The four broadcast groups behind ATSC 3.0-based datacasting company EdgeBeam Wireless this week named Conrad Clemson to serve as its CEO.
Clemson takes the reins of the new joint venture company having led EditShare as CEO. Prior to EditShare, he founded and was CEO of BNI Video, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2011. At Cisco, he held senior leadership positions.
E.W. Scripps, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair, which formed the joint venture, are optimistic about EdgeBeam’s prospects. The new company will leverage a portion of the broadcasters’ spectrum to deliver data via an ATSC 3.0, one-to-many, over-the-air broadcast network.
Ultimately, datacasting via 3.0 could generate an entirely new revenue stream for the partners that boosts earnings and the value of their TV spectrum.
In this interview, the new EdgeBeam CEO discusses his priorities, when the company expects to begin generating revenue, its sales strategy, the competitive landscape and more. (An edited transcript follows.)
TV Tech: What are your top priorities as you take the reins at EdgeBeam Wireless?
Conrad Clemson: The first thing anybody does walking in is assess what the situation is. I'm a technologist by background, so I think of things oftentimes in a techie way.
As I was going through the process of getting to know the EdgeBeam team, I laid out the concepts of running the company in two-week sprints and then I laid out a six-month path.
The key place to start is really assessing where we are. As we come out with that assessment, the No. 2 thing is going out and building the team.
What I found with companies is that you really have three important elements that must come together: the team, the technology and the market.
We’ve got a great market out there. Everybody needs data. Technology, we understand what it is. We’re going to have to do some work to make sure we’re ready to commercialize it.
Then the real key is going out, understanding the team we have in place and what we’re going to do to supplement that to create the kind of team that’s going to build a multi-$100 million or billion-dollar company.
TVT: When do you think you will have your executive and sales teams in place?
CC: My hope is within three months, we'll have an executive team and the sales team in place.
We really need to understand where in the commercialization phase we are to understand how much we are looking at order-driving, execution-oriented sales teams vs. kind of the Marines storming the beach—business-development resources—that help us establish that initial beachhead.
My feeling is that early on, we're going to be doing more business development than sales as we’re out there establishing the market, establishing who EdgeBeam is and then driving forward.
But make no mistake about it. The most important thing we want to do is to commercialize the technology, and that will drive on the sales team.
This is going to be a very technically oriented sale to begin with. That means you have both a sales organization, but also the sales engineers that go with that. That’s a critical piece as well.
The other thing that will be very important for us to do is to really validate and build two key elements: our core culture and our senior leadership team. Then we can develop our strategy.
With those three pieces in place, it will be time to turn the crank and get the job done.
TVT: It’s a frequent refrain in the TV industry that some younger folks don’t recognize television is transmitted over the air. Others might have a vague understanding, but think of it as something grandma watches. I wonder if that extends into the boardrooms of your potential clients. If so, how do you change those perceptions and demonstrate 3.0 datacasting is a viable alternative to other wireless services?
CC: One of the things that really attracted me to EdgeBeam is there are a lot of wireless service providers out there and the sales program always goes the same way: “Hey, I’m faster; I’m cheaper and I have more coverage than the other guy.”
This is the first time in a long time that I think a company has a chance to come out and say, “We have something different to offer.”
We're not here to surf the web. We’re here because we have a differentiated wireless offering. If that offering aligns with the kinds of services you're trying to put out into the marketplace, we can just do it better.
We have unique strengths. The first thing is this is a network that is naturally a broadcast network, a point-to-multipoint network. What are the applications for one-to-many? There are a lot of those.
If you're offering a 5G signal, it’s really good and it’s really fast, but it ain’t going to go through concrete.”
Conrad Clemson
There are easy ones like [streaming offload for] high-value live events, be they sports, news or otherwise.
There’s downloading software to stuff and by the way, in the case of interesting things like automobiles, there’s a ton of downloads. Those are great point-to-multipoint applications. But then you look and ask what about stock tickers? What about betting tickers?
Then there’s the core strength of having a very powerful transmitter. If you’re in the middle of a city with buildings and parking garages, we are unique in our ability to put our signal through to your endpoint.
If you’re offering a 5G signal, it’s really good and it’s really fast, but it ain’t going to go through concrete.
Then there’s timing, which goes to positioning opportunities. We look at those three things that make us different from the other guys.
We can come and do something that, quite frankly, is better—not just a little bit of a minor difference [compared to wireless companies’ offerings].
TVT: I think the thing most people in this industry want to know is when EdgeBeam will earn its first 3.0-based datacasting dollar.
CC: Let me be like a classic entrepreneur. When are you going to sell one? When are you going to sell 100 and when are you going to sell a million?
I think the company remains hopeful that between now and the end of the year, we’ll sell one.
We don’t light up $10 million, or $100 million, or pick a number of revenue. That’s not the plan. I think we want our objective to be as quick as possible.
And don't hold me to December. It might be January. The point is in the near term, we should see first customer revenue.
How that grows is both driven by internal constraints—our ability to invest and go get that revenue—and the external constraints of EdgeBeam as a company, looking back to our spectrum granters and showing them we can do something meaningful with this spectrum. We want to earn the right to have more spectrum.
TVT: A few months ago, the National Association of Broadcasters petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to move forward on a plan to sunset ATSC 1.0. Will EdgeBeam remain viable if there's no movement on that sunset? If the sunset is established, what will that do for EdgeBeam’s business?
CC: We're going to make sure we’re ready to go, and we’ve got a great service. We know we can see some early wins, but we're going to be really thoughtful about not stepping on the gas ahead of where the real revenue—revenue with a capital R—is coming from.
TVT: Does that mean that if the industry remains stuck in the dual-standard DTV world, that you’ll be able to make a go of it with the 7 to 8 Megabits per second that are available today for 3.0 datacasting in transition markets?
CC: Absolutely. But we need to challenge ourselves with how we get creative. If the demand for our services is outstripping the capacity to provide them, that’s an opportunity for us to be smart technologists and go figure it out.
We’ll take the highest-value pieces and put them on the limited bandwidth that we have, and we will figure out how to go create some more bandwidth and be good engineers, innovators and entrepreneurs to do that.
TVT: When EdgeBeam was announced, the joint partner companies said there would be an opportunity for other broadcasters to profit from allocating some spectrum for EdgeBeam datacasting. Do you have any other details about how that will work or what it will look like?
CC: So, day one was Monday. It’s a little early to be having conversations with potential other partners.
Having said that, we intend to be an open environment. Our assumption is as we start to show success other broadcasters will look around and want to be a part of that.
I'll be excited to see that, but I would step back and say the first thing we have to prove is that the dog will eat the dog food. That will create the energy and the excitement in other broadcasters to want to be a part of this, too.
TVT: At the risk of mixing metaphors, what low-hanging fruit are you targeting to demonstrate the dog food is tasty?
CC: We’re seeing a lot of traction in e-GPS [enhanced GPS], and I think the IoT [Internet of Things] market is ripe. I think those are all markets we can start exploiting quickly with fast turnarounds.
But some of the markets we are going to attack are multiyear engagements. It’s time to get those started, as well, with a clear understanding that we need to balance the risk-reward [ratio] and make sure that as a small company we’re focusing our limited resources in the right place.
TVT: Do you have any idea about how your rates will stack up against your wireless competitors?
CC: Good question. And to be honest with you, I don’t know the answer to that at the moment.
Having said that, I think one of the things that we can really strive for is to provide very deterministic costs for customers out there trying to bring those things [their data] onto our network.
As a young company coming into this environment, I think we have the opportunity to look at what our end customers are trying to accomplish and create pricing models that line up with that and have a great advantage.
The question for our end clients is, what kind of an economic value proposition can we bring to them? One in which they look at us and say, “this is a great opportunity,” because they know exactly what it is going to cost, independent of how many people watch it [or how many end points receive the datacast].
TVT: Among the four joint venture partners, two different broadcast core network solutions were in use as three of the four deployed their previous iterations of 3.0-based datacasting. I was told in previous interviews that the one chosen for EdgeBeam would be up to the new CEO. What have you chosen?
CC: The easy answer would be great. That would be there’s a single one that everybody has that’s fully deployed, and we only have to operate with one element out there.
The last time I checked, there were at least two of these things that were deployed out in the network. If you look into an IP network and ask whose routers are being used, well, they use multiple people’s routers.
When you’re building a mobile network, whose packet core gets used? There are four or five of them out there. So, I wouldn't want to preclude [any of them] and say: “The answer has to be A, or B or A and B.”
We’re going to have to look and see what's in there and what has the capabilities needed. My guess is, in all likelihood, we’ll have to go through a process of both rationalizing that and understanding what makes sense and what we should do out there. Then, we’ll make that decision over time.
TVT: Is there anything else you’d like to share about EdgeBeam?
CC: A couple of things. First, what a great time it is to be standing up a company. I’ve been working with the teams here for a couple of months, and I will tell you this is a world-class set of companies and investors to be working with.
The other thing is this is ground zero. This is the fourth company I’ve been a part of in a very early stage of growth and development.
I think this is a really interesting time in the industry to start taking advantage of AI tools that are coming online. Not stuff that we’re building into the product, but rather AI technologies and new capabilities that will help us as we think about the internal workings of the company in a native-AI fashion.
More information about EdgeBeam Wireless is available on the company’s website.
