if the Indian regulator were to permit 3.0 as an Indian national standard that would open up some doors. That said, unlike Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, South Korea and Brazil, there's no government mandate within India to make a change at all, let alone to ATSC 3.0 or any other system. 

So right now, they're very much in the testing phase, understanding and paving the way for what they may or may not do in the future. But I think that it is important to note with India, that they really are highly motivated to have a direct-to-mobile broadcasting solution. And that's pretty exciting.

TVT: Is it reasonable to think that with India’s direct-to-mobile strategy and its population of more than 1 billion people, that if 3.0 is permitted as a national standard that 3.0 mobile reception—that is in cell phones—will get a big boost?
MN: Certainly, I think that what's interesting about India is, as you point out, it's such a large market, that you could argue they can create scale, unilaterally within the country. That certainly is pretty exciting if that were to come to pass.

LOS ANGELES—Last month, Disney announced Wendy McMahon would become the new president of ABC Owned Television Stations Group, effective Jan. 1.

While she has just over three weeks of experience in that role, McMahon is quite familiar with the station group–especially with its digital content, a touchpoint for viewers that continues to grow in importance. Before taking over as group president, McMahon served as the senior vice president for digital and oversaw adoption of data-driven, mobile-first video strategies.

As station group president, McMahon is now responsible for all aspects of the eight ABC-owned TV stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and Fresno, Calif.

In this interview, she discusses a recent major upgrade to the group’s news app, whether there’s still a place for big-screen viewing in a mobile-first world, the opportunities presented by ATSC 3.0 and whether or not the recent FCC decision to do away with its local main studio rule will have any effect on the station group.

TVTechnology:Congratulations on your promotion. Let’s start with the recent announcement of an upgraded app that’s more customizable to enable users to specify personal news preferences. It also emphasizes live news streaming. From a newsroom workflow and news production perspective, what is the impact of this new offering across the ABC-owned stations?

Wendy McMahon: Thank you—I am incredibly honored by the opportunity to lead these powerful brands and businesses forward. We are committed to our local audiences and ensuring that every interaction, every engagement with our content and with our products is better than the last. Data and technology are powerful enablers and sources of strength for us in that effort.

You speak to two of the core promises we wanted to offer consumers in these upgraded apps: First, the ability to create personal streams of content and second, the ability to seamlessly engage with live news and moments that matter as they are happening.

Our content teams are amazing storytellers—and that capability is best represented in moments of live news coverage. We set out to showcase that strength in our upgraded apps. We want the apps to feel alive so we focused on an enhanced live streaming experience. It’s very easy for a user to discover and jump into multiple live streams, and our goal is to expand those offerings.

We also wanted to empower our audiences by giving them the tools to control their news experience. The app has a newsroom-curated top news feed, and we believe that is an essential aspect of what we do as a trusted news source. We also think it is important to let audiences explore, follow and keep up with the areas and topics most important to them resulting in personal streams of content [which is] titled “My News” in the app. We are also experimenting with AI as well as aggregation to make sure that experience becomes richer and more robust.

And we are seeing really positive results since we launched. In terms of downloads, video views and usage, we are experiencing dramatic, double-digit YOY [year-over-year] growth. In the first 16 days of this year, we have nearly eclipsed our total app uniques from January 2017. There is an increase in positive app reviews, and we are seeing a deeper level of engagement with fans spending between 10 and 30 minutes per visit in the app consuming OTT video and text, and also curating and personalizing their local news. We couldn’t be happier with viewers’ response and look forward to continuing to utilize our technology and data resources to deliver the best possible local news experiences.

TVT:The love affair of people, especially those in younger demographics, with their smartphones and tablets is radically transforming how people access news, information and entertainment. Can local broadcasters win those eyeballs back onto their main platform, i.e. TV? Should they even try? Or, should they simply accept what is happening in terms of preferences and pour increased resources into capitalizing on these digital platforms?

WM: Our local brands are intent on serving our audiences across all platforms. If a consumer chooses to engage with us on their smartphone, fantastic. If it’s a television set in their living room, great. Our goal is to meet and exceed their expectations at each touchpoint in the audience journey. If on a smartphone, the content is mobile-first, immediately available, less packaged and more “in-the-moment,” often short-form and easily digestible. If on TV, you can sit back and spend your morning with us, watching our local morning news and Good Morning America. When we understand and optimize for the needs of the audience by platform, all platforms win. The audience wins. The brands win.

TVT:ATSC 3.0 authorization opens multiple new opportunities for broadcasters. What will be your priorities regarding the next generation standard, from the points of view of deployment and business opportunities?

WM: I’m excited to dig into all the opportunities potentially afforded by 3.0, and I’ve asked my team to dig into both the business opportunities and the deployment options. I’ll be closely following the results from the Phoenix test market.

Given my background in digital, I am of course excited by the idea of creating better and more targeted experiences for our viewers [and] of enabling our advertisers to be even more sophisticated and surgical in their pursuit of relevant consumers. Bringing those uniquely digital qualities and attributes to linear television is very intriguing. 

TVT:Will the FCC’s recent elimination of its main studio rule affect ABC-Owned Television Stations? If so, how? Perhaps greater centralization of operations such as ingest, traffic, master control, playout. What about news production?

WM: We operate great local stations, and we’ll continue to operate those stations locally. Of course, I’m always interested in finding ways to better serve our viewers. Enabled by data and technology, I’ll be looking for ways to do just that. 

Last year, the newly combined Snell-Quantel appointed long-time industry veteran Tim Thorsteinson as its new CEO. Recently, TV Technology Editor in Chief Tom Butts sat down with Tim to discuss the latest on the Snell-Quantel merger—which resulted in a new name: Snell Advanced Media, or SAM—as well as the state of our industry and how important the upcoming NAB Show will be to SAM.

TV TECHNOLOGY: When we spoke at IBC, I got the sense from you that you really wanted to ramp up SAM’s presence in North America, you didn’t feel it was adequate based on past history with Snell and Quantel.

TIM THORSTEINSON: Right, it was pretty fragmented. Frankly, they (company employees) had to come back to the U.K. for stuff too often because we didn’t have the skill sets in the geography. For example, you need experts in the market that can articulate your IP roadmap and can consult with key customers. If you’re flying people in from elsewhere and they have funny accents, you don’t appear to be a global business. That’s been my experience in the past.

TVT: Do you feel the North American market is more provincial than other areas of the world?

THORSTEINSON: I find all areas of the world to be very provincial. The Japanese market loves people who speak Japanese. In the old days, people in Asia were quite impressed if somebody came from headquarters that had the “secret answer,” but it's less so today. I think you need to have competent, local people everywhere in the world if you want to grow your business. We try not to say anymore, "When they get up in the U.K., we'll be able to give you an answer." That's not the right answer.

TVT: Are there other things that have changed in the way business has been conducted in this industry in the last five years?

THORSTEINSON: It’s a lot less relationship-oriented. If you know people, they’ll take an appointment, which is nice, but it may be one.

TVT: The decisions are not necessarily made by the same people anymore?

THORSTEINSON: No, and the other thing is if you take somebody into an account, you can take one suit like me that has a band of knowledge, but the other person with me better be very technically competent because the customers are going to get right down to bit-rates and a level of technical detail that I'm done with in about 15 seconds. You can't have layers of guys in shiny looking suits; people aren't impressed with that anymore. They don't have the time because they're more thinly staffed than they used to be and they're under tremendous pressure.

Tim Thorsteinson

The good news is every customer has different performance criteria depending on their application, and then you have to be price competitive and you have to have a support structure. It's just a lot harder than it used to be.

TVT: Is it because there’s less specialization?

THORSTEINSON: Yes, and there's less business. Notwithstanding all of the things you read from industry pundits, I think if you added up the capital budgets around the world for our available market, they're smaller. I've been in the middle of the industry consolidation for 15 years now, and there's still a lot left. There are still way too many suppliers. The customers are well served because there are lots of good suppliers. One of the challenges I think is that it's hard for the suppliers to invest and to drive forward the technology to the degree that we want to. Up until now, the industry's been mostly served by relatively smaller suppliers;, big $100 billion companies have not been providing equipment, our available market is approximately $5 billion. It's a difficult time in the industry because, one, you have all this technical change going on and, two, balance sheets and operating budgets are strained so it's hard for people to keep investing.

TVT: Do you think the move to IP is causing more insecurity among vendors?

THORSTEINSON: Definitely. There’s going to be a whole swath of revenue that goes away.

TVT: What do you mean by that? Are you talking about a move to commodity hardware?

THORSTEINSON: Twenty years ago at Tektronix, I would go to the board meeting and some board member would say, "Oh, we make a routing switch. Doesn't Cisco make a routing switch? Can't we be like Cisco?" Eh, it's not really the same thing. "Well, will a Cisco switch do what our switch does?" Peter Symes would write a white paper and three or four years later, it would happen again. It's happened four or five times. Well, guess what? Those switches are going to be able to operate like a broadcast router used to pretty soon, and what a lot of the suppliers are going to be selling is the “goes in” and “goes outs,” that transition SDI to IP and back, but not the switch. That whole router market—a $300-$400 million market—is going to get smaller quickly I think.

TVT: You go way back on this. I remember years ago attending Grass Valley events and you talking about the move to software so this is not really new. This is something that's been going on for 10 to 15 years.

THORSTEINSON: No, but I've got enough historical perspective to tell you it's really happening now. If you take the big guys in the industry, the Evertzes and Beldens and Imagines—we're not at that level— but you take all those guys; huge amounts of their revenue are hardware today and if you consider where their margins are coming from today, the vast majority of it is hardware. Well, that's all going to change and for those of us that have manufacturing operations, fewer products are going to be moving through it. In the playout business, we're already to the point where people don't really want to buy the hardware, they just want to buy the software.

TVT: How important is the NAB Show this year to you guys?

THORSTEINSON: Massive. The most important one ever, I think. I mean, we relaunched ourselves as a company. We changed the name, and we added a few new products, but people have to come to the show and see the new technology and the direction the business is heading and say, "Wow, this is a lot different company than it used to be."

TVT: Is that fair to put the success, the future of the company on one show?

THORSTEINSON: No, but I'd have a full head of hair if it were a fair world. The world's not fair, but frankly it's clear, which is nice. What we need to do is not confusing at this point, which is good. We're getting the same message from every customer. We have helped one company get on-air to 4K quite successfully, and we have a couple of other really compelling deliveries in the pipe, in the short term. We'll go into the show with three to five deployments, and they all want to know, ‘OK, great,’ but HDRs got to be on their roadmap. We're going to be deploying software-only solutions, and there will be an announcement around that, but so will everyone else.

TVT: Image quality has always been a big selling point for Snell. Is that still very important to you? Are you afraid that message may get lost?

THORSTEINSON: That's an interesting point. Our biggest deal on the payoff side—we haven't announced it—but it was a $4-$5 million deal that we got in the last half of the year, highly competitive. We won it because of image quality. But again, it's a software-oriented playout solution. The reason we won is because we were able to take the ICE Morpheus stack and work with the folks with Alchemist and other vendors, and tune their hardware to get a compelling picture on whatever device you have. We won that because of image quality. I don't think the demand for high image quality is going to go away.

TVT: You think it will increase?

THORSTEINSON: I would think so. The problem is the customer wants everything. Customers want high image quality, lower prices and flexibility. They are so demanding, right?

Then again, their world is changing dramatically, but it's a good time to not be huge because we can make changes and reposition ourselves. You look at these big, big companies, and I'm talking about the $100 billion and up; how they change is tough because of the restructuring they have to do. I mean, we have plus or minus 500 people. I've been here 10 months, and the headcount has been flat, but we changed out about 70 people.

TVT: What do you mean by “changed out?”

THORSTEINSON: Well, people left and people came in with different skill sets. My guess is we will have, in two or three years, the same amount of people but half of them are going to be different.

TVT: Is your goal to try to keep the headcount the same or reduce the headcount?

THORSTEINSON: It all depends. My goal is to increase the number of engineers that I have as a percentage of my total headcount. That's been my goal in every company I've ever run. Ideally, one person can do all the finance in the company, and one person can do all the IT, and one really smart person can do all the marketing, and I don't need anything else. Then I have a bunch of people designing product, and they never break, so I don't need a whole lot of support people. That is kind of the ideal business model.

As a matter of fact, we have already combined all of our support, operation; what used to be Quantel and Snell, it's all one now. We've cross-trained all the support people. We’ve combined all the manufacturing and marketing. There's still some product specialists, people that are more specialists and work more products than the switching and routing, and that will always be the same. We're 80 percent of the way down the path of combining the company. The way I usually approach an organization is to figure out what the objectives are and then figure out what people and processes you need in place to meet those objectives. It's tough because there's not a ton of stability. If you look at the job loss in the industry of good people in the last two or three years ... I know you know a lot of them.

There's so many good people no longer employed, which obviously is not a pleasant thing. It's just been a really rough couple of years for the industry.

TVT: How is business now?

THORSTEINSON: Thankfully on the calendar year, our business was up about 15 percent in the second half of the year from the first half of the year. We had a strong fourth quarter. I think we made money. I say that I think because we haven't closed our books yet. We met all of our financial targets. I hear people say that all the time, and sometimes your targets are not that aggressive. They were the targets the board was looking for. We recapitalized the business. We finished the year strongly. We added 20 engineers over the year and got the product roadmap solidified towards IP and 4K and HDR and those kinds of things. All in all, I think it was a pretty good year; a lot of change, obviously, for everybody in the organization. It's tough because this is a legacy business, so I would say embracing change has been a challenge for most.

I think as we move into 2016, the business is definitely better. There are a lot of good opportunities on a global basis. It looks like the market is at least stabilized and maybe getting stronger, but it's more of an incremental step up from my perspective. My expectation is, from a market perspective, 2016 will be a better year.

TVT: How has the reaction been to the name change? Do you find people using SAM or Snell Advanced Media?

THORSTEINSON: I find people using SAM a lot. It doesn't seem to have been a major factor, frankly, from my perspective. I think people are glad it's one coherent brand, but I don't think it's become a big issue.

TVT: SAM is a member of AIMS (Alliance for IP Media Solutions). What is your opinion of AIMS? Why was it needed?

THORSTEINSON: We're not big enough to develop our own proprietary approach to this space. We are ultimately going to develop IP switches that interface with Belden’s routers and they're going to do the same with ours and others. That was the thought behind the consortium.

TVT: Is there a timeline you’re working toward?

THORSTEINSON: You know we’re at the front end to be really honest. We’ve yet to have the first of these meetings. From our perspective, it’s in the early stages. My guess is NAB will be used as an opportunity to really articulate the time frames, and schedules, and interoperability testing, and things like that.