WASHINGTON—The Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN) Alliance made the rounds at the Federal Communications Commission last week to underscore the importance of removing the ATSC 1.0-3.0 simulcast requirement, establishing a date certain for the shutoff of legacy DTV and setting a date by which broadcasters must transmit 3.0 to facilitate a successful transition and support continued technological innovation in broadcasting.
AWARN Alliance executive director Dave Arland and Ed Czarnecki, AWARN steering committee member and vice president of government and international affairs at Digital Alert Systems, met July 25 with FCC Media Bureau and Public Safety Bureau staff, as well as legal and policy advisers to Commissioners Anna Gomez and Olivia Trusty, to discuss how realizing all of the benefits of advanced emergency warnings depends on shutting down ATSC 1.0 and fully transitioning to 3.0, along with other issues, according to notices of ex parte communication sent to the agency.
Arland and Czarnecki told Media Bureau staff that “the full capabilities of the ATSC 3.0 standard require that each broadcaster have at its disposal an entire 6Mhz channel, as is done today with ATSC 1.0 transmissions, in order to have the certainty of knowing what technology will be utilized in the future before committing to more extensive deployment of ATSC 3.0’s full range of capabilities,” according to one of the ex parte notices.
Certainty of a date for the full transition to 3.0 will enable local stations to plan for “necessary technical upgrades and staff training to more fully deploy the capabilities of ATSC 3.0 such as advanced emergency alerting and information messaging,” the pair told the Media Bureau staff.
During the Media Bureau meeting, the AWARN Alliance representatives discussed A331, the ATSC standard on signaling, delivery, synchronization and error protection. Media Bureau staff inquired about the “wake-up bit” that can bring an ATSC 3.0 receiver out of sleep mode during an emergency, the notice about the meeting said.
The meeting with Public Safety Bureau staff covered the same material with additional discussion about advanced emergency alerting and information demonstrations. Noting that there have been some demos and real-world examples of how 3.0 has enhanced emergency alerting, Arland and Czarnecki added, “it’s very much a ‘chicken-and-egg’ situation” as broadcasters wait for the ability to devote all of their assigned spectrum to 3.0 and for more of their audience to have NextGen TVs and receiving devices.
The meeting with Gomez’s staff covered much of the same territory. Deena Shelter, legal adviser to Gomez, noted that the FCC does not want to leave any consumer behind during the transition and that there is no coupon program, as there was during the analog-to-digital transition. The AWARN pair said the transition would not succeed without certainty from the FCC regarding 1.0 shutoff.
Arland and Czarnecki told Shelter that “[i]naction could threaten the important technological innovations that ATSC 3.0 is designed to deliver,” the ex parte communication notice of the meeting with Gomez’s staff said.
During the meeting with Trusty’s staff, ATSC 3.0 digital rights management (DRM) was discussed in addition to the topics addressed at the other meetings. Broadcasters are using DRM to ensure free over-the-air transmission of high-value content is available, the communications notice for the Trusty meeting said.
“Arland noted that consumers have already purchased more than 15,000,000 ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV sets that work seamlessly with DRM technology and that only a small relative number of consumers are impacted by a set-top box product sold with a banned chipset that cannot be authorized to decode protected content,” the notice said, referring to the SiliconDust HDHomeRun 4K Flex and the HiSilicon SoC (system on a chip) that it uses.
