While broadcasters eagerly await an FCC rulemaking they hope brings clarity to a sunset of ATSC 1.0, the TV industry continues incremental progress on ATSC 3.0 with new technology, business and marketing developments that will play important parts on the NextGen TV stage at the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
(Editor’s Note: This article was written prior to the Federal Communications Commission rulemaking [MB Docket No. 16-142] reply comment deadline of Feb. 18.)
Among them are the latest developments on the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS), various enhancements to the standard, addressable multicast service, datacasting business progress and the latest on the headway ATSC 3.0 is making outside the United States. These and other 3.0 developments, however, are overshadowed by any FCC movement on its pending Notice of Proposed Rulemaking aimed at the transition to NextGen TV and sunsetting the existing ATSC 1.0 digital television service.
“I think what we need to see happen is a clear sunset date,” said Robert Folliard, senior vice president for government relations and distribution at Gray Media. “Everybody knows from their own personal lives that without a deadline, nothing ever happens. I think consumer electronics, manufacturers, broadcasters, everyone needs a clear road map for us to get this done.”
Leave No Viewer Behind
Perhaps the thorniest issue obstructing bringing today’s DTV to a date-certain conclusion is 3.0’s lack of backward compatibility with 1.0. For an industry that’s built upon serving the public with free news, sports and entertainment—and relies on the ad and retrans revenue they generate—a flash cut stranding over-the-air viewers is simply out of the question.
In January at CES 2026, Pearl TV announced an effort to take on this issue with its Converter Box Initiative, a program that aims to make affordable converter devices with a target price below $60 available to viewers for their existing TVs. At the 2026 NAB Show, the business group representing seven major TV station groups will discuss the progress it’s made on the initiative since then.
“Right now, we’re pulling together the tenets of the program, which provide for set-top box makers to participate where we’ve negotiated special discounts on aspects that would otherwise commercially be higher priced without this negotiation,” Pearl TV managing director Anne Schelle said.
While such lower-cost converters may not include the full attributes of the standard available on a NextGen TV, they will ensure viewers can maintain their over-the-air service and receive “the better audio and video capabilities” of 3.0, she said.
Converter boxes meeting the program’s specifications will qualify manufacturers for special component discounts Pearl TV is negotiating that will help to keep the price down by guaranteeing volume. “Guaranteed volume means everything in the supply chain to drive lower costs,” she said.
At the show, Pearl TV will release details of the devices’ specifications, as well as the findings of a qualitative study conducted by Magid Associates to test the $60 price target against feature trade-offs, Schelle said.
Delivering a lower-cost converter today would be a challenge given the AI server-
driven demand for DDR5 RAM and the associated price spike. However, by the time final FCC 3.0 transition rules are set and implemented, it’s likely memory costs will go back down, she said.
The availability of lower-cost converters addresses one of three main questions the FCC raised in its NPRM, Folliard said. “I think if we as broadcasters were to go to the FCC and say, ‘Give us a sunset date, thank you,’ the answer is going to be ‘no.’
“But if we go in, which is what we’re doing, saying, ‘We’re going to produce a low-cost converter device that makes sure consumers are not left behind,” he said. “We’ve done consumer research that finds over-the-air antenna users today say, ‘Yeah, I would pay that price. That’s a bargain.’ We’ve addressed the DRM concerns that are out there and solved the signal signing concerns that are out there, if we can tick off each of those items, I think it’s a different story.”
Tech Developments
NAB Show traditionally gives vendors the chance to roll out their latest advancements. The same is true of those focused on 3.0 technology with exhibits in their own booths, the ATSC booth in the Central Hall (C1655), the Pilot Pavilion and elsewhere.
At the time of this writing, many of these exhibit details are unclear. However, as in year’s past, the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) is producing a tearsheet that will be available at the show to inform attendees the location of vendor booths with 3.0 technology, the times and locations of 3.0-related presentations and “all the fun stuff, the happy hours and the cool events,” said ATSC President Madeleine Noland.
ATSC’s new vice president of standards development, Luis Fausto, and Noland will present an update on ATSC 3.0 during the SBE Ennes workshop on April 22.
Sinclair will highlight its work on development of “Broadcast-to-Everything” (B2X) in the ATSC booth. “That work is essential for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which is opening up the total available market to our IP platform,” said Mark Aitken, president of ONE Media and senior vice president of Advanced Technology at Sinclair.
Work is underway at ONE Media Technologies and more broadly by ATSC to align the standard with all of the 3GPP platforms and services. Among those is enabling IP multicast via 3.0 with addressable data flows, something datacasting clients can rely upon to ensure their valuable data is only received by those to whom they intend to send it.
“The work going on right now is a bridging technology that will bring us all the way to physical layer addressing, which changes the nature of the waveform itself,” said Aitken, adding that proof-of-concept deployments are expected in the second half of the year.
ATSC 3.0 Network Design
Advancing ATSC 3.0 network design is among the projects going on at the standards organization and will likely be a topic of discussion at its NAB Show booth. “We’re working on Recommended Practices for network design,” ATSC’s Noland said.
“How many transmitters do you need? What kind of robustness do you need? We have some of that work done in A/327 already, but this is a little bit of a bigger project where you’re really thinking about, ‘How can you set up your ModCods and your towers to achieve a given goal,’” she said.
Gray Media intends to tout its efforts to leverage the 3.0 over-the-top back channel to ensure robust OTA reception.
“One of the key things we have heard loud and clear from consumers is that the 1.0 signal is not great,” Gray’s Folliard said. “It’s not robust; it’s not reliable. If you can give me a way to get a more reliable signal that I don’t lose when the wind blows, that alone may be the biggest underappreciated consumer benefit of the 3.0 signal.”
Gray has been working with ATSC and others on updating the 3.0 standard to allow what the station group is calling “recovery channels,” he said. “If you are getting an over-the-air signal and it’s all fine, and then you temporarily lose it—maybe because of the digital cliff effect—what will happen is you’ll be able to get the signal automatically via the internet.”
Calling these recovery channels a “game changer” for OTA television, Folliard said the update to the standard will enable broadcasters to deliver “a perfectly stable and reliable OTA signal to viewers.”
Much work still needs to be done, and “much of what we have done is still theoretical,” he said. “Nonetheless, it is incredibly promising and another example of why we need to push the 3.0 transition forward.”
NAB Show will also give broadcasters the chance to learn the latest advances in BPS, including what’s going on with the U.S. Department of Transportation-funded BPS testing and a realignment of NAB tech leadership to focus on the ATSC 3.0-based backup to GPS. Several papers will be presented on BPS as well as demonstrations in the NAB Pilot booth and vendor booths.
EdgeBeam Wireless, the 3.0 datacasting-focused joint venture of E.W. Scripps, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair formed in January 2025 and announced later that year, will be at the NAB Show with two goals in mind: supporting its partners and talking to other broadcasters that could help it extend its 3.0 footprint, EdgeBeam CEO Conrad Clemson said.
Expanding the Ecosystem
“From the time I got here [June 2025] up until a couple of months ago, we would look at both the breadth and depth of our ATSC 3 deployments and say, ‘Wow, look at all the places we are. Isn’t this great?’” Clemson said. “Now we have a different conversation: ‘We’re trying to get an opportunity up here, and I don’t have coverage or I don’t have the depth of coverage I need.’”
NAB Show is “a great time” for EdgeBeam to start the process of expanding its coverage ecosystem, he said.
The show will also see a large contingent of broadcasters from other countries on hand to support or investigate the standard. Fresh off success in Brazil, where the ATSC 3.0 physical layer and other components of the standard were selected for that nation’s new DTV+ (formerly known as TV 3.0) standard, the ATSC organization will focus its efforts on the Americas and India, said Noland.
“We’re putting our resources there because our feeling is that in the Americas, there’s more of a clear path,” she said.
All of these 3.0 developments will occur against the backdrop of the FCC rulemaking that many broadcasters hope will bring clarity to an ATSC 1.0 sunset. For his part, Aitken is encouraged by recent Truth Social posts from President Donald Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr in support of Nexstar’s acquisition of Tegna, which he said demonstrate the government’s understanding of the vital role local TV broadcasters play in their communities.
“The relevance of local markets, the relevance of what we do in those local markets is increasingly understood,” he said. “Our uniqueness is distinguished by the roles we play there. We’ve now got this platform [3.0] to make a new business and strengthen our ability to serve our local communities. But we are resource-constrained [by the channel-sharing 3.0 rollout].
“There has to be some deference given to ensure the success of that service because an authorized service that cannot be received is not a service. It’s a policy failure.”
