GENEVA—The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) today released updated guidance to help countries maintain precision time systems.

Precision timekeeping enables reliable operations of critical infrastructure, including communications networks, navigation systems, electricity networks and financial systems.

The latest guidance is published in ITU’s “Handbook on Selection and Use of Precise Frequency and Time Systems.” It offers governments, engineers and technical specialists an updated reference on the technologies used to generate, measure, compare and distribute precise frequency and time signals.

“Global connectivity depends on technologies working together seamlessly—precision time is one of the foundations that makes this possible,” said Doreen Bogdan-Martin, ITU secretary-general. “Through international cooperation and technical expertise, ITU is helping countries strengthen the reliability and resilience of the timing systems that support communications and critical infrastructure worldwide.”

The new ITU guide is the first update since 1997. It covers the fundamental principles of frequency and time measurement, the operation of modern atomic clocks and the technologies used to disseminate precise time across national and international networks.

Developed by experts from the ITU Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R), the updated guide reflects nearly three decades of technological progress and modern society’s growing dependence on accurate, reliable time synchronization.

The 2026 edition addresses radio and satellite dissemination, optical fiber time transfer, optical atomic clocks and time as a service. It also examines a new generation of ultra-precise clocks based on optical frequency standards that could eventually change how the world defines a second.

“We rarely think about precise time, yet modern communications, navigation and critical infrastructure depend on it every second,” Mario Maniewicz, director of the ITU Radiocommunication Bureau, said. “This Handbook provides administrations and engineers with an authoritative reference for understanding the technologies behind accurate timing and for making these systems more reliable and resilient.”

The guidebook is available online.

NEW YORK—The Audio Engineering Society’s Committee on Broadcast and Online Delivery has updated its loudness website with an ear toward dialogue intelligibility.

Based on the group’s “Improving Dialogue Intelligibilty in Media” report, the AES site now offers what it calls a brief and authoritative introduction to the many reasons why dialogue can’t be understood and ways to improve intelligibility.

Some 50% of viewing is now done using captions and subtitles, AES said, which shows intelligibility is a growing consumer concern.

“When dialogue is not understood, it distracts the listener from being immersed in the story, leading to frustration or channel-changing,” Jim Starzynski, co-chair of the TOC-BOD committee and chair of the TD1009 study group, said. “The site shows how these issues arise and how they can be solved in the many steps from capture to consumption.”

The site now offers a summary of the topics in AES’s series of technical documents on loudness and intelligibility (TD1006, TD1008, TD1009) and of the AES71 and AES77 standards, which give recommendations for broadcast and online audio and video content. A new glossary defines loudness and intelligibility terms, including hearing science terminology that may be unfamiliar to audio production professionals.

“Loudness regulations are expanding to include online content,” David Bialik, co-chair of the TC-BOD committee, said. “This website has been updated to help professionals better understand loudness management.”

The Technical Committee on Broadcast and Online Delivery can also be reached via email.

The ATSC in July approved Broadcast-to-Everything (B2X) as a candidate standard and announced the approval with great fanfare earlier in October.

The work’s overarching goal was to advance ATSC’s vision of enabling broadcast and mobile technologies to work more closely together, according the committee’s announcement. It also extends the reach of broadcast so unicast networks can leverage the one-to-many strength of broadcasting.

TV Tech reached out to Madeleine Noland, ATSC president, to put this development into context for broadcasters.

In this interview, Noland discusses B2X, the thinking behind its development, who will likely use it, the parallel development of bridge technology that will bring some B2X use cases to broadcasting and how B2X is intended to address the future.

(An edited transcript.)

TV Tech: Earlier in the month, ATSC announced its membership’s approval of Broadcast-to-Everything (B2X) as a candidate standard. How are the ATSC 3.0 suite of standards and B2X related?

Madeleine Noland: There are a couple of things that are part of B2X. One is pure standalone B2X, and that is its own thing that would be running in different spectrum and doesn’t ride alongside of ATSC 3.0.

It’s a different physical layer, and it enables many new use cases that are pretty exciting. At the same time, there is something that the group is working on called "bridge technology," which is a way that an existing ATSC 3.0 broadcaster can implement a wide variety of the use cases that B2X can offer.

TVT: Such as?

MN: B2X enables you to do a couple of things you can't do as easily with ATSC 3. Although the bridge technology is going to get you some of the way, one of the things about B2X is that its unique physical layer design is perfect for very low-power devices.

Imagine you've got a sensor out in the middle of a cornfield that has no power other than solar, or it's battery-operated and nobody wants to get on a tractor and go out there and change the battery.

There are aspects of B2X that could be particularly useful in certain verticals for certain use cases that you might not want to use ATSC 3.0 for.

Then there are other use cases where you could really use either technology. It sort of depends on what you have deployed already, what your larger business model picture is all about.

Take, for example, if you wanted to do broadcast traffic offload of a unicast network. That’s a pretty good example. There are some things that you could do with B2X that you can't do with 3.0, but there are a lot of things you can do with the bridge technology that you can do with 3.0.

One of the things that they’re bringing to bear as part of this work is they are working on a broadcast core network, which will apply to 3.0 or B2X and will be closely integrated with 3GPP technologies. The concept behind that is that if you’re a mobile network operator and you want to take advantage of the opportunity to move some broadcast traffic off your network, this makes it much more seamless. It uses 3GPP-defined interfaces between core networks and between radio access networks.

TVT: So will ATSC 3.0 broadcasters take advantage of the standard’s bootstrap to tuck B2X into their existing NextGen TV transmissions?

MN: My guess is that they will use their ATSC 3.0 transmissions, and they will use the bridge technology to take advantage of some of the new verticals that they would be able to access, but that they wouldn’t necessarily change what they’re doing.

It's possible they would interleave ATSC 3 with B2X using the evolutionary frame capability, but my guess is that there’s some overhead to doing that. Are the advantages of B2X within an ATSC 3 transport or physical airframe structure strong enough that you would deal with some of the overhead that is necessary to interweave two standards together?

I don't know what the answer to that question is. My guess is that in the U.S. for the foreseeable future, they would look to the bridge technology, which is coming.

TVT: So who will be the users of B2X? Wireless network operators? Broadcasters around the world?

MN: One of the things that B2X has is it works in 5-, 10-, 15- and 20-MHz bandwidths, as well as 6, 7 and 8 [MHz], which is traditional broadcast. It can absolutely operate in any number of the frequency bands, including traditional television broadcasts, but also going up into the frequency bands that mobile network operators use.

Whether they will ultimately use it or not is certainly going to be a market decision. But it will become available to them to use for broadcast and multicast use cases. I could see that as a possible outcome.

I could also see broadcasters allocating different spectrum for this. For example, say that some consolidation takes place in the United States if the ownership cap rules ultimately are changed, and that there’s a possibility that broadcasters are going to be working together. They could say, "Well, we want to work with B2X in some of our spectrum, and we want to work with ATSC 3 in some other of our spectrum.” I think that in the U.S., though, that would require a regulatory change as well. I think that would be a little bit further down the pike if it were to come.

But then you start looking at other countries where they're thinking about what do they want to do with their digital strategy. What do they want to do with mobile offerings? What do they want to do with broadcast networking reaching rural areas? I think that some of these greenfield areas might be earlier fruit for the B2X technology.

TVT: What is driving an organization called the Advanced Television Systems Committee to develop a standard that may or may not be used by TV broadcasters?

MN: I think what's driving this is almost a philosophical understanding that when you look to the future, it's a network of networks. There's not any one network that is perfect for all use cases.

What you really need is the ability for the networks to operate together according to the data session and the need. When you start a standard that's needed right now, you are too late.

So, we think about B2X as really preparing broadcasters—and frankly, network operators—for this future of converged service. The idea behind B2X is to prepare us for that time, which is already here in many ways, and make us as close to 3GPP standards as we can be, and that's really the genesis behind B2X.

It's very much a future-thinking standard, and the goal is to have the standard complete and ready for testing and for exploration and implementation, with the understanding that as the world changes, we're going to be looking more to interchangeable networks that can be shifted seamlessly within devices and seamlessly on the transmit side.

I also think that ATSC for a number of years has been recognizing that broadcast infrastructure is way more than TV and, as you know, we have rebranded ourselves to take the word “television” specifically out of the name of the organization on the market-facing side of things.

We're working very hard to make people think about their broadcast infrastructure in new ways.

WASHINGTON—A key university working on the development of the ATSC 3.0 standard successfully demonstrated advancements in interference cancellation and signal reception capabilities during a July IEEE event in Brazil.

Mackenzie Presbyterian University demonstrated the advancements during the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB) in João Pessoa, Brazil.

The university conducted system integration and lab verification using hardware, software and algorithms developed or contributed by members of ATSC Implementation Team 5 - Tower Network (IT-5), including the University of the Basque Country (Spain), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China), the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI, Korea) and Western University (Canada).

The demonstration employed an Inter-Tower Communication Network (ITCN) and Geographically Segmented Localcasting (GSL) to improve spectrum efficiency by allowing signals from local stations to overlap geographically. It demonstrated how advanced signal processing techniques can facilitate the reception and decoding of lower-power signals in challenging co-channel interference environments.

For the demo, the desired signal was received at a power level 37 decibels below the stronger signal. Successful decoding under these conditions provides evidence of the potential for advanced interference cancellation techniques to support more flexible broadcast network architectures.

Ultimately, these capabilities could help broadcasters improve spectrum utilization, support localized content delivery and explore new network configurations as ATSC 3.0 deployments evolve.

“This demonstration is an important example of how ATSC 3.0 continues to evolve beyond traditional television broadcasting,” ATSC President Madeleine Noland said. “The ability to manage complex signal environments and make more efficient use of spectrum opens exciting possibilities for broadcasters.”

Brazil’s TV 3.0 has catalyzed ATSC members, in particular IT-5 members, to advance Localcasting technologies to improve spectrum efficiency and enable geographically targeted content delivery.

Responding to Brazil's needs, IT-5 members collaborated internationally to develop and demonstrate innovative interference-cancellation and signal-reception capabilities, highlighting the value of global technical cooperation.

These advancements provide a backdrop to the IEEE Broadcast Technology Forum, which opens Oct. 27 at NAB headquarters. The two-day gathering offers broadcasters engineers, technology developers and industry leaders a forum to explore the innovations shaping the future of broadcasting.

More information is available on the IEEE website.

NEW YORK—Pearl TV has secured new pricing from patent owners, technology licensors as well as testing and security providers necessary to one day making affordable accessible NextGen TV converters available to consumers.

The broadcast business group made up of seven of the nation’s largest station groups made the announcement on the eve of NAB Show New York, which opens Oct. 21 in Manhattan at the Javits Center.

“A successful transition to NextGen TV requires more than advanced broadcast technology. It requires affordable products that enable all consumers to continue enjoying free over-the-air television,” said Anne Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV. “Our work with technology licensors, manufacturers, testing organizations and the consumer technology industry is focused on reducing costs for consumers and establishing a clear market path for NextGen TV converter boxes to advance the ATSC 1.0 to ATSC 3.0 transition.”Affordable converter boxes will enable all consumers to access this content without buying a new television.

Pearl TV’s Converter Box Program brings together organizations from across the broadcast ecosystem to support the development of affordable devices. Participating patent owners through the Advanced Broadcast licensing platform, along with Dolby and Advanced HDR by Technicolor, are supporting the initiative through licensing arrangements tailored to qualifying converter boxes. Discussions are also continuing with additional intellectual property licensors and component manufacturers.

Testing provider Resillion and the ATSC 3.0 Security Authority have also established special pricing for the program, lowering the cost of both certifying and securing qualifying products.

“This is what industry collaboration looks like. Patent owners, technology licensors, testing and security providers, and manufacturers are all contributing to a shared goal of making affordable NextGen TV converter boxes a reality,” said Schelle.

“Together, we’re making meaningful progress toward affordable devices that connect to existing televisions through an HDMI connection, so that consumers can receive NextGen TV without needing to buy a new TV set. Millions of these receivers will be needed to complete the transition, and this collaboration is helping lay the groundwork,” she said.

Pearl is working with several manufacturers developing low-cost ATSC 3.0 converter boxes, with new products expected to be unveiled in early 2027. The group is also working with the Consumer Technology Association to help consumers easily identify qualifying products at retail.

“As the transition continues apace,” Schelle added, “consumers and broadcasters alike can have confidence in converter boxes using the famous NextGen TV logo and meeting its testing requirements.”

Converter Box Program specifications now require qualifying converter boxes to support ATSC 3.0 Advanced Emergency Alerting recommended User Interface requirements that aim to ensure a consistent user experience in the delivery of richer, more accessible, geo-targeted emergency information delivered in the over-the-air broadcast signal.

“The emergency information experience supported by the Converter Box Program is built on a user interface and user experience framework developed by Sinclair and ONE Media through the NAB NextGen TV News Technology Lab, an NAB initiative supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation,” said Mark Aitken, president of ONE Media and senior vice president of Advanced Technology for Sinclair Broadcast Group.

“The framework sets a common standard for how NextGen TV emergency information looks and behaves, so viewers get the same clear, predictable experience on any channel, any device, and any screen. It was shaped by input from about 300 emergency managers and focuses on what people need most under stress -- what is happening, where, how urgent it is, and what to do,” he said.

More than 600 NextGen TV services (or channels) are currently on-the-air from broadcasters throughout the U.S. Broadcasters are sharing transmission facilities to maintain both ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 services during the transition period, ensuring continued access to free over-the-air television.

“As the industry prepares for an eventual transition involving more than 1,600 commercial television stations, affordable consumer equipment, improved broadcast services and a clear transition timeline will be essential,” Schelle said.

InterDigital Inc. and Parks Associates have published a report into the adoption of HDR across the video ecosystem.

The white paper, High Dynamic Range and the Future of Video, explores the continuing evolution of HDR across televisions, streaming services, live production, mobile devices and more, alongside the technologies facilitating its growth. Expanding brightness, contrast and colour to produce images resembling what is seen by human vision, the technology’s adoption is accelerating.

Wider technological advances such as AI-assisted video enhancement, cloud production and next-generation codecs are lowering barriers to its broader deployment, said the report. Now commonplace across on-demand streaming services, HDR has been extended across major international live sporting events including the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2026 Winter Olympics.

The report’s findings indicate HDR is positioned to become a capability that audiences will expect, across television, live events, movies and more.

Lionel Oisel, head of video labs at InterDigital, said, “Consumers may not always know HDR by name, but they recognise the experience it enables: richer colour, deeper contrast and a more lifelike picture. As HDR expands across streaming, live sports, gaming and mobile, the opportunity is to make that premium experience consistent and efficient on every screen. Innovation in HDR, video compression and delivery will be fundamental to making that possible.”

“HDR technology support has advanced faster than consumer understanding,” said report author Michael Goodman, director, entertainment research at Parks Associates. “HDR is increasingly becoming an expected part of a high-quality viewing experience, and the industry is working to improve interoperability, reduce production complexity and communicate HDR’s value to consumers.”

WASHINGTON—ATSC took an important step in the development of Broadcast-to-Everything (B2X) with approval of a candidate standard for the emerging platform.

The approval is an initial step in advancing ATSC’s vision of enabling broadcast and mobile technologies to work closely together, advancing the effort to extend the reach and efficiency of broadcast to connected devices, networks and services and to make it possible for unicast networks to take advantage of broadcasting’s one-to-many architecture, the standards body said.

“ATSC is committed to advancing broadcast technologies that meet the evolving needs of our industry and create new opportunities for broadcasters, technology companies and consumers,” ATSC President Madeleine Noland said. “The progress on B2X is a strong example of that commitment.

“By bringing together expertise from across the broadcast and mobile ecosystems, ATSC is helping define how broadcast can evolve, and work alongside other networks as an essential part of the communications landscape,” she said.

“B2X System Discovery and Signaling” (S44-2-002r6) was approved by ATSC Technology Group 3. It provides an essential building block for devices to find and connect with future B2X services.

B2X could create new opportunities for broadcasters, wireless providers, device manufacturers, technology companies and service developers while opening new markets for broadcast-based services. It looks to leverage broadcast’s ability to simultaneously deliver the same information or content to a large number of receivers and complement mobile broadband networks in reaching connected devices.

“B2X can bring together broadcast efficiency in the mobile ecosystem, create new business opportunities, and ultimately extend advanced services to a broader range of devices, including very low-power devices, such as wearables or remote sensors,” said Joe Fabiano, chief technology officer of EdgeBeam Wireless and chair of the TG3 Specialist Group on B2X.

B2X is being developed to explore how broadcast can become part of that broader communications environment, complementing other networks rather than operating separately from them.

Candidate standard status moves B2X from internal development toward broader industry evaluation and implementation. It gives companies and organizations, regardless of ATSC membership, the chance to review the specification, evaluate its implementation and provide feedback.

The candidate standard is available on the ATSC website.

Digital Alert Systems has released Version 6.1 software for its DASDEC-III emergency messaging platforms. It is free for users who already run Version 6 or who meet certain other criteria.

This adds tighter user-session controls, OpenID Connect (OIDC) configuration enhancements for single sign-on, EAS-Net reliability improvements, and SSL-based CAP Canada support.

DAS published Version 6 in March, citing demand for hardened infrastructure, and this update builds on it.

Now new Federal Communications Commission cybersecurity requirements for Emergency Alert System participants, including radio and television broadcasters and cable operators, took effect on Sept. 29.

“The rules require these operators to install security patches and security-related software and firmware updates from equipment manufacturers promptly after they become available. Testing is permitted, provided it begins promptly. The rules also call for strong passwords and a network firewall or comparable segmentation that limits remote management access.”

Version 6.1 includes current security updates for the DASDEC-III platform.

Here is how the company describes the updates:

• Access Controls: Tighter controls over user sessions, including who can adjust permissions, plus OIDC configuration enhancements for single-sign-on environments.
• Canadian Alerting Support: SSL-based CAP Canada support to accommodate changes to the country’s secure alert-data feed.
• EAS-Net Improvements: Enhanced reliability and event-file management.
• Operational Refinements: Refined MPEG DASH operation, along with improvements to EAS-Net decoding, audio sampling, CAP status reporting and other station functions.

Customers running Version 6 receive V6.1 at no cost. They can download it from the company website using their V6 password.

Customers enrolled in the company’s Software Assurance Plan, who have purchased a new DASDEC or who have participated in its Up-Trade program since October 2025 also receive it at no cost.

Pricing for other users depends on how far back the current software revision is and whether the hardware is compatible. For support email support@digitalalertsystems.com and include your unit’s serial number.

Digital Alert Systems also released Version 5.6 software for its DASDEC-II platforms, which includes some of the same improvements, along with the security updates to comply with current FCC rules. And it encouraged all customers running DASDEC-III to move to Version 6.

This article initially appeared in Radio World, sister brand to TV Tech.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill.—Cobalt Digital will showcase its end-to-end ST 2110/IPMX ecosystem, solutions geared to address the C-band spectrum transition and multiviewer products at NAB Show New York, set for Oct. 21–22 at Manhattan’s Javits Convention Center.

A main focus at Cobalt’s NAB Show New York exhibit (Booth 226) will be its end-to-end approach to ST 2110/IPMX, which the maker of signal-processing products said will show how broadcasters can transition from SDI to IP at their own pace while supporting hybrid environments and protecting their existing investments.

Cobalt said it will spotlight the expansion of its IPMX capabilities with support for JPEG XS Temporal Differential Coding (JXS TDC), which enables IPMX-certified products to discover, establish and transport visually lossless, ultralow-latency JPEG XS media streams. The enhancement strengthens IPMX environments with plug-and-play deployment and low-latency JPEG XS workflows while maintaining compatibility across mixed-vendor systems, it said.

Support for JPEG-XS is available across Cobalt ST 2110/IPMX-capable products, including its SAPPHIRE miniconverters, Indigo gateways, PACIFIC encoders/decoders, TOPAZ processing platforms, Aria audio monitors and UltraBlue multiviewers, it said.

To help broadcasters navigate the C-band spectrum transition, Cobalt has added support for hybrid satellite/internet operations to its Cobalt PACIFIC compression line. The enhancement complies with VSR TR-06-4 Part 7 and uses internet connectivity to recover data affected by satellite transmission losses.

The Pacific ULL-DEC with SAT-DEMOD uses a factory-installed DVB-S/S2 demodulator to receive satellite signals and make them available through both ASI and IP, the company said. In hybrid operations, it uses the Ku- and Ka-bands for bulk distribution and the internet for lost packet recovery, offering broadcasters a practical approach to maintaining reliable content delivery and adapting to changes in satellite distribution, the company said.

Cobalt will also exhibit its blueCORE family of standalone signal processors, which debuted at April’s NAB Show in Las Vegas. blueCORE delivers multifunction audio and video processing in a compact 1-RU form factor and supports both SDI and ST 2110/IPMX signal processing, providing extensive flexibility for infrastructure transitioning to IP, Cobalt said.

The company also plans to demonstrate its latest UltraBlue MV-SW multiviewing capabilities, which provide flexible monitoring for facilities working with compressed streams, SDI, ST 2110, IPMX or hybrid environments. It’s available as a turnkey package or as software that runs on customer-supplied hardware and incorporates support for IPMX, Cobalt said.

Cobalt will also display its enhanced audio capabilities, including optional fiber input/outputs added to its line of 9935-AUD4-DANTE openGear advanced audio processor cards to support Dante Audio Interfaces. Direct fiber connectivity simplifies Dante installations, supports longer-distance deployments and eliminates the need for external media conversion in fiber-based network infrastructures, it said.

Cobalt will also showcase its ARIA audio monitoring line, featuring full IPMX compliance alongside support for 16 SDI or 64 MADI channels in a compact rack-mount chassis with touch-display and web-based controls.

Other pieces of Cobalt’s broader product portfolio on display will include Sapphire miniconverters, Indigo gateways, Pacific compression tools and its openGear card lineup.

“The industry is no longer asking whether it will move to IP; it is asking how to make that transition practical,” Cobalt Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Marketing Suzana Brady said. “At NAB New York, we will demonstrate an end-to-end ecosystem that provides broadcasters with the tools they need to move at their own pace, while also addressing challenges such as the C-band transition. From IPMX and ST 2110 to standalone processing and multiviewing, our goal remains the same: provide practical solutions that make complex workflows easier to deploy and operate.”

For more on Cobalt Digital’s NAB Show New York plans, visit its website.

INDIANAPOLIS—Andrew Sveum has joined the Society for Broadcast Engineers as marketing and growth director, an expansion of the group’s leadership team under its new strategic plan.

The position is intended to reflect SBE’s commitment to expand its reach, strengthen member engagement and support long-term growth, the group said.

A 20-year business owner and nonprofit veteran, Sveum is the founder and executive director of Freedom Rising, a group that combats human trafficking and supports vulnerable communities around the world. His background in business ownership, nonprofit leadership, international experience, marketing grant research and partner development gives Sveum a broad perspective on organizational growth and community engagement, SBE said.

The SBE is a professional organization supporting television and radio engineers and those in related fields with more than 4,000 members in 117 chapters across the U.S., Hong Kong, Eastern Europe and in more than 25 other countries. It offers educational programs, networking opportunities, a U.S. technical broadcast certification program and an expansive list of educational programs for broadcast engineers, operators, technicians and IT professionals, as well as advocacy for its members with federal agencies and the U.S. Congress.

For more information, visit SBE’s website.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) today announced SMPTE Bootcamp: Precision Timing for ST 2110, a one-day program to take place Wednesday, Oct. 21, at NAB Show New York.

The program will run from 9:20 a.m.–4:30 p.m. in SMPTE Program Room 3D-03 of the Javits Convention Center, where NAB Show New York will take place Oct. 21–22.

Precision Time Protocol (PTP) now sits underneath ST 2110 facilities, networked audio systems and a growing range of live production and pro AV equipment. Speakers with deep experience in clocking, network design, networked audio, and test and measurement bring a vendor-neutral, working view of how timing is distributed, designed, measured and maintained, along with the lessons gathered from real systems.

Attendees leave able to explain how timing moves through a facility; to configure and verify a grandmaster and the clocks beneath it; to read PTP traffic and design redundancy that holds at failover; and to know what to ask of a supplier before purchase.

The program is produced with Douglas Gillette, an independent engineer and SMPTE member, who also opens the day and moderates a field-experience panel.

"Timing touches every part of an ST 2110 facility, and the best way to learn it is from the practitioners who design, build and run these systems every day," said Maja Davidovic, SMPTE director of education.

“The boot camp moves from fundamentals through network design, measurement and deployment practice, so attendees leave with a clear understanding of how timing works and the confidence to apply it in their own facilities. Having experts from across the industry share one stage and compare notes with the people in the audience makes for a rare learning opportunity,” she said.

Whether the next project is a migration, a new IP facility or an upgrade to an existing one, the day offers a practical starting point, SMTE said. The full-day boot camp costs $500, with a $400 rate for National Association of Broadcasters, SMPTE members or government attendees and $250 rate for students. Registration includes an NAB Show New York Floor Pass for both days of the event.

For full program details and registration, click here.

The Day at a Glance
Morning: fundamentals and network design

• Why Precision Timing Matters in ST 2110, with Douglas Gillette
• Inside PTP: How Precision Timing Actually Works, with Andrew Scott of Telestream
• Designing PTP Networks for Scale, Resilience, and Failover, with Ryan Morris of Arista Networks
• ST 2059 Today: What’s Changing in Media Timing, with Leigh Whitcomb of Meinberg, a SMPTE Fellow and co-chair of the committee behind the standard
• PTP Lessons from the Field: Problems, Fixes, and What We’ve Learned, a panel moderated by Douglas Gillette with Ken Stiver, Ryan Morris, John Salt and Steve Holmes

Afternoon: practice, measurement and deployment

• Keeping Networked Audio in Sync: PTP, Dante, ST 2110, and AES67, with John Salt of Audinate
• Locked Isn’t Enough: How to Know Your PTP Timing Is Really Right, with Steve Holmes of Leader Electronics
• Inside the Network: How Switches Handle Precision Timing, with Alex Pendleton and Devan Cress of Netgear
• Building the Reference: Grandmaster Design for Hybrid Facilities, with Evertz
• Watching Timing in Real Time: PTP Analysis on a Live Network, with Bridge Technologies
• Eleven Commandments for PTP Deployment, with Steve Kolta of Meinberg
• Keeping Media in Sync Across Redundant and Long-Haul Networks, with Andreas Hildebrand of Lawo

Why Attend?
The program also covers the latest standards work, including an update from the co-chair of the committee behind ST 2059, the differences between editions of ST 2059-2 and the integrity features added in IEEE 1588-2019.

SMPTE designed the day to be vendor-neutral. Speakers draw on experience that applies across equipment from many manufacturers, and sessions center on how systems from several suppliers behave together on the same network, which is the question that matters most on a show day.

The bootcamp is designed for broadcast and media engineers, systems integrators, live and remote production teams, media IT professionals and anyone responsible for keeping IP media systems in step.

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MELBOURNE, Australia—Mediaproxy, a provider of software-based IP compliance monitoring and multiviewing solutions, will give NAB Show New York attendees a look at new AI-powered capabilities within its LogServer compliance and analysis platform.

Also on tap for the Javits Convention Center from Oct. 21–22 is the first-ever NAB Show New York demonstration of Monwall Web, Mediaproxy’s interactive, browser-based multiviewer.

LogServer, the company’s flagship compliance and analysis system, will add several AI features designed to streamline live broadcast operations, the company said. The new release incorporates intelligent event detection, automated reporting and expanded quality-of-experience (QOE) monitoring.

Mediaproxy said the enhancements will let operators offload routine checks to the system while gaining insight into real-time issues more quickly within fast-moving broadcast environments. Visitors to Mediaproxy in Booth 561 can see a demonstration of LogServer performing automated tasks typically handled by human operators, including real-time alerting and data-driven analysis. The company called the new AI tool set a significant shift toward more efficient, data-driven monitoring workflows.

Monwall Web, which marks its first appearance at the New York event, incorporates Mediaproxy’s software-defined multiviewer into the web browser, allowing operators to interact with live mosaics from every location. The platform is designed for flexible, low-latency remote monitoring, the company said, and supports Low-Latency HLLs (LL-HLLs) and the Media over QUIC (MoQ) protocol. It also includes remote audio output monitoring and the ability to rewind live layouts.

Mediaproxy also said it has signed on to the open-source Media eXchange Layer (MXL) initiative, integrating the technology’s high-performance, in-memory media transport into its software-defined workflows.

For more on the latest developments from Mediaproxy, visit the company’s website.

BALTIMORE and IRVING, Texas—Sinclair and Nexstar Media Group are launching a consumer awareness campaign Sept. 17 to educate viewers in 13 markets about the benefits of NextGen TV.

The campaign will run in seven Nexstar markets—including Cleveland; Austin, Texas; Kansas City, Mo.; Tampa, Fla.; Portland, Ore.; Buffalo, N.Y.; and Denver—and in six Sinclair markets—Las Vegas; Columbus, Ohio; Nashville, Tenn.; Baltimore; Seattle; and Washington.

The campaign’s goal is to raise viewer awareness of NextGen TV. Available as a TV spot and a social media post, the promo asks: “On game days, who’s got next? With NextGen TV, you do.” The message informs viewers that NextGen TV delivers their favorite games in UHD and immersive sound, as well as their local news, weather and favorite shows.

The campaign builds on the consumer-education initiative Sinclair developed and tested in Columbus during the summer.

“Consumer education is an important part of accelerating adoption of NextGen TV,” said Del Parks, president of technology at Sinclair. “Our experience in Columbus demonstrated that when consumers understand what NextGen TV is, how to access it and the benefits it can deliver, we can meaningfully increase engagement. By partnering with Nexstar, we can take what we learned from that campaign and bring a consistent, consumer-friendly message to viewers across an even broader group of markets. Now is the time for all broadcasters to begin promoting the advantages of NextGen TV.”

The campaign also includes website GoNextGenTV.com, where consumers can learn what NextGen TV programming is available in their area using a search-by-ZIP code feature.

The site also explains the steps needed to set up a NextGen TV viewing experience, whether with an ATSC 3.0-compatible set or a converter box and existing TV. It offers an extensive list of consumer devices—including converter boxes, NextGen TV sets, antennas and cables—as well as a frequently asked questions section and a list of the standard’s benefits.

“The transition to NextGen TV has been a story of broadcasters working together to bring new capabilities to TV viewers. The cooperation and collaboration with Sinclair to educate those viewers is the next chapter in that story,” said Brett Jenkins, Nexstar’s executive vice president and chief technology and digital officer. “We’re confident that as consumers come to understand the advantages of NextGen TV, they will be eager to adopt it and will seek out TV models with ATSC 3.0 capability.”

KINGS PARK, NY—Multidyne Video & Fiber Optic Systems will introduce SilverBack-IP, the newest member of its SilverBack Series of fiber camera adapters, at the 2026 IBC Show, Sept. 11-14 at the RAI Amsterdam. SilverBack-IP brings native SMPTE ST 2110 connectivity to Multidyne’s fiber camera platform, providing a direct path for integrating digital cinema cameras into modern IP production environments, the company said.

Multidyne developed the SilverBack Series to help content producers bring the cinematic quality of digital cinema cameras into live multi-camera production. The lightweight, vendor-agnostic adapters convert digital cinema cameras for SMPTE studio-camera workflows and have been deployed across live sports, concerts, television productions, houses of worship and other professional production environments.

Purpose-built for the industry’s transition from SDI, SilverBack-IP retains the series’s mobility, camera flexibility and familiar operational benefits while moving the transport layer to IP. The new design enables production teams to connect their preferred cinema cameras directly to SMPTE ST 2110 networks while maintaining the camera-centric workflows that have made SilverBack a fixture in live cinematic production.

SilverBack-IP features dual 25GbE network interfaces and supports SMPTE ST 2022-7 hitless protection across the two fibers within SMPTE hybrid cable, providing redundant network paths for demanding live production environments. Two 12G-SDI and two 3G-SDI connections accommodate a broad range of HD and UHD workflows, with video, audio, intercom and data encapsulated and de-encapsulated as standardized IP streams.

The IP architecture removes many of the point-to-point limitations associated with traditional camera chains. Rather than requiring signals such as intercom, timing and video to be discretely connected and distributed through dedicated hardware, SilverBack-IP makes those signals available within the ST 2110 network infrastructure. Integrated intercom, for example, can operate as an ST 2110-30 audio essence flow, allowing production teams to source and associate intercom audio through the network instead of a dedicated point-to-point connection.

The dual 12G-SDI capability also positions SilverBack-IP for emerging immersive production requirements. Stereoscopic cameras that generate discrete right- and left-eye UHD signals can deliver two simultaneous 12G-SDI feeds into the adapter, allowing both signals to be transported into the ST 2110 environment. The architecture extends SilverBack’s vendor-agnostic philosophy to new generations of digital cinema and immersive cameras, allowing producers to select the most suitable cameras.

SilverBack-IP’s studio camera-style physical design puts controls, menu access and system status directly in front of the camera operator. Full-size professional connectors complement the operator-centric interface, marking a departure from the traditional ENG-style cameraback configuration of earlier SilverBack systems. The result is a familiar studio-camera experience while retaining the flexibility of adapting a digital cinema camera for live production.

SilverBack-IP supports both 12V and 24V camera systems when paired with appropriate Multidyne power extension solutions, accommodating traditional cinema cameras as well as newer high-power camera platforms, the company said. The adapter can operate independently of a camera as a standalone fiber gateway, allowing production teams to place the unit remotely and transport video, intercom and other signals between SDI endpoints and IP networks.

Multidyne will be in Stand 11.C12.

BRISTOL, U.K.—DTVKit will showcase its production-ready DVB-I Client at the Ocean Blue Software stand during IBC2026, Sept. 11-14, at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

The demonstration will give broadcasters, operators, TV manufacturers and technology providers a first-hand look at how DVB-I can be deployed using a practical, standards-compliant implementation designed to accelerate commercial adoption.

Developed collaboratively by Ocean Blue Software and DTVKit, the DVB-I Client is available to DTVKit members as a shared-source, royalty-free solution, delivering a portable and efficient implementation suitable for smart TVs, set-top boxes and next-generation hybrid television platforms.

As DVB-I moves from industry trials into commercial deployment, manufacturers are increasingly seeking production-ready solutions that simplify integration, reduce development effort and ensure compliance with evolving standards. The live IBC demonstration will show how the jointly developed implementation enables rapid DVB-I adoption while maintaining platform flexibility and low resource requirements.

The DTVKit DVB-I Client is implemented in native C++ for maximum portability, efficiency and minimal memory consumption. The client exposes a JSON-based API, enabling seamless integration with web-based user interfaces and applications across a broad range of operating systems and device platforms.

Key capabilities include:

• Shared-source, royalty-free DVB-I client available to DTVKit members. 
• Native C++ implementation designed for portability and low resource usage. 
• JSON API for integration with modern web-based user interfaces. 
• Compliance with DVB-I BlueBook A177r7 requirements. 
• Platform-independent architecture suitable for Android, Linux, RDK and other browser-capable environments. 

Visitors to the Ocean Blue Software stand will see the DVB-I Client integrated with a React-based web user interface running on the DTVKit Android reference set-top box platform.

The demonstration will showcase how users can:

• Discover DVB-I service lists with region selection. 
• Browse channels and services. 
• View program guide (EPG) information. 
• Access accessibility and parental-control metadata. 
• Play IP-delivered linear television services. 
• Navigate and launch on-demand boxsets. 
• Launch linked HbbTV and web applications. 

The demonstration highlights the flexibility of DTVKit's architecture, which separates the DVB-I client from the presentation layer through a standards-focused JSON interface.

Although the demonstration runs on DTVKit's Android reference platform, the implementation itself is not Android-specific. The web-based user interface communicates with the DVB-I client through a platform-independent JSON API, enabling deployment across a wide range of browser-capable environments.

The demonstration intentionally does not use the Android TIF/TIS framework, showcasing an integration model that can be readily adapted to different operating systems and middleware environments.

DTVKit continues to track developments within DVB and is actively following the DVB-I roadmap, including support for future specification updates. Members receive full source-code access to the DVB-I Client together with royalty-free distribution rights.

See Ocean Blue Software at IBC2026 stand 1.B25.

More information is available on the DTVKit and Ocean Blue Software websites.

BOTHELL, Wash.—The Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS) has announced the results of its second IPMX Product Certification Test Event, Aug. 24-28, at European Broadcasting Union (EBU) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

Eight manufacturers submitted 14 products for testing, and all fourteen were officially certified to the Internet Protocol Media Experience (IPMX) standard, qualifying them to carry the IPMX branding and signaling verified compliance with published transport, control and interoperability requirements.

The EBU serves as the independent certification authority for IPMX and conducted the testing at its Geneva facility, while AIMS administered the certification program overall. This event, the second since the program's inaugural session in January that certified 48 products from 10 manufacturers, was open to AIMS, VSF and AMWA member companies. It has continued the shift from informal plugfests to a formal, repeatable certification process, giving integrators and end users an independent basis for verifying IPMX interoperability.

Following rigorous testing, solutions from Bridge Technologies, Cobalt Digital, EvertzAV, ITDev, intoPIX, Matrox Video, Macnica and PlexusAV successfully passed certification. Testing covered the baseline IPMX requirements along with uncompressed video and audio, the JPEG XS profile, the JPEG XS TDC profile mode and the HKEP and PEP capabilities.

IPMX is a set of open standards and specifications designed to extend SMPTE ST 2110–based media transport and NMOS–based control into a broader range of markets, including professional AV, live events, corporate media and education. In addition to uncompressed workflows, IPMX introduces support for compressed video, simplified system timing, HDCP, interoperable USB over IP, media encryption between brands and defined system profiles to make deployment more practical, scalable and cost-effective for Pro AV environments.

The certification program is designed to ensure predictable behavior, reliable interoperability and adherence to the published IPMX test plans and specifications.

The IPMX test plan is available online.

The IPMX certification registry is available online.

Technical IPMX information is available online.

Information about the AIMS Alliance is available online.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers will put on the “SMPTE Roadshow: Future of Media Infrastructure” during IBC2026, Sept. 14, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Room G-106 of the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

The SMPTE Roadshow will help leaders assess where technology investment can create operational and business value and give attendees a practical look at implementing emerging approaches.

The program moves from strategy to practice over two complementary three-hour sessions. The morning session, “Strategic Media Infrastructure: A Technology Roadmap for Executive Leadership,” will examine six major areas of technology investment through a business and operational lens. In the afternoon, “DMF in Practice: Designing and Operating Dynamic Media Facilities for Software-Defined Production” will tackle the technologies, architectures, tools and live demonstrations behind software-defined media production.

Pierre Routhier, media production architect at CBC-Radio Canada, will lead the morning session. His work spans advanced imaging, media production architecture and emerging production technologies.

Designed for executives, technology leaders, strategists and others involved in infrastructure planning, the session will examine:

• UHD, HDR, 1080p and 8K
• Codec strategy
• The transition from SDI to IP
• Dynamic Media Facilities
• HTML5 and OGraf graphics workflows
• Cinematic approaches to broadcast production

Attendees will examine total cost of ownership, time to market, operational efficiency, infrastructure readiness, audience engagement and competitive position. The session will provide a framework for determining where investment makes sense and how technology choices connect to wider organizational goals. It does not require an engineering background.

Willem Vermost, senior IP media technology architect for the European Broadcasting Union, and Wim Van Roy, educational architect at Lawo, will lead the afternoon session focusing on DMF, which will examine the DMF approach to software-defined production and the technologies making it possible. Topics will include modern Ethernet networking, RDMA and RoCEv2, server and compute architecture, NUMA and CPU affinity, GPU pass-through, virtualization, Linux, containers, Kubernetes/k3s and the Media eXchange Layer (MXL).

Attendees will see how these individual building blocks come together as DMF concepts move from trials and proofs-of-concept toward real production environments.

Live demonstrations will provide a closer look at three implementations: a container-based Docker deployment using YAML configuration; an AWS-based MXL deployment demonstrating cloud-scale operation; and an SMPTE Lab reference environment illustrating interoperability and standards-based design.

Participants will also receive QR-code access to curated GitLab repositories and resources they can use to continue exploring the technologies after IBC. No prior DMF experience is required, and attendees are encouraged to bring a laptop.

Attendees can participate in the complete program or register separately for either the morning or afternoon session. Full-day registration is $500. Individual sessions are available for $275 each. Use code 20OFF at checkout for 20% off registration.

To register, visit SMPTE Roadshow online.

IBC2026 visitor passes are available for free with code EXFRKQFR7 on the IBC registration page.

As U.S. TV station owners’ prospects increasingly depend on how they deal with challenges posed by the global 5G juggernaut, newfound flexibility in the use of the fast-evolving cellular technology is opening more promising paths to their success in the battles ahead.

“We’re now at our last chance to remain a viable communications platform across all devices,” said Mark Aitken, president of ONE Media Technologies, Sinclair’s engineering unit. The opportunity lies in the fact that multiple strands in the long and complex evolution toward broadcast and mobile service integration are coming together on commercially viable chipsets capable of making things work across all fronts, he added.

“Whether our integration into the 5G domain is by way of ATSC 3.0, 5G Broadcast or some combination of the two, we as an organization don’t care,” Aitken said. What matters above all is “over-the-air broadcast remaining viable.”

Whatever Means Necessary
Many in broadcast TV circles, including Aitken, first viewed 5G Broadcast as an approach to multicasting video and other content to smartphones aimed at circumventing ATSC 3.0. But Aitken said he saw things differently after learning about the ATSC 3.0/5G Broadcast strategy implemented by Castanet, with live LPTV prototype services supporting the current 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) version of 5G Broadcast on ATSC 3.0 transmitters in Las Vegas and Silicon Valley.

In fact, Aitken said, ONE Media plans to test the Castanet platform on Sinclair’s WIAV-CD Washington, D.C., once the LPTV station receives the multiplexing and exciter equipment from Castanet partner Televes.

“We can see how [the Castanet solution] plays against the widest variety of 3.0 receivers,” Aitken said. “I think we have a bigger variety than just about anybody. If it comes out as claimed, why wouldn’t we support another means?”

How long before the solutions developed by Sinclair and Castanet will be relevant to getting ATSC 3.0/5G convergence off the ground remains to be seen. Eventually—and not so far in the future—TV station owners will be able to bolster the long-term viability Aitken said they’re looking for by leveraging 5G as a so-called bootstrapped radio access network (RAN) component of ATSC 3.0 transmitters through implementation of the recently announced Broadcast-to-Everything (B2X) standard.

The emerging 5G/TV convergence stems from the fact that both ATSC and the wireless industry’s 3GPP have moved their respective architectures ever closer through successive waves of standards development. Like LTE, ATSC 3.0 employs orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation, and like the New Radio (NR) version of 5G, the B2X Radio Access Network (BRAN) framework will employ OFD Multiple Access (OFDMA) to support slicing capabilities with disaggregation between core and edge processing sites.

Optimizing 5G
But B2X does away with reliance on 5G broadband, although it employs techniques similar to those adopted in 3GPP’s latest Release 19 version. The idea with B2X is to optimize execution of all 5G-like functionalities in accordance with ATSC 3.0 architecture while ensuring smooth interoperability between the two domains.

Current U.S. broadcaster options related to using 5G Broadcast with ATSC 3.0, as supported by the Sinclair and Castanet solutions, are a bridge to opportunities across a virtually unlimited range of 5G multicast verticals anchored by B2X, ATSC President Madeleine Noland said. As for broadcasters that feel constrained by the fact that bandwidth availability for 5G multicasting is highly restricted by the current “lighthouse” sharing scenario of ATSC 3.0 spectrum, where Federal Communications Commission rules require full-power stations to continue ATSC 1.0 broadcasts, Noland said to stay tuned.

“I think it’s a good idea to keep an eye on B2X and what that can enable in the future,” she said.

One example of bridge-building to BTX already underway is in India, where government-run broadcaster Prasar Bharati and its technology partners are conducting direct-to-mobile (D2M) 5G/ATSC 3.0 service trials in 19 cities in preparation for commercial rollout by year-end. Smartphones and other devices will run on chipsets developed by Saankhya Labs, now owned by Tata Group’s Tejas Networks, with investment support from Sinclair. This full-reception system is built on a patented, software-defined radio platform that supports demodulator, antenna, filter and other front-end components, Aitken noted.

As this phase of the D2M strategy takes hold across India, Prasar Bharati and its tech partners have begun gearing up for the transition to B2X with high-profile standards development support from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. Sinclair and the other partners backing Saankhya Labs have launched Sampige Semiconductors to create B2X chipsets “in roughly the same time frame that semiconductors supporting 5G Broadcast will be appearing in some smartphones,” Aitken said.

Ready for Qualcomm
LPTV spectrum owners, who are free of 1.0/3.0 simulcast requirements, represent an immediate market for 5G Broadcast solutions providers, as long as they implement 5G Broadcast over ATSC 3.0 transmitters as required by the FCC. Castanet is allied with what founder and Executive Chairman Vern Fotheringham describes as a coalition of LPTV spectrum holders with footprints covering 60% of the U.S. population. Castanet documents point to expectations of expanding that base to 95%.

Castanet’s immediate goal is to ensure broadcast customers are fully prepared to capitalize on the projected 2028 rollout of smartphones equipped with new Qualcomm chipsets, Fotheringham said. Those chipsets support 3GPP Release 19 advancements that bring TV reception and 5G applications together on smartphones and tablets without requiring a separate tuner or SIM card and with no impact on a user’s data cap. These
systems-on-chips (SOCs) will enable interleaving, which allows non-TV 5G signaling to share the same spectrum with TV broadcasts, and CAS muting, which prevents that TV protection mechanism from impeding the 5G flows.

Once the smartphone turnover cycle puts these new devices into mass circulation sometime around 2031-32, the floodgates should open for broadcasters, Fotheringham said. “Our capex for the 5G Broadcast master site is equivalent to the cost of a 4G macro-level site but serves population areas covered by hundreds or even thousands of those cell sites,” he added. This translates to a massive cost reduction for 5G multicasting compared to MNO reliance on narrowcast streaming, he said.

The LPTV Factor
Of course, there are two sides to 5G tech advances, with benefits also accruing in directions unfavorable to the ATSC 3.0 agenda. One such trend is the widely publicized push by some segments of the LPTV community for freedom from FCC rules limiting use of 5G Broadcast to ATSC 3.0 broadcasters.

Last month, LPTV broadcaster XGN and sister company X1 Mobile, along with Tyche Media LLC, owner of WCRN-LD Boston, filed a petition with the FCC requesting permission to completely replace ATSC TV broadcasts with 5G Broadcast distribution. This goes beyond last year’s filing by the largest LPTV station owner HC2 Broadcasting—soon to be acquired by Dish founder Charlie Ergen—that seeks authority to use 5G Broadcast overlaid on a single ATSC 1.0 TV channel with no 3.0 requirement.

The proposed rule change would require LPTV stations to stream at least one free TV channel and to devote at least 50% of the remaining spectrum capacity to the types of public-safety applications ATSC 3.0 broadcasters are considering with use of 5G, such as emergency alerts, first-responder data and GPS backup.

WCRN for the past three years has been running FCC-sanctioned tests demonstrating 5G Broadcast delivery of linear programming streams, emergency alerts, global positioning and many other public-safety solutions, said Frank Copsidas, founder of XGN/X1 and founder and president of the LPTV Broadcast Association. Elsewhere, Copsidas said, LPTV stations in France, Africa and other countries with fewer regulatory restrictions are pursuing commercial rollouts of 5G Broadcast services.

“By 2029, short-form programming produced by the TDF Group for LPTV distribution will be available to 90% of the French population,” he said.

Another player pushing 5G Broadcast—but with the full expression of the Release 19 version—is Austria-based Big Blue Marble.
With support for interleaving and CAS muting, the company’s Nakolos platform is ideally suited for enabling 5G Broadcast over existing DVB-T2 infrastructure in Europe free of licensing restrictions, said Johann Mika, Big Blue Marble’s chief innovation officer.

“From a regulatory perspective, in Austria, for example, we can ask for a 10-year license for 5G Broadcast with no issue,” Mika said. But, as with Castanet, the “missing piece for us is mobile phones.” Broadcast organizations across Europe are “working to get phone costs lower,” he added, noting that with the wait for Release 19-capable chipsets, things “aren’t 100% set yet.”

But when they are, those Qualcomm-designed chipsets will also open the gate for MNOs and 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) providers to put 5G Broadcast to use over their own networks, said Andrew Towe, a 5G Broadcast specialist and participant in media streaming standards who worked closely with WCRN at the outset of the 5G Broadcast testing project in Boston.

“It will be pretty impressive when you get to an ecosystem with all the 5G advanced capabilities working on smartphones,” Towe said, noting there is a widespread expectation in many quarters, including among European broadcasters, that when that happens, “5G is going to take over.”

Aitken is well aware of the “threat,” which he said is a big reason suppliers and broadcasters must be incentivized to move ahead with preparations for 5G rollout on ATSC 3.0, free of the 1.0 broadcast burden.

“We’re just waiting for somebody to cut the shackles,” he said. “Until they do, we have to hop around on one foot with our hands behind our backs.”

BOTHELL, Wash.—The Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS) has announced that ITDev and Bolin Technology have joined the organization as its newest members.

The additions bring a professional PTZ camera and AV-over-IP hardware manufacturer and a FPGA design and IP licensing specialist into the alliance, further broadening the range of expertise represented among AIMS members as adoption of IPMX and SMPTE ST 2110-based standards continues to expand across broadcast and Pro AV, the group said.

“Both Bolin Technology and ITDev each bring a different, valuable perspective to AIMS,” said Andrew Starks, director of product marketing, Macnica Broadcast & Pro AV; Board Member and Marketing Work Group Chair, AIMS. “ITDev’s FPGA design expertise supports the engineering work behind IPMX, while Bolin’s experience building PTZ cameras for broadcast and live production gives us a direct line into how these standards perform in the field. Adding their perspectives helps us keep IPMX grounded in real deployment needs as adoption continues to grow.”

Bolin Technology designs professional PTZ cameras and AV-over-IP solutions built for real-world production environments. Drawing on decades of experience in video technology, the company develops indoor and outdoor PTZ systems along with supporting hardware that work across modern IP workflows, including NDI, Dante AV and Fast HEVC.

Bolin's cameras are used by broadcasters, live event teams, sports venues, houses of worship and corporate production groups that require dependable performance, flexible connectivity and consistent image quality.

“Our focus has always been on where professional video is going next and building the products and technologies that help move it forward,” said Sapan Doshi, chief product & revenue officer at Bolin Technology. “As IP continues to reshape broadcast and Pro AV, we see IPMX and ST2110 as important parts of that future. Joining AIMS allows us to take an active role in advancing that ecosystem, bringing what we learn from real-world production into the conversation while helping drive broader adoption of open, interoperable workflows. We’re excited to work alongside AIMS and its members to turn that vision into solutions that can be adopted and deployed across the industry.”

ITDev is an Altera and AMD design services and FPGA IP partner that helps customers accelerate FPGA-powered product development from concept to market.

Its IP portfolio includes solutions for IPMX, along with ST 2110 and video processing, backed by end-to-end embedded systems engineering across architecture, software, FPGA development, and system integration.

“IPMX adoption depends on manufacturers having a practical, well-supported path to implementation, and that's exactly where ITDev fits in," said Phil Chilton, commercial manager of ITDev. “Being part of AIMS lets us stay closely aligned with the standard as it evolves, so we can keep helping customers move from concept to certified product with confidence. We're glad to be working alongside the rest of the alliance on that effort.”

ITDev and Bolin Technology join a growing roster of broadcast and Pro AV companies working within AIMS to advance IPMX and support the industry's transition from proprietary, point-to-point systems to open, standards-based IP media networking.

More information about AIMS and its work is available at www.aimsalliance.org.

SÃO PAULO, Brazil—ATSC has announced that it will highlight the latest advancements in next-generation broadcasting and international collaboration on August 17-20 at SET Expo 2026, Latin America’s largest broadcast, media and entertainment event, held annually in São Paulo, Brazil.

"SET Expo continues to be among the world’s most important gatherings for the broadcast industry,” said Madeleine Noland, president of ATSC. "This year’s show promises to be bigger than ever, and we’re pleased to showcase the innovations of our members, collaborate with international standards organizations, and engage with broadcasters and policymakers as next-generation television continues to evolve across the region."

During the show visitors are invited to meet with ATSC and its members at Booth 41.8, where demonstrations and discussions will showcase the growing momentum behind ATSC 3.0 and emerging broadcast technologies.

In ATSC’s booth, two members will have showcases:

• ETRI (the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) will be demonstrating South Korea’s Broadcast Positioning System (BPS), showing how synchronized ATSC 3.0 broadcast signals can provide resilient positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services as a terrestrial complement to satellite navigation. Based on recent laboratory and field testing in Korea, the demonstration highlights the potential for the existing ATSC 3.0 broadcast infrastructure to enhance resilience and support future critical timing and positioning applications.
• HCLTech will showcase an integrated approach to next-generation media and broadcast operations, spanning content preparation, service orchestration, subscriber engagement, and terrestrial delivery. Through its Media Workflow Manager (MWM), Video Headend Manager (VHM), Universal Video Platform (UVP), and Broadcast Core solutions, HCLTech demonstrates how broadcasters and service providers can simplify operations, accelerate service innovation, and support new business models across broadcast, IPTV, OTT, and ATSC 3.0 environments. Together, these capabilities reflect HCLTech’s Unified Core vision: a unified operational framework that helps organizations modernize with greater speed, resilience, and flexibility.

SET Expo attendees will also hear from ATSC leadership and members during the conference program.

Madeleine Noland will participate in a panel discussion with leaders from Brazil’s Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital Terrestre (SBTVD) Forum and Korea's Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA). They will examine how ATSC 3.0, the world's first IP-based digital television system, has become the foundation for multiple national implementations, including DTV+ (TV 3.0) in Brazil, UHD Broadcast in South Korea, and NEXTGEN TV in the United States.

Panelists will also discuss the recently signed Memorandum of Understanding among ATSC, the SBTVD Forum, and TTA to advance technical recommendations and standards that promote international interoperability for next-generation broadcast products and services, and how continued global cooperation is helping shape the industry. The session takes place on August 18 at 15:40 in room 1 of the Anhembi Convention Center I & II.

David Starks of AdCore Local will present on Broadcast-to-Everything (B2X), an emerging ATSC initiative that is designed to more closely integrate ATSC broadcast/multicast delivery with 3GPP mobile networks and devices.

His session will explore how broadcasters and mobile network operators can work together to deliver free-to-air television and data services at scale, leveraging converged broadcast and broadband infrastructure to improve spectrum efficiency, reduce network congestion, and create new opportunities for mobile content delivery and interactive services. Joining him will be Seshadri Venkiteshwaran from Freestream Technologies to provide an update on Direct-to-Mobile activities in India as that country prepares to launch commercial services. This session is scheduled for August 19 at 14:20 in room 3 of the convention center.

ATSC will host a reception bringing together government officials, regulators, broadcasters, and industry leaders from across Latin America. The reception will provide an opportunity to exchange perspectives on the future of broadcasting, foster regional partnerships, and discuss the role of open standards in enabling innovation and public service.

Noland said Latin America continues to be a region full of possibilities and SET Expo remains a premier forum for technology leaders, broadcasters, regulators, and innovators to collaborate on the industry's next chapter. “For ATSC,” she said, “the event provides an unparalleled opportunity to strengthen regional partnerships, showcase the growing momentum behind ATSC 3.0, and engage with the organizations driving the evolution of multimedia.”

More information is available at www.ATSC.org.

NEW YORK—IAB Tech Lab has released updates to its Privacy Standards Portfolio that include enhancements to the Global Privacy Protocol (GPP) and the Data Deletion Request Framework (DDRF) Version 2.0.

The updates by the global digital advertising technical standards-setting body aim to reinforce how elements of IAB Tech Lab's Privacy Standards Portfolio work together to help organizations mitigate privacy risk while supporting consistent implementation across the industry. The public comment period will be open until September 11, 2026.

"Privacy requirements continue to change, but that doesn't mean implementation has to become more complicated," said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. "These updates reflect what we've heard from companies putting these standards into practice and help make compliance more consistent, transparent, and practical across the ecosystem."

The proposed GPP updates focus on changes needed to support the Fifth Amended and Restated Multi-State Privacy Agreement (MSPA). They include removing MSPA coverage for the previous state-by-state approach, eliminating Service Provider and Opt-Out Option Modes, removing secondary usage consents, and simplifying notice and choice fields.

The IAB Tech Lab also reported that DDRF Version 2.0 is now finalized following a public comment period that commenced in the fall of 2025. It introduces updates based on implementation experience and regulator questions.

The revisions clarify identity and deletion request JSON Web Tokens (JWT) definitions, improve result feedback and troubleshooting, strengthen framework integrity, and support implementation-specific extensions. Together, these updates are intended to make data deletion requests easier to implement while increasing confidence for both consumers and regulators.

"Organizations implementing these standards have given us valuable feedback on where additional clarity was needed," said Rowena Lam, senior director of product at IAB Tech Lab, IAB Tech Lab. "These updates are intended to make implementation more predictable while helping companies meet growing privacy expectations with greater consistency."

The updates were developed through IAB Tech Lab's Global Privacy Working Group and Privacy Rearc Commit Group (PRCG), reflecting collaboration across the industry. IAB Tech Lab encourages stakeholders to review the proposed GPP specifications and submit feedback during the public comment period to help shape the final standards.

To learn more about the Privacy Standards Portfolio and participate in the public comment process for the GPP and DDRF Version 2.0 specifications, visit https://iabtechlab.com/2026PrivacyUpdates

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—SMPTE announced a program of expert-led sessions, professional workshops and networking events for IBC 2026, Sept. 11-14, at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

The program will deliver practical guidance on AI, open-source media workflows, cloud infrastructure and other technologies shaping the future of content creation and delivery.

“As a proud partner of IBC, SMPTE has the privilege of presenting sessions and workshops that explore the latest media trends and help technologists at all stages of their careers navigate this period of rapid change,” said SMPTE president Rich Welsh.

"From AI and cloud infrastructure to open-source solutions and evolving production architectures, media organizations are facing important technology decisions. Our IBC program is designed to provide practical insight — not just into what's changing, but how these technologies can be applied today. Whether you're an engineer, architect or technology leader, these sessions offer valuable perspectives from the people defining tomorrow's production workflows."

SMPTE will present four sessions within the IBC 2026 Partner Program. Free to attend, these expert-led sessions will explore the technologies, workflows and business models reshaping the media industry. They include:

• “Sovereign AI and Sovereign Cloud,” Hans Hoffman, deputy director of technology and innovation at EBU, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2:30-3:30 p.m., Room E102.
• “Dynamic Media Facility: Why It Matters, and Why Now,” Willem Vermost, senior IP media technology architect, Saturday, Sept. 12, 3:30-4:10, Room E102.
• “OGraf: Making Broadcast Graphics Open and Accessible,” Paola Sunna, senior technology innovation manager at Eurovision Italy/EBU and Niels Borg of TV2.DK, Saturday, Sept. 12,, 4:10-4:50 p.m., Room E102.
• “The Innovation Flywheel: How Open Source and Standards Reinforce Each Other,” Thomas Bause Mason, director of standards development at SMPTE, Saturday, Sept. 12, 4:50-5:30, Room E102.

SMPTE will present two in-depth professional education workshops on Monday, Sept. 14. Designed for engineers, architects and technology leaders seeking a strategic and practical roadmap for the modern media enterprise, these workshops require paid registration. They include:

• "Technology Roadmap for the Modern Media Enterprise," course modules include Visual Quality Formats, Codec Strategy, The Transition to IP, The Dynamic Media Facility, Graphics Workflows and Cinematography in Broadcast. Speakers include Pierre Hugues Routhier, advanced imaging technologies specialist at the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Monday, Sept. 14, 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., Room G106.
• "DMF in Practice: Design and Operation for Software-Defined Production," course modules include Dynamic Media Facility: Why It Matters, Building Blocks of a Software-Defined Media Facility, From Concepts to Practice and Live Demonstrations. Speakers include Willem Vermost, senior IP media technology architect at EBU; Wim Van Roy, education architect at LAWO Academy. Monday, Sept. 14, 1:30-4:30 p.m., Room G106.

SMPTE will also present two networking events at IBC 2026. The include:

• “The Green Line Media Networking Event,” a unique rail journey to IBC that combines networking, industry discussion and sustainability-focused programming. The event will also feature a guest D.J. set from SMPTE president Rich Welsh. Thursday, Sept. 10, London St Pancras to Amsterdam Centraal.
• Evertz and SMPTE drinks and networking event. The two are partnering to provide relaxed networking and complimentary refreshments. Current members and those interested in learning more are welcome. Registration is available online.

See SMPTE the IBC2026 Owner Pavilion, along with the other international bodies, in the Hall 8 lobby and stand 7.P14.

For more information about SMPTE, please visit smpte.org.

BOCA RATON, Fla.—Florida Atlantic University said Dolby Laboratories has acquired a video-compression technology portfolio FAU had developed through a long-standing research partnership with OP Solutions LLC (OPS).

At the heart of the portfolio is technology that contributed to Versatile Video Coding (VVC), also known as H.266, the international video-compression standard finalized in 2020 by the International Organization for Standardization and the International Telecommunication Union. VVC reduces video data requirements by approximately 50% compared with the previous High Efficiency Video Coding standard while maintaining the same visual quality.

Although VVC is not yet widely deployed by streaming services, due to the lack of hardware support, the codec has been adopted by Brazil's TV 3.0 standard as well as DVB broadcasters in Europe. ATSC approved the standard for 3.0 in April.

The portfolio comprises 683 intellectual property assets, including 250 granted patents worldwide and 73 United States patents, which were invented by FAU researchers in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. The research was sponsored by OPS, which provided strategic research support, patent development and commercialization expertise, while FAU faculty conducted the underlying technical research.

“This acquisition exemplifies the power of combining world-class faculty expertise with strong industry partnerships,” said FAU President Adam Hasner. “Technology developed at Florida Atlantic has evolved from groundbreaking university research into an international standard and is now part of the portfolio of one of the world’s leading media technology companies. Its applications span digital media, national security, autonomous systems and emerging AI technologies, demonstrating how FAU research is driving innovation and economic impact on a global scale.”

The transaction also highlights the success of the research and commercialization partnership between FAU and OPS. Through the collaboration, OPS sponsored advanced video-coding research at FAU while helping guide intellectual property development and commercialization efforts.

“This achievement illustrates the power of sustained investment in research excellence and strategic partnerships,” said Stella Batalama, Ph.D., dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science. “Working with OP Solutions, our faculty took video-compression research from the lab into a global standard, and that work is now part of Dolby’s portfolio. It is a clear example of FAU research reaching real products and returning value to the university.”

Sixteen U.S. patents developed through the FAU-OPS collaboration have been declared essential to the VVC standard and are licensed through the Access Advance VVC patent pool for worldwide commercial implementation. Dolby acquired the portfolio from OPS, which held the patent rights following assignment from FAU.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) are seeking innovations that significantly surpass the capabilities of the current Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard and have issued a call for proposals for the next generation of video compression technology.

The formal registration for proposals period runs from Aug. 1 to Sept. 1.

The call for proposals from the Joint Video Experts Team—a partnership of ITU-T Study Group 21 (multimedia, content delivery and cable TV) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 (coding of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information)—marks the start of the process to develop a new video coding standard by 2029.

Submissions will be evaluated by the 45th meeting of the Joint Video Experts Team next January.

The project continues a longstanding tradition of joint work that has produced VVC (ITU H.266 | ISO/IEC 23090-3), along with the Emmy Award-winning High Efficiency Video Coding (ITU H.265 | ISO/IEC 23008-2) and Advanced Video Coding (ITU H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10).

The call for proposals covers a broad range of content types and use cases, including streaming services, video conferencing, social media, gaming, content creation, extended reality (XR), machine vision, and high-dynamic-range (HDR) video.

The Joint Video Experts Team said proposals may introduce entirely new coding tools, improved system architectures or novel approaches to advance the state of the art in video compression.

Reflecting an increasingly diverse video ecosystem, innovations will be evaluated across diverse test content ranging from HDR and ultra-high-definition (UHD) video to gaming, screen content and user-generated media.

The call invites innovations that demonstrate either significantly improved compression performance or important new functionality beyond the capabilities of VVC.

The groups said they welcome innovations addressing future multimedia requirements, including those arising from the continued evolution of AI-enabled content creation, processing, analysis and delivery.

All proposals will undergo rigorous evaluation through both formal subjective quality assessment and objective performance measurements.

Proposals can be submitted here.

Imagine building a TV business based on streaming IP-packetized local TV channels to viewers on a market-by-market basis. Who would have thought of that?

Well, it turns out the broadcasters, broadcast vendors and CE companies responsible for developing the ATSC 3.0 standard aren’t the only ones. In early July, a tech company called “FreeCast,” specializing in providing “streaming Platform-as-a-Service” solutions, threw its hat into the ring with the announcement of FreeCast Cities.

The service combines local TV channels, free streaming channels, premium television services, on-demand entertainment and subscription management into a single consumer experience. Currently in beta, FreeCast will enable consumers to access this content via supported TVs, mobile devices, computers and connected streaming platforms, according to a press release.

The FreeCast Cities announcement came about three months after a company called Landover Saturn 5 proposed to the Federal Communications Commission that it conduct an auction of a nationwide block of TV channels 28–36.

The two are unrelated in most respects but share a common thread: They both give the FCC even more to consider as it works on its final report and order regarding ATSC 3.0, which is expected to be out before the end of the year.

To be sure, neither proposal is a slam dunk. FreeCast must successfully navigate its way through rights negotiations with stations and their networks before it has a chance of fulfilling what it calls its “consumer-focused design philosophy,” namely, “One City. One Login. All Your Television.”

Regarding the Landover proposal, the FCC has much to consider, not the least of which is whether it wishes to empower a private entity to conduct the proposed auction on its behalf.

What’s worrisome is these proposals further muddy the waters for the commission as it considers its NextGen TV report and order—something a television industry seeking clarity on sunsetting today’s DTV standard and an expeditious transition can ill afford.

A Bit Overwhelming
A month or so ago, I reported about my stroke and my upcoming open-heart surgery to bypass four significantly clogged cardiac arteries.

Since then, I have undergone the surgery and am convalescing at home. While I am not ready to run down the aisles at NAB Show any time soon, the doctors assure me that after my outpatient rehab is complete, I will be back in the swing of things. In fact, following the operation, my surgeon told me I now have “the heart of a 20-year-old.”

I also wanted to report that the outpouring of support, well wishes and prayers from both family and friends, as well as many in the TV industry, has been a bit overwhelming. I want to thank everyone for their supportive texts, emails, phone calls, cards and flowers. They have meant the world to me.

As I sign off, I will echo the closing of my last column. I am eager to put this all behind me and get back in the swing of things, reporting on our fast-changing industry.

Interest in the Broadcast Positioning System, or BPS—a relatively new offshoot of the ATSC 3.0 standard—continues to grow, sparking the creation of a new company tasked with developing the technology for commercial deployments.

In addition to their regular services, broadcasters that have adopted ATSC 3.0 can also deploy BPS by transmitting very precise timing signals. The BPS signals are received and decoded similarly to satellite-delivered global positioning system (GPS) signals (also referred to as “Global Navigation Satellite System” or GNSS signals), and may be used to pinpoint the receiver’s geographic location and as a highly accurate time reference.

Too Many Eggs in One Basket
An obvious question about the development and rollout of such an alternative to the long-established GPS technology is: Why is it needed? Doesn’t GPS function well enough in most applications?

The answer lies in the dependency upon GPS signals that now exists among many business sectors and industrial operations. These extend far beyond vehicular navigation.

GPS has become an invisible utility that provides precision time to U.S. critical infrastructure, so much so that the National Security Council describes it as a single point of failure, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) estimating the risk to the U.S. economy exceeding $1 billion per day, according to Sam Matheny, formerly executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters’ Broadcast Positioning System group and now CEO of Merkhet Solutions, an independent company launched by NAB in June.

“Critical infrastructure includes the energy grid, communications networks, financial and data centers—the infrastructure that undergirds every facet of modern life,” Matheny said.

Harvey Arnold, senior vice president of engineering at Sinclair, which has been working with the NAB to develop BPS, said GPS delivery of timing information is very much a “single thread” with no place to go should that thread break.

“As time goes on, you hear more and more about GPS’s lack of resiliency,” Arnold said. “GPS transfers time, not just positional information. This time-transfer function is very important.”

As GPS relies on reception of relatively weak signals from orbiting satellites, he noted, it is especially vulnerable to blocking or jamming—intentional or otherwise—from stronger terrestrial RF sources.

“People don’t pay much attention to how easy it is to jam or ‘spoof’ GPS signals,” Arnold said. “However, this can affect such things as financial transactions, which require accurate time stamps. It’s after jamming or spoofing attacks that people get excited.

“GPS has become the ‘gold standard’ for time transfer,” he continued. “It’s ubiquitous, but it’s a weak signal that’s subject to jamming and spoofing. Even space junk has the potential to disrupt it. Such issues are common to any space-based communications system. Russia and China have a backup for their GPS systems; we don’t.”

Bad Things Do Happen
Matheny noted that GPS disruptions aren’t just speculative—they can and do occur.

“On March 19, 2026, 12 airplanes reported false positions at Dallas-Fort Worth airport as a result of GPS interference,” Matheny said. “In mid-May 2024, solar storms impacted GPS such that farmers across the Midwest were advised to postpone use of their GPS-assisted tractors during planting season.”

Matheny also flagged a January 2022 incident in which GPS service was disrupted for more than 33 hours in the Denver area, affecting both aircraft and ground-based users over eight square miles. The cause of the outage was later determined to be accidental, traced to a transmitter inadvertently operating in GPS spectrum.

GPS jamming or spoofing (the replacement of valid GPS information with spurious signals) occurs frequently in military combat zones and also along the U.S. southern border, Matheny noted.

“While illegal, there are numerous low-power jammers that can be found for sale online,” he said. “These are known to be used by people who would like to conceal their movements, but in doing so also create interference issues in their vicinity.”

A commercial-grade GPS jammer is currently available for military applications, Matheny added, and Russia has demonstrated its ability to use satellite-transmitted signals to interfere with GPS operations.

BPS to the Rescue
Given these vulnerabilities, BPS technology seems to have arrived just in time to bolster the existing GPS navigational and time-transfer applications.

“The beauty of BPS is that it can easily become part of a broadcast system,” Arnold said. “Transmitters and towers are already in place. Once stations have converted to ATSC 3.0, the cost to add BPS is nominal.

Added Matheny: “The amount of equipment is relatively small in that you need a BPS synchronizer and a source of reference time. However, I’ll note that BPS has to function as a single, synchronized, managed network and is not something that a station would just go out and do on their own as each station has to be part of a coordinated system. That is why we launched Merkhet Solutions to deploy BPS nationwide service.”

Where Are We Now?
The concept of using broadcaster-originated signals as a GPS-adjunct dates back about five years, in a paper delivered at the 2021 NAB Broadcast Engineering and IT (BEIT) conference by its inventors: NAB’s Tariq Mondal, Bob Weller and Sam Matheny. Demonstrations and field testing began shortly afterwards and continue to the present.

Matheny said Merkhet Solutions currently has a cooperative R&D agreement in place with NIST covering several aspects of the technology, as well as a contract
with the U.S. Department of Transportation for BPS field studies. He also described testing of BPS technology in a power grid application.

“We partnered with Dominion Energy [a Richmond, Va.-based energy producer and distributor] for this effort, and have BPS installed at one of the largest power substations on the East Coast,” he said. “BPS is being evaluated for use with phasor measurement units and fault detection systems. The results thus far are positive and meet the needs of energy grid operations.”

Dominion Energy testing involves over-the-air signals from WHUT-TV Washington, D.C., and WNUV Baltimore, Arnold said.

“WNUV receives WHUT-TV, which is about 40 miles away,” he explained. “It’s configured as the ‘leader’ station which is referenced to the coordinated universal [CUT or UTC]time reference sent from the NIST facility in Boulder, Colo.”

The Baltimore station (WNUV) receives the time information signal from the Washington station (WHUT-TV), resynchronizes to it, and then retransmits this precision time information in a “leader-follower” manner, Arnold continued.

“As the BPS network develops, such ‘leader-followers’ can serve as important tools in helping to economically extend the coverage of the BPS network,” he added.

Sinclair is getting ready to turn on another BPS station (WIAV-CD, a Class-A station in Washington, D.C.) to determine how many hops are possible before the timing signal is degraded.

“This will also provide a third location for testing and analysis of BPS positioning information,” Arnold said.

Time to Retire ATSC 1.0
BPS is a unique application of ATSC 3.0 and cannot be added to ATSC 1.0, according to Metheny.

“It has to do with the signal and framing structure where BPS is leveraging the bootstrap emission time, which doesn’t exist in 1.0,” he said. “Additionally, the use of a highly robust physical layer pipe [PLP] in ATSC 3.0 enables a BPS signal that operates below the noise floor, which also isn’t possible with 1.0.”

Arnold and Matheny agreed that a nationwide BPS deployment won’t be possible until a hard date for ATSC 1.0 shutoff is established.

“We need more transmitters and geographic separation for good positional information in implementing BPS,” Arnold said. “This requires the sunsetting of ATSC 1.0. That’s one of our pushes right now.”

Matheny added: “A firm time frame for transition would certainly be helpful. That is true for BPS as well as for consumers and NextGen TV generally. Having a timeline certainty enables everyone to plan and invest accordingly. My hope is that BPS can help accelerate the transition, as it solves a well-defined and big problem.”

NEW YORK—The IAB Tech Lab has released AAMP 2.3, a notable update to the Agentic Advertising Management Protocols that are designed to help organizations deploy AI agents within existing advertising infrastructure.

More specifically, AAMP 2.3 expands the open framework for Agentic Advertising with enterprise-ready deployment, integrated privacy diligence, stronger pricing integrity, broader platform support, and the finalization of key industry standards.

“The industry has already shown what's possible with AI agents,“ IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur said. “Now, the focus is making them reliable in the environments where advertising actually happens,. Organizations need infrastructure they can trust. They need AI agents that work across systems, respect consumer privacy regulations, and make decisions with repeatable accuracy. AAMP 2.3 gives the industry that foundation, moving agentic advertising into everyday business.…

The release comes as agentic advertising is making rapid progress, with AI agents demonstrating how they can automate planning, buying, selling and optimization.

AAMP 2.3 is designed to accelerate the next phase of that development by providing the industry with a common framework that enables those capabilities to operate within the technology environments companies already use. It lets organizations deploy model-agnostic agentic stacks that connect to major inventory sources while remaining interoperable across the broader advertising ecosystem.

The release also introduces new capabilities making production deployments more practical. Organizations can deploy AAMP through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore; expand buying across additional platforms, including Metal integrate Google Ad Manager reporting; and build on new open-source contributions from HyperMindz and Mixpeek. Together, these enhancements give buyers, sellers, publishers and technology providers greater flexibility to integrate AI agents into existing workflows using the systems they already have in place, the IAB Tech Lab said.

As AI agents begin handling more transactional decisions, confidence in the information being used becomes increasingly important, IAB Tech Lab said.

To address that issue, AAMP 2.3 integrates the IAB Diligence Platform and SafeGuard Privacy directly into the Buyer Agent, helping organizations embed privacy diligence into agent workflows. Enhanced pricing guardrails also improve the accuracy and integrity of transaction data, IAB Tech Lab said, creating greater confidence for buyers and sellers as agentic advertising moves into production.

Beyond that, the IAB Tech Labs reported that Agentic Audiences are now ready for fully programmatic and agentic transactions, extending standardized agentic workflows into audience activation.

New features and developments in AAMP 2.3 include:

• Enterprise-ready deployment through Amazon Bedrock and Databricks.
• Deterministic negotiation guardrails with proven end-to-end real negotiation.
• Server-side trust verification on every price-moving path.
• Support for Meta buying.
• Google Ad Manager reporting integration.
• IAB Diligence Platform and SafeGuard Privacy approval gate integrated into the Buyer Agent.
• Enhanced pricing guardrails that improve pricing accuracy across Buyer and Seller Agents.
• Any path that commits spend is deterministic and provable with human approvals outside of value-based thresholds.
• Inventory availability is always based on real, not derived, numbers.
• Fully conforming to the OpenDirect open standard and validated against the spec.
• Deals Sync API MCP Server contributed by HyperMindz.
• Content Taxonomy Parser contributed by Mixpeek, adding semantic IAB Content Taxonomy v3 classification, contextual inventory discovery and enrichment and brand-safety scoring.
• Agentic Audiences v1.0 ready for transactions.

To learn more, visit the IAB Tech Lab website.

NEW YORK—The IAB Tech Lab has announced the release of the Podcast Technical Measurement Guidelines v2.3, an update to the industry's technical framework for measuring podcast downloads, audience, and ad delivery using server-side log data.

The updated guidelines clarify how measurement should be applied across both audio and video podcasts distributed through open RSS feeds and podcast applications that rely on server-side file delivery. The guidelines are available for public comment for 30 days until August 19, 2026.

[More on the growing interest in video podcasting in the new TV Tech, Radio World and TVBEurope ebook here.]

"Measurement only works at scale if everyone is counting the same way," said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. "These updates give the industry clearer guidance for today's podcast ecosystem and help reduce the inconsistencies that slow deals down and create unnecessary questions. That is good for buyers, publishers, and everyone responsible for reporting the numbers."

More specifically, v2.3 updates terminology from "listener" to "podcast consumer" and adds guidance around URL prefix measurement, RSS enclosure URL changes, invalid traffic considerations, and the application of different measurement window approaches.

These updates also provide clearer implementation guidance for organizations responsible for measuring podcast audiences and advertising delivery.

The change of terminology lays a foundation for work in 2027 on v3.0 guideline, which will be focusing on the growth area of streaming video podcasts. That next version of the guidelines is currently in development by the Podcast Technical Working Group, and anyone interested in supporting their development should email techlab@iabtechlab.com to join.

"Server-side log data remains the backbone of podcast measurement, and these updates reflect the continued evolution of the medium," said Hugo Martel, senior vice president of podcast and content delivery, Triton Digital. "Clearer guidance for video podcast measurement is a welcome addition, helping the industry adapt as podcast consumption expands across formats while giving publishers and advertisers greater confidence in the insights they rely on."

In releasing the new version, the IAB Tech Labs also noted that the podcast ecosystem continues to rely heavily on server-side log analysis because most podcast applications do not provide client-side playback confirmation yet. The updated guidelines help members reduce measurement discrepancies, better account for video podcasts, improve the handling of duplicate downloads and platform-driven anomalies, and promote more consistent reporting across the marketplace. For buyers, the guidance strengthens confidence that reported downloads, audience, and ad delivery are being counted consistently. For publishers, hosting providers, measurement vendors, and platforms, it provides clearer implementation guidance that supports a more trusted podcast advertising marketplace.

"These updates give the market more clarity around how podcast audiences and ad delivery should be measured, which ultimately benefits everyone relying on those numbers," said Robert Freeland, founder & CTO, Podtrac. "Our industry depends on trusted measurement that everyone can understand and apply consistently. These updates help bring that consistency."

The Podcast Technical Working Group led the development of Version 2.3 through industry collaboration and member input. IAB Tech Lab encourages publishers, platforms, measurement providers, and other stakeholders to review the draft and provide feedback during the public comment period before the guidelines are finalized.

To learn more about the Podcast Technical Measurement Guidelines v2.3, click https://iabtechlab.com/podcastmeasurement2dot3

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—SMPTE has launched its 110th Anniversary Campaign, a fundraising initiative that honors a legacy of achievement while investing in the organization's vision for the future.

The campaign will support strategic initiatives that advance SMPTE's Standards, Education and Community programs, ensuring they continue to drive innovation, develop industry talent and connect the global media technology industry.

“As we ring in our 110^th anniversary year, there’s a lot to celebrate and a lot of work still to be done,” said SMPTE president Rich Welsh. “Our industry is evolving at an unprecedented pace, from AI-driven and cloud-based workflows to new approaches for content creation, distribution and even authenticity—making SMPTE’s role more vital than ever. This campaign represents a commitment to investing in initiatives that strengthen the foundations of our industry and ensure SMPTE continues to support current and future generations of media technologists.”

The SMPTE 110th Anniversary Campaign will help position SMPTE as a leader in the global media technology community into its next century. Campaign support will advance programs that expand access to technical knowledge, democratize standards access, support responsible innovation in AI and emerging technologies, cultivate the next generation of leaders, deepen local and global community engagement and ensure SMPTE remains prepared to address the evolving needs of the industry for decades to come.

“SMPTE has brought the global media technology community together for 110 years,” said Sally-Ann D’Amato, SMPTE executive director. “Today, more than ever, the industry needs a trusted community where people can share expertise, exchange ideas and address the challenges and opportunities shaping the future of media technology. SMPTE brings together media companies, creators, technologists, educators, students, and leaders from across the industry, and the 110th Anniversary Campaign will help ensure SMPTE continues to serve as that vital resource for the industry, powering another century of innovation.”

More information is available on SMPTE’s website.

WASHINGTON—ATSC has completed a major revision of its A/85 Recommended Practice: Techniques for Establishing and Maintaining Audio Loudness for Digital Television, marking the first comprehensive update to the industry reference since 2013.

ATSC said the revision, which expands the guidance beyond traditional television to address today's hybrid broadcast and streaming environment, is designed to help media organizations comply with loudness requirements and maintain a high quality viewing experience as they continue to transition toward IP-based and hybrid broadcast-broadband delivery models.

"As audiences increasingly consume content across both over-the-air and streaming platforms, maintaining a consistent listening experience has become more important than ever," said Madeleine Noland, president of ATSC. "This update to A/85 gives the industry practical, contemporary guidance that reflects today's production and distribution workflows while preserving the high-quality viewer experience broadcasters have worked to deliver for many years."

The newly revised ATSC Recommended Practice modernizes the document with numerous technical clarifications and introduces two important new annexes:

• Guidance for establishing and maintaining consistent loudness for streaming media services using both metadata-based and non-metadata-based audio codecs.
• A new Loudness and True Peak Quick Reference designed to simplify implementation for engineers and content providers.

More specifically, the revised A/85 Recommended Practice provides recommendations for audio measurement, monitoring, production, metadata management, dynamic-range control and loudness management throughout the content creation and delivery chain. By incorporating lessons learned from more than a decade of implementation, as well as addressing emerging streaming workflows, the document helps ensure consistent audio presentation regardless of how viewers access content, the ATSC reported.

The revised A/85 Recommended Practice can be downloaded here: https://www.atsc.org/atsc-documents/type/1-0-recommended-practices/

As broadcasters await a decision from the FCC to shut down the current ATSC 1.0 broadcast format, the industry’s leading lobbyist is reiterating its support for ATSC 3.0, (aka “NextGen TV”).

Since last October, when the FCC voted on a proposal to determine a date when to sunset ATSC 1.0, debate has swirled around the timing of the shutdown and what consumer protections will be in place to ensure viewers don’t lose access to free over the air broadcasting. The commission is expected to announce a final decision by the end of 2026.

The NAB, which has promoted NextGen TV as a way for broadcasters to better compete in the increasingly complex TV landscape, told the FCC six months ago that continuing uncertainty over the lack of a date is hampering progress.

“The record developed here confirms that the Commission’s central task is no longer to debate whether NextGen TV is worth pursuing—stakeholders across the ecosystem recognize that it is—but to decide whether the transition will be allowed to succeed through an orderly, coordinated framework, or instead be stranded indefinitely in a regime of regulatory uncertainty and half-measures, all to the detriment of the viewing public,” the NAB said in comments filed with the commission in February.

Currently approximately 76% of U.S. households can receive a NextGen TV signal, according to the ATSC. In April, Pearl TV Group, a consortium of broadcasters and tech suppliers, announced the launch of an initiative to develop consumer converter boxes that could retail for under $60.

The association has also launched a campaign to help preserve live sports on free over the air TV, again noting the increased competition from streaming giants.

The ability to access live sports over free TV, competition from Silicon Valley and the very survival of broadcasting were tied together in NAB’s latest blog. The association also took aim at viewers who criticize the content protection aspects of ATSC 3.0, with many claiming that certain devices on the market don’t carry the necessary software to decode DRM-protected signals.

“ATSC 3.0 includes security and service-protection mechanisms as part of its technical framework, just as modern communications and entertainment platforms routinely protect their content and distribution systems, the NAB said. “There is an important reason for these protections. Broadcasters invest substantial resources to secure sports, entertainment and other high-value programming. They also invest every day in local journalists, meteorologists, production professionals and the technology needed to keep communities informed and safe.”

“Without reasonable safeguards, unauthorized businesses can capture local stations’ signals and resell them at scale without permission or compensation,” the association added.

NAB also criticized the possibility that the broadcast industry could be saddled with outdated technology, impacting its competitiveness.

“Requiring broadcasters to operate a decades-old standard forever would effectively make free, over-the-air television the only major communications platform that is never permitted to modernize,” it said. “That would not protect viewers. Over time, it would leave viewers with an increasingly outdated service while streaming platforms, wireless providers and global technology companies continue to innovate.”

NAB’s latest blog can be accessed here.

Hitomi Broadcast will introduce Spectra, a new HDR color verification tool as well as its Matchbox Panorama timing solution at IBC2026, Sept. 11-14 at the RAI Amsterdam. Expanding its capabilities beyond timing and synchronization, Spectra helps engineers confirm that color remains accurate as pictures move through complex production and distribution routes, the company said.

Live workflows now carry more formats and versions through the same facility, including SDR and HDR outputs from a single production. As signals pass through converters, routers, processors, LUTs and software workflows, one configuration error can leave the program technically wrong even when the picture looks acceptable during initial checks.

“In the pressure of set-up, errors in a video source can be missed because there is a recognizable picture,” said Russell Johnson, Director at Hitomi. “If the color path is wrong, that problem can travel through the workflow and affect the final program.

“Engineers are dealing with more sources, more formats and more delivery paths than ever before,” Johnson added. “With MatchBox, we made timing checks fast, objective and simple. With Spectra, we are applying the same thinking, giving teams certainty that the image is being handled correctly before it reaches the viewer.”

Hitomi’s color verification solution generates a defined set of test colors at the source, sends them through the normal program route and analyzes them at the end. By comparing the received colors with the expected result, it can highlight incorrect LUTs, unexpected conversions and routing errors between SDR and HDR paths.

That gives engineers a fast, objective check which reduces reliance on visual judgement alone and helps catch configuration errors before they become visible on air, according to the company.

MatchBox Panorama will also make its IBC debut following its launch at the 2026 NAB Show in April. Matchbox provides a wide view of timing throughout the entire production workflow of a live broadcast. Panorama brings timing measurements from across complex production workflows into one central view, helping teams identify where delay is being introduced across facilities, remote production and software-based environments.

MatchBox Panorama is a standalone software product designed for larger production environments. It is already proven within the Grass Valley AMPP ecosystem, with further integrations with other manufacturers to be released soon.

Hitomi will be in Stand 10.A40 during the show.

For most of broadcast history, captioning was treated as a metadata problem. QC systems checked whether caption data was present, whether files were correctly formatted, and whether character encoding was valid. If a CEA-608 or CEA-708 stream was embedded and a sidecar file — SCC, SRT, WebVTT — was properly formed, the asset passed. Whether the captions accurately reflected what was spoken was largely outside the scope of automated review.

FCC requirements in the United States and emerging mandates across Europe have moved from nominal compliance gates to substantive quality standards. Caption files that pass every technical check can still fail on accuracy, synchronization, or readability.

What broadcast and streaming organizations need is content-level validation: verifying that captions are accurate, properly timed, readable, and ready for multiplatform delivery. Captioning is becoming part of the broader media intelligence layer — one that evaluates a caption track against the content it accompanies, treating accuracy, timing, readability, and compliance as properties the system actively measures.

Caption Accuracy Starts With the Audio Track
The practical difference between metadata validation and content validation shows up in what each one misses. A traditional QC pass confirms that a caption file is present and well- formed. It does not detect dialogue that was misheard during transcription, lines that were omitted, or text that lags consistently behind speech — all failure modes that reach viewers and, increasingly, regulators.

Content-intelligent captioning systems work directly with audio. Modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) models transcribe spoken dialogue from the audio track, producing a reference against which existing captions can be checked, or generating a new track directly. Current-generation ASR achieves word error rates below 5% on standard broadcast dialogue — comparable to experienced human transcribers, and substantially lower than error rates produced under the time pressure of manual captioning at scale.

Accurate transcription addresses what is said; alignment addresses when it appears. AI alignment engines analyze audio waveforms to synchronize caption timing against actual speech, accounting for pace variation and pausing that fixed-offset methods miss. Captions that drift from dialogue constitute a real accessibility failure, and automated alignment catches those errors systematically across an entire content library. These systems can also surface compliance risk before delivery, flagging assets where timing drift, word error rate, or reading speed exceeds regulatory thresholds.

How Captions Render on Screen
A caption that is correctly transcribed and timed can still be difficult to follow if segmented poorly. Breaking mid-phrase or mid-clause forces viewers to piece together meaning across display windows. This presents a functional problem for all audiences and a more significant one for viewers with hearing impairments who rely on captions as their primary communication channel.

Rather than breaking text at fixed character counts, machine learning models identify natural language boundaries, such as clause endings, breath pauses, and semantic units, then segment accordingly. The result is captions that read more naturally. Emerging standards reflect this: quality evaluation is increasingly extending from file validity to content readability, including reading speed, display duration, and caption segmentation.

A complete evaluation also requires reference to the video frame. Text that covers a speaker's face, obscures on-screen graphics, or overlaps burnt-in text creates problems that fall outside the scope of transcription-level review. Managing visual placement has traditionally required frame-by-frame manual review or post-production adjustment — both slow and unsystematic at the scale modern workflows demand.

Video analysis integrated into current captioning platforms detects faces, on-screen graphics, and critical visual elements, then adjusts caption positioning automatically. These tools can also prevent captions from spanning scene-change boundaries, a source of visual discontinuity invisible to metadata validation. The caption track is evaluated against the full audio-visual context of the content it serves — a quality assurance step that operates where file-level checks end.

From One Validated Track to Many
Once a base caption track has been validated, the same content intelligence can carry through to multilingual delivery. Machine translation pipelines generate multilingual versions from that source track without a proportional increase in localization effort. Additionally, systems incorporating large language models can preserve timing, segmentation logic, and reading-speed compliance across the target language, so translated tracks inherit the quality properties of the source without a separate QC cycle.

Broadcast, OTT, and streaming platforms each impose distinct caption format requirements, and a caption track that passes QC for one delivery destination may fail for another. Generating and validating multiple output formats — SCC, WebVTT, TTML, and others — within the same pipeline means format-specific compliance is confirmed once, upstream, before distribution splits across platforms.

Accuracy That Compounds With Use
One persistent limitation of traditional captioning pipelines is that errors recur without systematic correction. When a captioning process mishandles a recurring term, such as a character name, an athlete, or a brand, that error propagates across multiple assets with no mechanism to resolve it at the source.

Content-intelligent platforms address this through a continuous learning loop. When operators review and correct AI-generated captions, those corrections are captured and used to fine-tune the underlying model. Over successive production cycles, the system becomes progressively more accurate for that organization's specific content mix, speakers, and terminology. This provides a meaningful advantage over static vendor relationships, where the same errors resurface without correction.

Moving Quality Decisions Upstream
These capabilities move captioning from a production checkpoint into a media quality system. Content-intelligent workflows generate structured, validated caption data that feeds directly into MAM systems, localization platforms, and distribution pipelines. The caption track arrives at each stage as a verified asset, ready for use without additional QC. That changes where quality decisions happen. Compliance risk is surfaced before delivery.

Multilingual tracks inherit the quality properties of the source. Format-specific requirements are confirmed once, before distribution splits across platforms. The underlying shift is from discovering caption failures at the point of delivery, where correction is costly and timelines are unforgiving, to catching them at the point of production.

NEW YORK—In an important development that will improve ad planning and measurement by establishing standardized definitions for digital video product types and their advertising formats, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has released the Redefining Media Types (RMT) Standard for public comment.

Developed with IAB Tech Lab, the standard is open for public comment from brands, agencies, publishers, ad tech partners, networks, and other industry stakeholders through August 8.

“As the video marketplace has expanded across platforms, formats, and viewing experiences, the industry needs a more consistent way to define and classify digital video environments,” said Jamie Finstein, vice president, Media Center at IAB. “The Redefining Media Types Standard is intended to give buyers, sellers, publishers, and platforms a shared, future-proof language that improves planning, execution, and measurement across the entire ecosystem.”

“Many of the technical systems supporting digital advertising still rely on inconsistent or outdated classifications for video,” IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur said. “By partnering with IAB on this framework, we can help connect these definitions to the technical standards and infrastructure needed to support adoption across the industry.”

The RMT Standard is aims to create comprehensive, standardized definitions for digital video product types and their associated advertising formats, including connected TV, online video, social video, FAST, video podcasting and retail video. The definitions consider channels, screens, context and ad formats, with the goal of serving as an authoritative guide for media agencies, publishers, networks, technology partners, and brands.

The standard addresses a core problem in video advertising: legacy media classification terms were built to describe distribution technology and business models, not consumer experience.

For brands and agencies, inconsistent definitions can lead to misaligned planning strategies, incomparable measurement across platforms, and media investments that do not reflect the intended viewing environment. For publishers and platforms, inconsistent terminology can create confusion around inventory packaging, monetization, and buyer expectations. For ad tech and measurement providers, the lack of standardized classification makes it more difficult to support interoperability and consistent reporting across systems.

The IAB noted that the RMT Standard provides a two-layer classification system designed to support both strategic planning and operational execution.

The first layer organizes video advertising environments into four macro buckets grounded in consumer viewing experience, including “Lean Back Viewing”, “Personal Screen Viewing” and “Passive and Communal Viewing.” These buckets are based on how a viewer is cognitively and physically oriented to the screen, rather than the technology delivering the content or the business model funding it.

The second layer applies binary impression-level attributes that allow individual impressions to be classified with precision across platforms and devices, including:

• Sound state
• Skip-enabled versus completion-required
• Full-screen presentation
• Addressability
• Availability of signals
• Measurability
• Device
• Ad Formats

This operational layer gives planners, buyers, measurement vendors, and ad tech platforms a shared set of signals that can be used at the point of transaction, the IAB explained.

Together, the two layers support both planning and technical execution. The macro buckets give the industry a shared language for strategy and cross-platform planning, while the operational attribute layer provides a framework for impression-level classification that can be encoded into OpenRTB bid requests and Project Eidos taxonomy fields.

The framework is intended to create clearer expectations and more consistent communication across the buy-side, sell-side, and technology ecosystem by:

• Helping brands and agencies align media investment with the intended consumer viewing experience.
• Giving publishers and media owners more consistent ways to package and describe inventory.
• Supporting more interoperable reporting and measurement across platforms.
• Providing ad tech and measurement providers with standardized signals that can be used operationally at the point of transaction.
• Creating a more stable standards foundation as video formats, platforms and viewing behaviors evolve, and new media types enter the mix.

A number of industry players praised the release in these statements:

• “Given the extent of change in the video marketplace, from what and where people watch to how advertisers execute ad campaigns, it was critical to come together as an industry and develop a new, contemporary video marketplace framework,” said Adam Gerber, head of strategy, Media.net. “The ambiguity and obsolescence of legacy definitions and ways of working were holding back growth and creating friction in the market. This new standard attempts to fix that and provide a common language for all marketplace participants to apply within the context of their individual businesses.”
• “With the constant innovation and increased complexity of our digital ecosystem, it is important for the industry to have consistent guiding principles in place,” said Alex Stone, senor vice president, managing director, Horizon Media. “These IAB standards are our guardrails which we will use as our progression accelerates for years to come.”
• “As streaming and cross-platform video consumption continue to evolve, premium video remains one of the most effective environments for brands,” said Michael Reidy, senior vice president, Small and Medium Business Growth, Advertising & Partnerships, NBCUniversal. “As an industry, we have an opportunity to align around clearer, more consistent standards that drive greater media effectiveness and deliver simplicity for our partners across buyers, sellers, and technology platforms.”
• “The way people watch video has changed dramatically, but the language the industry uses to describe it hasn’t kept pace,” said Colt Cheadle, senior manager, sales activation, Spectrum Reach. “As video continues to evolve across platforms, screens, and viewing experiences, establishing a common framework is essential to reducing complexity, improving collaboration, and helping buyers and sellers make more informed decisions."

The public comment period for the RMT Standard is open from July 8 through Aug. 8. IAB and the IAB Tech Lab will continue working with industry stakeholders, working group participants, and standards contributors to refine the framework and support adoption across the ecosystem.

To learn more about the Redefining Media Types Standard and to provide feedback, click here.

NEW YORK—The IAB Tech Lab digital advertising technical standards-setting body has announced SupplyChain v1.1, a significant proposed upgrade to the OpenRTB SupplyChain Object, commonly known as “schain” that is designed to give advertisers and buyers a more complete view of how programmatic bid requests are generated and handled.

“This is one of the most significant transparency enhancements to the digital advertising supply chain in years,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. “Advertisers deserve to understand not only who participates in a transaction financially, but also who takes full control of a given request before it reaches a buyer. By expanding SupplyChain to include technical custody, we're providing the industry with a more complete picture of the programmatic ecosystem and creating a stronger foundation for trust, accountability, and investment in the open internet.”

IAB Tech Lab also invited the industry to participate in the public comment period until August 21, 2026.

The update, developed through extensive work by the Programmatic Supply Chain Working Group and guided by the Programmatic Supply Chain Commit Group, expands the role of schain beyond the traditional payment-flow view of the supply chain.

The change will allow buyers to see not only which companies participate in the commercial flow of a transaction, but also which entities take technical custody of a bid request as it moves through systems such as Prebid, ad servers, SSAI platforms, SDKs, wrappers, and other infrastructure.

The result, the IAB Tech Lab reported, is a more complete and accurate view of the programmatic supply path. The update is expected to help buyers improve supply-path optimization, reduce duplicative bid requests, and better identify all companies involved in the programmatic transaction.

In announcing the update, the IAB Tech Lab also released statements from industry leaders across the buy side, sell side, and advertising infrastructure ecosystem voicing strong support for SupplyChain v1.1. Those statements included:

• “OpenRTB exists to make programmatic advertising more interoperable, more scalable, and more trustworthy,” said Neal Richter, VP, Amazon Ads, and Chair of the IAB Tech Lab Board of Directors. “This update is an important step forward because it gives buyers a clearer understanding of how supply is actually created and transmitted. Greater transparency is how we build a healthier marketplace and give advertisers more confidence to invest in the open internet.”
• “The open internet should be the most transparent, accountable, and efficient place for advertisers to spend money,” said Paul Bannister, Chief Strategy Officer, Raptive. “This change helps make that possible. When buyers can see both the commercial path and the technical path of a bid request, they can make better decisions, reward high-quality supply, and reduce waste caused by opaque or duplicative infrastructure.”
• “Longer supply chains are not automatically worse supply chains,” said Rob Hazan, The Trade Desk. “A longer chain that accurately discloses the parties involved in the impression is better for buyers than a short chain that hides important information. With fully traceable supply chains, the industry can finally move beyond simplistic node-counting and toward a more sophisticated understanding of which supply paths best correlate to advertiser performance and outcomes.”
• “Advertisers should not have to choose between scale and clarity,” said Chris Kane, Founder, Jounce Media. “The best supply paths are the ones buyers can understand. By expanding schain to include technical custody, the industry gets closer to a world where efficiency is measurable, duplication is easier to identify, and value-added partners can be distinguished from unnecessary hops.”

The OpenRTB Working Group considered multiple implementation approaches and recommended a model that adds custody-taking entities directly to the main schain, using the hp=0 designation when an entity is not part of the payment flow.

This approach preserves the integrity of the existing schain model while giving buyers a fuller view of technical participation in the bid request lifecycle.

The Working Group also recognized that, in many cases, schains will become longer as transparency improves. To support adoption and minimize disruption, IAB Tech Lab will provide rollout guidance recommending that SSPs and DSPs coordinate staged testing, validate parsing behavior, monitor bid health, and progressively scale SupplyChain v1.1 traffic.

The proposed update also reinforces the open and collaborative nature of OpenRTB. The specification has long served as the common language for real-time bidding across the digital advertising ecosystem, and this change reflects months of discussion among companies across the buy side, sell side, and infrastructure layers.

SupplyChain v1.1 is intended to help buyers understand three critical dimensions of a bid request: how it originated, who took technical custody of it, and which parties participated in the payment flow. Together, those signals can improve trust, reduce ambiguity, and help the market direct spend toward the most efficient and highest-quality supply paths.

To review the guidance visit https://iabtechlab.com/supplychainv1dot1

SMPTE, has announced that it is making its entire Standards catalog is free to the global media technology community. This includes all published SMPTE Standards, Recommended Practices, Engineering Guidelines and Registered Disclosure Documents (RDDs), as well as all future releases.

For more than a century, SMPTE Standards have provided a foundation for the entertainment technology industry. By removing barriers to access, this milestone is expected to accelerate adoption and implementation, strengthen interoperability, and help drive the next generation of innovation.

“This was a decision we did not make lightly,” says SMPTE President Rich Welsh. “For 110 years, SMPTE has evolved alongside the media technology industry, helping to drive change and innovation — and we’re not stopping now.

“Our industry is confronting transformative shifts, from IP-based workflows to AI authenticity and content provenance, and we find ourselves at another inflection point. We listened to our Members, Partners and the global Standards community, and the answer was clear: Interoperability is essential to the future of media. Now is the time to open the gates and ensure the next generation of media technology is built on a stronger, more accessible foundation.”

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—SMPTE has launched its summer 2026 education lineup, which includes two standalone courses, an intensive boot camp and a hands-on practical lab built to develop expertise in IP networking and SMPTE ST 2110.

Introduction to IP Networks and the ST 2110 Intensive Boot Camp begin June 11, with Understanding ST 2110 starting later in the summer.

Introduction to IP Networks (ITIPN), June 11-July 9, provides a foundation in IP networking suited to those new to the field as well as experienced professionals seeking a refresher. Participants work through every layer of the network stack, cover multicast and protocols, such as DNS and RTP, and gain hands-on experience with Wireshark, earning a certificate of completion and eligibility for the SMPTE Practical Lab.

The comprehensive ST 2110 Intensive Boot Camp for IP Networking Professionals, June 11-Sept. 1, includes 20 modules across three courses, Introduction to IP Networks, Understanding ST 2110 and IP Network Design. Participants progress from networking fundamentals through PTP timing, synchronization and redundancy, network design and operational change management. Live coaching sessions, led by technologists from organizations, including the EBU, Lawo, Arista, Cisco and Meinberg, run Tuesdays and Thursdays and are recorded for on-demand access. Participants who complete the program and pass the final exam earn the industry-recognized SMPTE Certificate of Achievement.

Starting later in the summer, Understanding ST 2110, July 21-Sept. 1, offers an in-depth, practical exploration of the ST 2110 standard, covering uncompressed and compressed video, audio and data encapsulation, timing and synchronization, redundancy and network traffic shaping.

The SMPTE Practical Lab, available to those who complete Introduction to IP Networks, Understanding ST 2110 or the full Boot Camp, provides a sandbox environment in which to design, sync and troubleshoot live-production workflows. The Practical Lab is made possible by the support of partners, including Lawo Academy, Arista, Blackmagic Design, Meinberg, Bridge Technologies, Matrox and AJA Video Systems.

The standalone courses and the boot camp are instructor-led with live coaching sessions recorded and available on demand within 24 hours so participants can take part from any time zone.

“The move to IP is one of the most significant shifts our industry has seen, and our goal is to make the expertise behind it accessible to everyone who needs it,” said Maja Davidovic, director of education at SMPTE. “Our instructors are real-world practitioners who design and run these systems every day, our live sessions bring in special guest participants, and the learning stays hands-on and interactive throughout. Whether you’re taking your first steps in IP networking or preparing to lead a full ST 2110 migration, you'll be working through real challenges alongside the people shaping the field.”

SMPTE is offering member and non-member pricing for the courses, including:

• Introduction to IP Networks (ITIPN): $399 for members and $599 for nonmembers.
• Understanding ST 2110: $399 and $599.
• ST 2110 Intensive Boot Camp: $799 and $999.
• Practical Lab: $99 and $199.

Student and hardship discounts are always available for all SMPTE Education courses. Registration is available online.

WASHINGTON—Sam Matheny, CEO of newly launched Merkhet Solutions, today told a House subcommittee that the country is becoming “dangerously overdependent” on GPS satellites for delivery of precise timing and positioning data.

Merkhet Solutions is the company spun off from the National Association of Broadcasters to develop commercial uses for the Broadcast Positioning System, a terrestrial backup to GPS. In testimony before the House Communications and Technology Subcommittee, Matheny warned lawmakers that GPS disruptions from jamming, spoofing, cyberattacks or natural failures could endanger critical infrastructure including energy, telecommunications, data centers and financial services.

These “risks endanger virtually every American critical infrastructure sector, including energy, telecommunications, data centers and financial services, where a disruption to precision time can trigger grid instability, network outages and lost transactions,” Matheny said.

BPS provides a backup to GPS by leveraging the nation’s TV broadcast transmission infrastructure to deliver precise timing information. “BPS is a patented terrestrial timing and position technology that leverages existing high-power broadcast infrastructure and licensed spectrum already covering the United States,” Matheny told the subcommittee. “BPS was first conceived by my team at NAB in 2021, and you can think of it as the terrestrial equivalent of GPS.”

A potential loss of GPS would affect national security and pose an economic risk of $1 billion in losses per day, Matheny testified.

Matheny laid out five BPS advantages, including:

• An infrastructure that is already in place.
• Transmission of BPS signals from high-power, tall towers in diverse locations, making it difficult to jam or spoof at scale.
• BPS uses existing licensed spectrum.
• BPS supports unlimited simultaneous users, meaning no bottlenecks—an essential element for emergency and critical infrastructure applications.
• BPS is independent of GPS and other global navigation satellite systems, functioning even when GPS is compromised.

Congress can help advance the speed and scale at which BPS can begin offering reliable GPS backup service, Matheny said.

“First, Congress should help accelerate BPS installation and operations through funding for traceable time, station hardware, calibration and ongoing network operations and monitoring,” he said.

Congress also “should support and work” with the Trump Administration in designating a lead agency to “expedite the activation of BPS and other complements to GPS,” he said.

“Finally, Congress should encourage the Federal Communications Commission to complete the important work it has already initiated on ATSC 3.0,” Matheny said. “In addition to the significant benefits to television viewers, including upgraded picture and sound and better emergency alerting, the full benefits of BPS cannot be harnessed until the FCC completes its work on the ATSC 3.0 transition.”

More information on Merkhet Solution is available on the Merkhet website.

WASHINGTON—At its annual NextGen Broadcast Conference this week, ATSC honored Julia Kenyon of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) with the 2026 Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award.

“Julia is an excellent consensus builder and techno-diplomat who is a graceful and very competent leader,” ATSC President Madeleine Noland said. “She knows how to help groups get things done efficiently and collegially, which is a real art. Not only has she led multiple ATSC committees, but Julia also has a terrific sense of humor and is able to blend levity with the serious nature of standards work. She is always curious, and most recently has been helping ATSC participants really lean into the benefits of developing artificial intelligence tools.”

Kenyon has served as Vice Chair of ATSC Specialist Group on Interactive Environment (TG3/S38), Vice Chair of ATSC Implementation on Conformance (IT-3), and Chair of ATSC Specialist Group on Management and Protocols (TG3/S33). Additionally, for more than three years, she has served as CTA’s lead technical representative for the NextGen TV Test Suite development, working not only with ATSC but as chair of CTA’s own groups that work with the test suite.

Kenyon also guided ATSC in the development of A/381, the recommended practice for use of the broadcaster application for NextGen TV.

“Julia Kenyon brings unique skills to the challenge of ensuring NextGen TVs work properly with the advanced services ATSC 3.0 broadcasts provide,” said Brian Markwalter, vice chair of the ATSC board of directors and senior vice president of research and standards for the CTA. “Besides her visible leadership in ATSC and CTA standards groups, Julia directs the TV testing program that backs the NextGen TV logo. CTA commends Julia on this recognition of all she has done for ATSC and the industry.”

“Julia is an exceptional contributor to ATSC 3.0,” added Dr. Paul Hearty of Technology Advisors, an ATSC board member and ATSC Technical Group 3 (TG3) chair. “She leads and contributes to standards and compliance development both in ATSC and in CTA, covering the spectrum from origination of services at broadcast to consumption at consumer devices. She maintains balance, fairness, and technical rigor—as well as humor—throughout.”

The Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award is given each year to an ATSC member whose technical and leadership contributions have been exemplary. It is named for its first recipient, the late Bernard Lechter, retired staff vice president, Advanced Video Systems at RCA Laboratories, whose 30-year career covered all aspects of television and display research.

Lechner Award recipients:

• 2000 – Bernard Lechner, Consultant
• 2001 – Rich Chernock, Triveni Digital
• 2002 – Regis Crinon, Microsoft
• 2003 – Glenn Adams, Extensible Formatting Systems
• 2004 – Graham Jones, National Association of Broadcasters
• 2005 – John Henderson, Hitachi
• 2006 – Art Allison, NAB
• 2007 – Mark Eyer, Sony Electronics
• 2008 – Michael Dolan, TBT
• 2009 – Wayne Bretl, Zenith/LG Electronics
• 2010 – Pat Waddell, Harmonic
• 2011 – Jim Starzynski, NBC Universal
• 2012 – S. Merrill Weiss, Merrill Weiss Group
• 2013 – Mark Aitken, Sinclair Broadcast Group
• 2014 – James Kutzner, PBS
• 2015 – Luke Fay, Sony
• 2016 – Madeleine Noland, Zenith/LG Electronics
• 2017 – Skip Pizzi, NAB
• 2018 – Mark Corl, Triveni Digital
• 2019 – Adam Goldberg, AGP/Sony
• 2020 – Jae-Young Lee, ETRI
• 2021 – Alan Stein, InterDigital
• 2022 – Youngkwon Lim, Samsung Electronics
• 2023 – Glenn Reitmeier, NBC Universal/Sarnoff Labs
• 2024 – Ali Dernaika, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
• 2025 – Aldo Cugnini, AGC Systems
• 2026 – Julia Kenyon, Consumer Technology Association

With the Federal Communications Commission rules for an auction of at least the congressionally mandated 100 MHz of C-band spectrum expected as soon as July, many broadcasters had a laser-beam focus on how best to proceed with signal contribution and distribution alternatives during the 2026 NAB Show.

A breakfast event organized by The Hive Group, a public relations and creative agency headquartered in McLean, Va., on behalf of LTN, shed a great deal of light on the issues and alternatives from both the broadcaster and vendor points of view. For the purposes of this column, I’ll focus on the former.

Brad Cheney, vice president of field operations and engineering at Fox Sports, moderated a panel discussion about the challenges of living with less C-band spectrum. Panelists included David Johnson, senior vice president of technology at The Walt Disney Co., Alastair Hamilton, senior vice president of distribution, engineering and architecture at Fox, and Ken Fuller, vice president of distribution and technology operations at Paramount/CBS.

While video of the event posted to YouTube is available, panelists made several points worth calling attention to here.

There are multiple ingredients to success, including quality, reliability and availability, that must match what broadcasters have today in C-band. What each broadcaster ultimately chooses to do will include a mix of technologies. “There is not one silver bullet solution that gives us what we have today,” Fuller said. Finding what’s right will require “a testing curve” and a “learning curve.”

Matching C-band reliability is a big job. As things stand today, broadcasters have 99.999% C-band reliability. Disney has a lot of experience using non-satellite fiber IP and the public internet. That provides it with a good basis for comparison with C-band. “The primary challenge there is, it’s not five 9s,” said Johnson. “When you think about five 9s compared to four 9s, that’s four minutes difference in a 30-day period.” That translates into a “significant difference in quality and reliability that we need to solve for.”

Packet recovery via the internet is concerning. Some alternatives to C-band involve multiple transport paths, such as Ku-band with internet backup for dropped packets. After looking at nearly 200 major markets, Fox found ISP internet outages to be “quite alarming,” said Hamilton. “Some major markets were down for hours and hours.”

Distribution to small MVPDs will be a challenge. Taken together, Disney, Fox, Paramount/CBS, Warner Bros. and other major broadcasters deliver more than 10 Gbps of content to MVPD partners. That’s not a problem for the largest players with fiber connectivity. But the 10% of MVPDs that are smaller operators is “the bit that worries me,” said Hamilton. “I think we are going to have to get creative to service those.”

Opex reimbursement will be key. Unlike the last C-band auction, maintaining service won’t simply be a matter of replacing capital equipment. Recurring operational expenses for alternatives to C-band will be a major factor. “The blanket statement…is you [government reimbursement funds] will have to pay for our Opex for 10 years,” Fuller said. “Now, what does that mean? We don’t know yet.”

We will be holding a TV Tech Talk webinar July 29 on the ramifications of the C-band auction and available alternatives. Rebecca Hanson, director-general of the North American Broadcasters Association, will be our featured speaker. I am moderating.

NEW YORK—As media companies face growing problems with AI bots and crawlers, the IAB Tech Lab has issued guidance that is designed to help publishers and content owners better evaluate and manage how non-human agents, including AI systems, access their content as they work to adopt the Tech Lab’s CoMP API framework for managing content crawling.

The new guidance, which is now available for public comment until June 26, 2026, outlines different approaches content owners and publishers can take to inform access from non-human user agents with the aim of helping the ecosystem make more informed decisions alongside the adoption of the CoMP API V1.

“Giving content owners clear, practical guidance is key if we want adoption to move forward in a meaningful way,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. “This work helps simplify a complex area so companies can make decisions that fit their business while supporting a more sustainable marketplace.”

The IAB Tech Lab noted that following the release of the CoMP API V1, it became clear that many content owners and publishers have not yet developed formal strategies around their approach to bots and crawlers, which sit outside the scope of the API itself.

To address this gap, the CoMP Working Group developed this guidance to outline the range of available approaches and the advantages and trade-offs of each strategy. This gives stakeholders a clearer understanding of how to manage access from all non-human traffic, including AI systems in a way that aligns with their business goals.

More specifically, the guidance is designed to support the adoption of the CoMP API by helping content owners navigate an area that can be operationally complex and resource-intensive and is aimed at non-technical leadership to give them the questions they need to ask.

Those questions will ultimately help them understand the value and hard costs associated with each lever they pull. With clearer direction on these strategies, organizations can make more confident decisions, reduce risk, lower their operating cost, and operate more efficiently as they engage with AI systems. Establishing these strategies is also critical to enabling partnerships between AI systems and content owners, which are necessary to build a sustainable and scalable content marketplace.

A number of industry participants involved in the development of the guidance also emphasized the importance of clarity and practical direction as the ecosystem evolves.

“Content owners are being asked to make important decisions quickly, often without clear frameworks,” said Shailley Singh, EVP & COO, IAB Tech Lab. “This guidance helps break down the options so they can choose an approach that aligns with their goals.”

“The AI revolution has caught many publishers with their front doors wide open, essentially leaving the lights on for bots and crawlers to pilfer intellectual property.” added Scott Messer, principal & founder, Messer Media, “This IAB Tech Lab guidance is the essential roadmap content owners need—a practical framework to navigate the complex maze of decisions, tech, and tools available to protect their business. By empowering publishers to identify who is really there, this guide helps them distinguish between a value-driving 'ally' and a resource-draining 'extractor'. Managing AI bots is no longer just a technical background task; it is a critical business strategy for protecting what you’ve built and restoring a fair exchange of value for your content.”

Similarly, Dave Bellous, vice president of strategy, Metal Toad, explained that “non-human traffic now dominates most of the open web, and AI agents and crawlers are steepening the curve. Blanket bot-blocking is no longer a useful strategy. For publishers, advertisers, and ad-tech alike, distinguishing beneficial automation from invalid traffic through graduated, standards-based controls has become a baseline requirement. The Bot and Crawler Guidance from IAB is a much-needed tool in crafting a modern web strategy.”

Tom Koch, head of sales, ads and marketing ecosystem at TwelveLabs also highlighted the importance of the guidance in addressing the problem of bots and crawlers: "As AI agents increasingly serve as proxies for consumers, publishers and platforms need clearer frameworks for transparency and control. The crawler management framework is an important step toward giving content owners greater visibility into how their content is accessed and used. TwelveLabs is proud to contribute as this work is foundational to ensuring video, the richest form of data, is no longer overlooked in how AI engages with the web."

The guidance was developed by the CoMP Working Group, with public comment providing an opportunity for industry feedback ahead of finalization. IAB Tech Lab will continue working with members to support implementation and encourage adoption of both the guidance and the CoMP API.

IAB Tech Lab invites the industry to participate in the public comment period until June 25, 2026. To review the guidance, https:///iabtechlab.com/botmanagement/.

VIENNA—Big Blue Marble has announced that its Nakolos platform is the first end-to-end 5G Broadcast solution worldwide to implement the complete feature set introduced with 3GPP Release 19, achieved in collaboration with ecosystem partners Bitstem, TRedess and SYES.

The milestone follows two years of active standardization contributions with organizations including the European Broadcasting Union and Broadcast Networks Europe, and for the first time enables broadcasters and broadcast infrastructure providers to validate and deploy all major Release 19 enhancements in real-world environments, Big Blue Marble said.

U.S. broadcasters are also considering the use of 5G in ATSC 3.0, with many low-power TV broadcasters advocating a switch from ATSC 1.0 to 5G Broadcast after 1.0 sunsets.

Built on a carrier-grade, 3GPP-native architecture, Nakolos has evolved continuously from Release 14 through Release 19, according to Big Blue Marble. The platform now supports a complete set of new capabilities that directly address the economic and operational realities of 5G Broadcast rollout, including Time Frequency Interleaving (TFI), which enables the reuse of existing transmission sites while improving signal robustness; CAS-Muting functionality, which allows existing DVB-T2 infrastructure to be repurposed for 5G Broadcast transmission, substantially reducing initial deployment costs; and support for the new early-deployment frequency bands B112, targeting the U.S. market, and B113, targeting Europe and other global markets.

In combination with Release 19-compatible transmitter solutions from TRedess and SYES, and the new Bitstem 5GR receiver platform, released in conjunction with this announcement, customers can now validate and deploy complete interoperable 5G Broadcast chains under real operating conditions rather than in isolated proof-of-concept environments.

“Release 19 represents a concrete step forward for commercial 5G Broadcast, not a future promise,” said Johann Mika, chief innovation officer at Big Blue Marble. “The features introduced in this release give network operators a credible path to cost-efficient deployments using infrastructure they already have. With Nakolos, they can begin that transition today, ahead of the first generation of commercial 5G Broadcast-enabled consumer devices.”

Devices should be commercially available within the next few years, said Big Blue Marble, which is positioning Nakolos “as the platform for operators who need to be infrastructure-ready before mass-market adoption begins.”

BEAVERTON, Ore.—HDR10+ Technologies LLC, an industrywide consortium with more than 180 adopter companies, has been selected to administer the certification program for Eclipsa Video, a new open source video standard.

Eclipsa Video is based upon SMPTE 2094-50, the recently developed specification created by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), with experts from Google, Apple and NBCUniversal leading this initiative.

Roshan Baliga, Google Product Lead for Eclipsa Video explained that "we decided to leverage HDR10+ Technologies LLC’s proficiency in premium video standards, making their organization the ideal partner to administer the Eclipsa Video program.”

The Eclipsa Video program helps to ensure the highest-quality video on compatible smartphones other and next-generation devices. This latest effort marks the second time that the HDR10+ Technologies LLC has been selected to administer a program for Eclipsa. Last October it was selected to administer the Eclipsa Audio certification program

“For years, HDR10+ has been at the forefront of video innovation by delivering a spectacular viewing experience,” Bill Mandel, co-manager of HDR10+ Technologies LLC said. “With Eclipsa Video, we can now expand our pioneering work in Eclipsa Audio certification, in order to deliver a more seamless and immersive audio/video environment”.

Eclipsa Video seamlessly integrates with the broadly supported HDR10+ standard. Devices certified for both standards may utilize the name Eclipsa Video powered by HDR10+.

The new Eclipsa Video program will initially address smartphones, with other devices to follow. The first Eclipsa Video approved devices are expected to be introduced later this year.

For more information on licensing and testing Eclipsa Video, please visit www.eclipsamedia.org

WASHINGTON—ATSC, The Broadcast Standards Association, today announced that Mark Aitken, president of ONE Media and senior vice president of advanced technology for Sinclair Broadcast Group, will be honored on June 2 as the 2026 recipient of the prestigious Mark Richer Industry Leadership Medal.

This annual award honors individuals or teams who demonstrate exemplary leadership in advancing ATSC’s mission and embody the vision, tenacity, and commitment that defined the legacy of former longtime ATSC President Mark Richer. Richer led the organization through two decades of transformative innovation, from the original ATSC 1.0 standard to the launch of ATSC 3.0 next-generation standards.

The 2026 Richer Medal will be presented to Aitken during ATSC’s 2026 NextGen Broadcast Conference during the first week of June in Washington. Registration is now open for the event.

The ATSC board of directors awarded Aitken the Richer Medal for his longtime work to advance next-generation broadcasting in the U.S. and throughout the world. Promoting ATSC 3.0 as the most flexible IP-based broadcasting option available to broadcasters, Aitken has invested significant energy and time in developing new avenues for ATSC 3.0—particularly in India.

“From the beginning, as ATSC members began discussing how broadcasting should evolve to meet the changing needs of the industry and consumers, Mark Aitken has played a pivotal role in helping to build support for next-generation broadcasting as both an obvious upgrade for viewers but also for the new business opportunities that emerge with ATSC 3.0,“ ATSC President Madeleine Noland said. “With Mark’s leadership and personal engagement, the ATSC 3.0 standards have rapidly advanced to meet the needs of stakeholders and consumers throughout the world. Mark has also been instrumental as we sought to reimagine ATSC itself, not just as a television standards body but as THE Broadcast Standards Association. He exemplifies the very qualities that Mark Richer himself embodied during his leadership of ATSC.”

Said Aitken: “I am deeply honored to receive the ATSC Mark Richer Medal, an award that carries special meaning because of Mark’s extraordinary legacy of technical leadership, collaboration and service to the broadcasting community. This recognition belongs as much to the colleagues and partners who have worked alongside me to advance the future of broadcasting as it does to me.“

Aitken has spent more than four decades shaping the evolution of modern broadcasting technologies and standards, joining Sinclair in 1999 after accumulating more than 25 years of industry experience with companies including CCA Electronics and COMARK, where he specialized in advanced RF and transmission technologies. Since joining Sinclair, he has led the company’s efforts in emerging broadcast technologies, spectrum innovation, advanced networking systems, and digital television deployment.

As President of ONE Media Technologies, Aitken helped establish Sinclair’s technology innovation platform focused on developing advanced broadcast systems that integrate broadband, mobile connectivity, datacasting and enhanced video delivery. Aitken currently serves on the boards of the ATSC and the Advanced Television Broadcast Alliance (ATBA), and previously served as a board member of Saankhya Labs, a semiconductor and software-defined networking company specializing in broadcast and wireless technologies. He is also an active member of professional organizations including IEEE, SMPTE, and the Association of Federal Communications Consulting Engineers (AFCCE).

An accomplished inventor and author, Aitken holds multiple patents related to RF devices, broadcast architectures and next-generation communication systems. He has written numerous technical papers focused on digital broadcasting strategies, advanced transmission systems, and emerging media technologies. His contributions to the industry have earned him several prestigious honors, including the NAB Television Engineering Achievement Award, the ATSC Bernard Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award, the Broadcasting & Cable Technology Leadership Award, and recognition as a fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

WASHINGTON, SAO PAULO, SEOUL, South Korea—ATSC, Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital Terrestre (SBTVD) Forum from Brazil and South Korea’s Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) May 12 inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to establish a formal framework for cooperation on the development, harmonization and worldwide promotion of next-generation terrestrial broadcasting standards.

“This agreement represents an important milestone for the global broadcasting industry,” said president ATSC Madeleine Noland. “By aligning efforts across North America, South America and Asia, we are creating a stronger foundation for interoperable next-generation broadcasting technologies that will benefit broadcasters, manufacturers, developers and viewers worldwide.”

The agreement reflects a shared commitment to strengthening global interoperability for advanced broadcasting services and to accelerating international collaboration around the evolution of ATSC 3.0 and related technologies. The collaboration was made official during a signing ceremony in Seoul.

“This MOU reinforces the importance of international cooperation in shaping the future of broadcasting,” said Raymundo Barros, president of SBTVD Forum. “A harmonized standards ecosystem enables greater innovation and creates new opportunities for broadcasters and technology providers globally.”

Under the MOU, the organizations will collaborate on the development of broadcasting standards and recommended practices, support testing and certification activities, exchange technical and strategic information and coordinate joint industry engagement efforts across key global markets. The partnership is particularly significant as broadcasters worldwide continue transitioning toward IP-based, software-defined and integrated broadcast-broadband delivery systems enabled by ATSC 3.0 and related next-generation standards.

All three standards organizations agreed to hold regular coordination meetings aligned with major international broadcast industry events, including NAB Show in Las Vegas, KOBA Show in Seoul and SET Expo in Sao Paulo.“TTA is pleased to collaborate with ATSC and the SBTVD Forum to support the evolution of next-generation broadcasting technologies,” said TTA president Seunghyun Son. “Closer cooperation between standards organizations is essential to ensuring global compatibility and sustainable industry growth.”

The MOU establishes cooperation on:

• Collaboration on next-generation broadcasting standards and recommended practices. 
• Promotion of worldwide interoperability for terrestrial broadcasting services and products. 
• Coordination on testing and certification of broadcasting equipment and services.
• Support for cross-referencing and harmonization of technical standards.
• Exchange of technical and strategic information between organizations.
• Joint communication initiatives, including sharing press releases and member newsletters.
• Appointment of liaison officers to coordinate collaborative activities.

The organization will also consider expanding participation to additional standards development organizations adopting 3.0 or related technologies.

By strengthening coordination among standards organizations in the Americas and Asia, the agreement is expected to help reduce market fragmentation, encourage economies of scale for device manufacturers and accelerate innovation in areas, such as immersive media, advanced emergency information, targeted services, datacasting and mobile reception.The agreement also recognizes the importance of maintaining flexible collaboration structures that can potentially include additional standards development organizations in the future while respecting each organization’s intellectual property policies, governance models and legal frameworks.The MOU takes effect immediately and reflects the Parties’ mutual intent to deepen international cooperation in support of the future of terrestrial broadcasting worldwide.

More information is available on the ATSC website.

“LPTV has discovered a path for the future; it is time for full power to find a path of its own. Then again, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. —‘SuperFrank” Copsidas, Chairman and Founder, LPTV Broadcasters Association

To the editor of TV Tech:

This is in response to Mark Aitken’s op-ed posted on May 14, Op-Ed: Stop the False Choice—5G Broadcast Can Ride Inside ATSC 3.0, and We Can Deploy Now.

There is no false choice. Mark Aitken’s public acknowledgment of 5G Broadcast’s real strengths—its native alignment with mobile ecosystems, familiar tooling, and clear potential for reaching everyday phones—is refreshing. Still, the situation for Mark and the dedicated team at Sinclair/ONE Media is understandable.

They have invested years of sincere engineering effort into ATSC 3.0, and watching it struggle for relevance in a mobile-first world must be exhausting. The Op-Ed reads less like a confident vision and more like a heartfelt plea to keep the dream alive through increasingly complex workarounds. When so much has been invested, letting go is painful. But good intentions do not make the hybrid proposal practical.

The Time-Slicing Compromise Is a Sad Technical Patch
It is unfortunate to see talented engineers spotlighting three delicate scheduling “knobs”—CAS muting cycles, 5 ms frame alignments, and bootstrap timing promises—as if they represent breakthrough innovation. In reality, this is a fragile hack: two mismatched waveforms awkwardly sharing spectrum, complete with guard times, drift compensation, and coordination overhead that reduce efficiency and introduce real operational risks.

The small-scale Castanet pilots are admirable as lab efforts, but the use of ATSC 3.0 in Castanet is essentially a bandaid solution until 5G Broadcast is fully licensed and available. Presenting this as ready for broad deployment feels like wishful thinking born from necessity rather than strength. Much creativity is being spent gluing incompatible systems together instead of pursuing cleaner solutions.

The “Chips in Phones” Claim Deserves Gentle Honesty
The repeated emphasis that ATSC 3.0 mobile receivers are ready today comes across as more hopeful than realistic. Saankhya/Tejas demodulators exist in niche Indian reference designs, yet mainstream consumer smartphones remain untouched. Full receiver integration—antennas, RF front-ends, power management, and usable software—stays confined to controlled demos, not products people actually buy and carry.

Meanwhile, 5G Broadcast benefits from riding inside the cellular modems already present in billions of phones. The community continues to hold onto “we built some tablets” stories while the broader ecosystem has moved on.

The India D2M Hope Feels Like a Distant Lifeline
Reliance on India’s government-backed trials to generate global momentum and open the stubborn U.S. market for ATSC 3.0 is understandable. India’s unique policy environment and genuine need for low-cost solutions are real. What the Op-Ed does not mention, however, is that India’s largest wireless carrier, Jio, is actively involved in 5G Broadcast trials nationwide together with Prasar Bharati, India’s public broadcaster. Jio’s 5G Broadcast trial in Delhi, for example, is testing delivery to smartphones for both broadcast TV and public warning notifications.

Expecting India’s ATSC 3.0 efforts to magically overcome America’s carrier-controlled ecosystem, regulatory gridlock, and consumer apathy toward broadcast tuners is more poignant than persuasive. It reads like a last best hope rather than a credible strategy and does not fully reflect what is actually happening in India or Brazil.

The Phased Plan Reflects Deep Investment, Not Momentum
The three-phase roadmap—scale today’s limited ATSC 3.0 datacasting, publish yet another coexistence profile, then hope India delivers devices—feels less like bold progress and more like a holding pattern to protect existing infrastructure. After all these years, broadcasters are still being asked to wait for meaningful mobile datacasting wins.

In the end, Mark’s sincerity and the solid technical merits ATSC 3.0 offers for home and portable reception are not in doubt. But it is unfortunate to watch talented people defend such convoluted hybrids and optimistic projections when the mobile world has already chosen its direction.

True progress in broadcast datacasting will come from technologies that meet consumers where they are—inside their everyday phones—rather than asking them to embrace yesterday’s compromises. The ATSC community deserves better than fighting these rearguard actions. They deserve a graceful evolution.

Mounting demand for a next-generation video streaming solution that surpasses the latency and unidirectional limitations imposed by the currently dominant streaming architecture is generating strong support for a new standard known simply as "MOQ" (Media over QUIC).

While by all accounts, it will take at least a few more months before the Internet Engineering Task Force finalizes the MOQ specifications, there are now multiple projects underway allowing producers to try out this new multidirectional, multi-latency approach to streaming.

“There’s a buzz and excitement in the air about MOQ we’ve never seen before,” says Will Law, chief architect for the cloud technology group at Akamai and a leader in the IETF MOQ initiative.

HEIGHTENED INTEREST AT NAB
This was evident at the recent NAB Show where MOQ demos abounded on the exhibit floor and an overflow crowd filled the large meeting room devoted to the NAB’s first-ever session on the standard. Entities announcing infrastructure support for MOQ included public CDN operators Broadpeak, CacheFly, Cloudflare, and CDN77 as well as cloud compute platform providers Akamai, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Streaming software system suppliers demonstrating delivery of payloads and advanced features over MOQ-enabled facilities included Ateme, Bitmovin, EZDRM, Nomad Media, Norsk Media, Oracle Media, Synamedia, Red5 and Wowza,.

While proprietary real-time streaming systems supporting video conferencing and a host of other applications have been around for several years, MOQ is meant to satisfy the need for a standardized, ubiquitously available two-way superhighway over which video flows in any direction at any scale with latencies attuned to specific use-case requirements. That’s why Red5, a successful provider of a highly scalable WebRTC-based streaming platform, is throwing its weight behind MOQ, says Red5 CEO and co-founder Chris Allen.

“WebRTC was designed as a peer-to-peer protocol, which means there’s no standard for scaling the way we do by building out clustered cloud resources,” Allen says. “MOQ was designed from the get-go as a scalable broadcast technology for the internet, which we believe will accelerate adoption of next-generation streaming.”

The foundational set of MOQ specifications, known as MOQ Transport (MOQT), marks an incompatible break with conventional streaming modes like HLS and MPEG DASH that are based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). As a so-called connectionless platform, MOQT employs a simple publish/subscribe approach to streaming by signaling the start and end points of a session while avoiding the thousands of request/response exchanges that transpire between clients and servers in HTTP streaming.

QUIC is a modern transport protocol built on UDP that is designed to make web connections faster, more secure, and more resilient. It was originally developed by Google and later standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 9000

Moreover, the new standard provides a way to automatically tune end-to-end latencies to whatever levels meet user requirements, including real-time 200-400ms latencies that are imperceptible to humans as well as what Law calls “interactive live” at 2 seconds for use in sports betting, online casino gambling, banking and similar applications and “conservative live” supporting ironclad HD, 4K, and, eventually, 8K quality persistency at 5 seconds.

ALL YOU NEED IS CACHE
With decoding and other device rendering processes managed through leading browsers, MOQ in most instances doesn’t require client plug-in software. And depending on how MOQ-ready CDNs are designed, MOQ can also support recording live content for short-term replay and catchup and long-term storage for VOD archives and cloud DVR applications. “VOD just means my cache is big enough to hold stuff that was live a while ago,” Law says.

Paralleling MOQT development, there are other initiatives within IETF and through the closely affiliated ad hoc organization known as the OpenMOQ Software Consortium that are aimed at creating a practical operating environment for the transport protocol. They include media layer streaming formats emerging from IETF, a new client player template developed by Red5 and endorsed by the consortium, and several ready-to-deploy players, , including a MOQ-based plug-in for Bitmovin’s new multi-purpose Player Web X platform.

“We have an array of features we enable, and each is treated as an individual plug-in,” says Bitmovin product manager Jacob Arends, who describes Player X as the latest, completely rebuilt version of its popular Web X player. “From a player [configuration] perspective there’s not much more to it than that,” but with MOQ playback departing from the HTTP norms, “it takes a lot of heavy lifting on the cloud side.”

While much of the focus on MOQ has to do with overcoming the limitations of conventional B2C streaming, the protocol also needs to be accommodated in post-production playouts to producers’ broadcast and OTT affiliates, notes Gwendal Simon, senior director for video network technology at Synamedia. “We’re bringing MOQ into our Quortex PowerVu multitrack contribution management system,” Simon says.

STAMFORD, Conn.–The LPTV Broadcasters Association today sent a formal letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr calling for immediate regulatory action to allow low-power television to use the 3GPP 5G Broadcast standard as a voluntary transmission option for LPTV stations.

The letter urges the Federal Communications Commission to fast-track a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in response to HC2 Broadcasting’s 2025 Petition for Rulemaking (MB Docket No. 25-168) and move expeditiously toward final rules. HC2—which owns 131 LPTV/Class A stations and four full-power stations—has been granted experimental licenses to allow two LPTV stations in Connecticut to test 5G Broadcast.

If approved, LPTV operators say they could use 3GPP 5G Broadcast to deliver linear TV, live events, emergency alerts, and datacasting directly to millions of 5G- and 6G-enabled smartphones and tablets—no additional hardware or SIM card required.

The association has been at the forefront of using 5G Broadcast as an alternative to ATSC 3.0, (aka NextGenTV), to which U.S. broadcasters are transitioning. 5G Broadcast is a direct-to-mobile platform that runs independently of any other service on a smartphone chip be it cell service, satellite, wifi, or Bluetooth.

Frank Copsidas, an early advocate of 5G Broadcast—which has garnered more support in Europe than in the U.S. so far—is chairman and founder of the LPTV Broadcasters Association and began publicly pushing for the use of 5G Broadcast in 2023 after he formed “XGN,” a startup dedicated to promoting the standard. That same year, XGN began testing 5G via LPTV station WWOO-LD in Westmoreland, N.H., which had been awarded the industry’s first application for an experimental 5G Broadcast STA.

At the NAB Show last month, another start-up, Castanet, announced the launch of a hybrid ATSC 3.0 and 5G Broadcast internet pilot network in Las Vegas. The pilot network uses ATSC 3.0 as the transport layer for 5G Broadcast in alignment with current FCC regulations and industry standards. Castanet said the deployment demonstrates how LPTV spectrum can serve as a foundational asset in next-generation internet infrastructure.

In his letter to the FCC chairman, Copsidas said broadcast TV “has been stuck in the regulatory Stone Age while cellular technology has advanced at lightning speed.”

“Recognizing 3GPP 5G Broadcast under Part 74 will unleash a major new opportunity for investment,” Copsidas wrote. “Industry forecasts show the U.S. market for 5G Broadcast services and infrastructure is poised to grow tenfold over the next five years**. It’s time to delete this outdated dichotomy and give American broadcasters — especially agile LPTV operators—the tools to capture this explosive growth while strengthening emergency communications and delivering the mobile-first experience consumers demand.”

Copsidas said that new smartphones that support 3GPP 5G Broadcast are slated to be deployed this fall and said that LPTV is the “ideal proving ground for this technology.”

“The spectrum, technology and Q3 2026 smartphone rollouts are ready,” the letter concludes. “The only missing piece is forward-looking policy.”

NEW YORK—IAB Tech Lab has announced new Attributes to describe live content and a new Substitution Macro in OpenRTB.

It has also opened up public comments on them through May 28, 2026.

The updates introduce standardized bidstream signals that help define whether content is a livestream, real-time, or a first broadcast, along with enhancements that allow more explicit communication of pricing and discounting between supply and demand platforms.

"As more live events move into programmatic channels, a total shift in strategy is needed; buyers must condense weekly budgets into mere hours," said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. "By providing clearer signals, we're giving buyers and sellers the transparency they need to fully capitalize on ultra-premium, real-time inventory."

The update clarifies an existing field and adds two optional fields to OpenRTB and AdCOM objects that allow sellers to describe the "liveness" of content in the bid request. These fields distinguish between content that is occurring at the exact moment a bid is sent, content that is being streamed in real time but not necessarily live, and content that is in its first scheduled broadcast window. This added layer of signaling gives buyers more precise context about the nature and timing of the inventory they are evaluating.

In tandem, updates to substitution macros refine how price-related data is passed in the bidstream, specifically enabling clearer communication of discounts and net pricing back to demand-side platforms. Together, these changes improve how both content metadata and pricing signals are expressed within OpenRTB, reducing interpretation gaps between buyers and sellers.

These enhancements address growing complexity in programmatic environments, particularly with the rise of CTV and live event inventory supported by initiatives such as the Live Event Ad Playbook. As more live and near-live programming becomes available programmatically, differences in timing and format, from live sports to premieres to streaming channels, directly influence how inventory is valued. Clearer signals help buyers make more informed bidding decisions and support more efficient pricing and yield for sellers.

"Live content signals help us better understand the context of live inventory so we can deliver buyers' budgets effectively," said Rob Hazan, GM, Product Management, The Trade Desk. "This enables agencies and advertisers to better achieve their marketing goals and sellers to more effectively monetize their most valuable media assets."

The work was developed through the Programmatic Supply Chain Commit Group, with continued industry input encouraged during the public comment period, which remains open through May 28, 2026. Feedback will inform final specification updates and broader adoption across the ecosystem.

To learn more about the Attributes describing live content and the new Substitution Macro in OpenRTB and submit comments, please visit https://iabtechlab.com/openrtb/livesignals/