Editor's note: This article was written prior to the FCC's formal announcement on June 30 of the planned auction of 160 MHz of midband spectrum.
As broadcasters wait for the FCC to release the ground rules for the congressionally mandated upper C-band auction in July 2027, the gap is widening between what their lobbyists and suppliers say will happen if they lose all 180 MHz of the high-value block.
The contrasting perspectives, ranging from near panic to sanguinity that—with enough transition time—broadcasters will be fine—played out in interviews, recent Federal Communications Commission filings and a high-level executive C-band panel at NAB Show. It’s still unclear how much spectrum will end up on the auction block, how long stations will have to make whatever transitions to alternatives are necessary and what they can expect in the way of compensation for the costs.
The View From NAB and NABA
Messaging from the National Association of Broadcasters, the North American Broadcast Association (NABA) and other industry representatives expressed deep concerns on all points, starting with the possibility of losing more than 100 MHz of upper C-band spectrum. After 60% of the overall C-band total vanished in the 2021 lower C-band auction, losing all 180 MHz in the upper band could cause irreparable harm, NABA Director-General Rebecca Hanson said.
“We have members already suffering after the first auction,” Hanson said, citing evidence submitted in an FCC filing by the North American Spectrum Alliance, an independent project launched last year under NABA management. “I hesitate to say broadcasters will be just fine if we can keep 80 GHz. Current constraints are already having an impact.
“There are no viable alternatives that match what C-band delivers,” she said. “Ku-band has rain-fade problems; fiber has penetration problems; there can be multiday outages on internet connections. In research you find claims to the contrary, but what’s in the NAB filings challenges those claims.”
Indeed, earlier this year NAB advised the commission, “The record consistently demonstrates that claims of ‘viable alternatives’ are overstated, unsupported, and incomplete.” It went so far as to cite discussions with broadcasters that showed one vendor’s claims of offering a terrestrial alternative to C-band with “zero downtime” over several years “to be false, or at least misleading.
There are no viable alternatives that match what C-band delivers.”
Rebecca Hanson, president, NABA
“Terrestrial circuits are vulnerable to physical cuts, congestion, vendor outages and first-mile failures, with restoration times measured in hours or days—conditions completely incompatible with broadcast operations,” NAB said. “No one offers a universal, one-for-one [C-band] replacement capable of delivering the same reliability, coverage, scalability and resilience nationwide.”
‘So Many Options’
But the no “one-for-one replacement” caveat is beside the point for many broadcasters hoping to orchestrate various combinations of these transport solutions to meet NAB’s requirements. Even if the whole C-band sky falls, they said there’s reason to believe technology will open ways forward that could even work to their advantage.
“If we lose all or substantially all of the spectrum, which I think we probably will, our plan will be to forklift the traffic to Ku-band and then supplement that with some number of terrestrial paths,” said Alastair Hamilton, senior vice president of distribution engineering and architecture at Fox, who spoke on the NAB Show C-band panel. “I’m glad we have so many options.”
On the satellite front, along with the Ku-band option, broadcasters could also use low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite capacity, Hamilton noted. Deepak Mathur, president of media at SES, said the satellite operator is aggressively working with suppliers to design and build a new set of Ku-band satellites enabling higher power outputs in heavy rain zones and “cross-strapping” tie-ins to uplinks that work in the C-band.
“We believe that we can come very close, not exactly all the way there, but very, very close to the network reliability that you’ve enjoyed with C-band,” Mathur told the NAB Show panel audience. Setting 2030 as the target date when broadcasters would be able to deploy retrofitted Ku-band antennas for the uplink strategy, he added, “We’re on a good track to get there.”
The ‘Last-Mile’ Challenge
For many broadcasters, a comprehensive C-band replacement solution will have to include support for off-shore connectivity, which in CBS’s case includes service in the Caribbean, parts of Latin America and Canada. Whatever the hybrid replacement solution turns out to be, “it’s going to put more onus on us to make sure the carriers and the service providers are indeed routing the paths and have the proper resiliency within their networks,” Fuller said, noting that the last-mile transition is the “hard part.”
Hamilton agreed. “That’s the bit that worries us the most,” he said. “Our broadcast markets for the most part have some reasonable connectivity, and we can go to the top five or six MVPDs on the cable side with fiber, internet, satellite. We’ve got whatever the number is, 90%, but it’s that extra 10% that’s going to be the real challenge. I think we’re going to have to get creative.”
Just how hard that will be remains to be seen.
There’s a well-proven solution readily at hand, said Rich Young, head of global products at LTN, who appeared on a second vendor panel at the NAB Show C-band session. Station groups and multichannel operators can “bring one feed in” on the IP network and “deliver it with synchronized latency to every location,” he said, noting the LTN Network coverage was on course to connect customers accounting for an aggregate 1,700-plus broadcast station affiliates plus multichannel video programming distributors reaching 98% of “the MVPD eyeballs.”
The range of possibilities was well illustrated by last month’s announcement that 330 PBS member stations are adopting LTN’s IP platform. Without mentioning the upper C-band issue, PBS said the move was aimed at “modernizing and future proofing” the PBS Interconnection system. The LTN Network will deliver up to nine linear broadcast feeds from PBS and affiliated networks to member stations while enabling always-on support for inter-station content sharing and contributions of locally produced content to regional and national broadcasts.
LTN is tackling the C-band replacement issue with multivendor integrations and network enhancements aimed at improving reliability, scalability and operational visibility. For example, a collaboration with Appear integrates that firm’s high-density X Platform to support encoding and decoding IP-native live video contribution and distribution payloads on the LTN network.
Harmonic is another supplier partnering with LTN, in this case through a tie-in with Harmonic’s XOS Advanced Media Processor software appliance used in MVPD headends to unify encoding, playout and delivery. As Andrew Hildenbrandt, Harmonic’s solutions director for broadcast and primary distribution solutions, makes clear, LTN is just one of the paths XOS customers can take in their adjustments to C-band replacement.
“At the affiliate edge, XOS acts as a ‘headend-in-a-box,’ offering a flexible and
future-proof solution for distribution via Ku-band satellite, managed IP through partners like LTN or Zixi, CDN or hybrid workflows,” Hildenbrandt told TV Tech. “With XOS media processor, we are embracing a very straightforward but powerful idea: broadcasters and programmers can deliver any content, over any platform, to any affiliate.”
Multiplatform Approach
Other suppliers said it’s possible to fashion a seamless flow of live-event feeds into production and out to affiliates without relying on C-band, but doing so requires a means of orchestrating support from more than one platform.
Synamedia, for example, has long enabled use of its workflows in multiple transport environments, including “delivering content over satellite securely for over 30 years,” noted Synamedia Director of Distribution Kenelm Deen, another NAB Show C-band session speaker.
“There’s no one technology that will solve this,” Deen said. “There will be multiple technologies for different use-case applications.” He said Synamedia, with an edge platform “that can receive across any network technology, be it Ku with BSF [bandstop filters], IP, Zixi, SRT—any protocol,” is working with broadcasters to shape post-C-band paths precisely to their needs.
Zixi is also working with broadcasters making the transition from C-band on the assumption that “there’s no one technology that can replace it,” as Alan Young, vice president of strategic business development, put it during the NAB Show session. “We act as a trust boundary for a lot of traffic as it passes through the workflow,” he said.
Zixi’s Zen Master manages all the complexity of orchestrating hitless switching across multiuse IP networks so latency is deterministically fixed “everywhere at every receive site” with transmissions in and out of multiple vendor workflows, Young said. “Doing that, you can create five 9s or maybe even better if you add more paths,” he added, noting that Zixi “is working with pretty much everyone on this panel and many others.”
Blended Connectivity
Coming from a different perspective on support for C-band replacement through hybrid transmission solutions, Dejero has been showing broadcasters how its TITAN Command platform can be used to orchestrate video flows at high performance across 5G and LEO networks utilizing the blended connectivity enabled by its field-based EnGo 3 transmitter.
At the NAB Show, Dejero teamed with other suppliers, including Clear-Com, GlobalM, Matrox Video and Ross Video, in a live “field-to-air” demo that leveraged use of the TITAN Command orchestration platform to combine cellular and Eutelsat’s OneWeb LEO constellation into a resilient alternative to C-band in a multivendor environment.
“We have the right technology and are in the middle of trying to understand what the business model looks like and what the next steps should be,” said Kevin Fernandes, Dejero’s chief revenue officer, adding that working out the business model includes figuring out a way that LEO network capacity can be monetized for as-needed broadcast industry use.
“These discussions don’t happen overnight,” he added. “Right now, we’re putting TITAN out there and showing it works.”
Other suppliers are bucking the perception that C-band replacement requires hybrid multiplatform approaches by offering single-platform solutions they say can do the job with C-band-caliber performance on the internet. One such advocate is BCNEXXT. In an interview, Graham Sharp, its sales and marketing vice president, noted successes in the playout arena, including providing Sky Europe with cloud-based playout support on 220 channels, as a foundation to providing a C-band alternative.
“Our whole system is developed around reducing CPU power and distribution costs,” Sharp said, noting BCNEXXT is hoping to close on its first large U.S. station group deal by year’s end. “That’s why we think it’s a good alternative to satellite distribution.”
Another executive expressing confidence in a single IP-based platform solution to the C-band replacement issue is Michelle Munson, CEO and co-founder of Eluvio. At the NAB Show event, Munson said Eluvio’s global broadcast fabric supports any-to-any networks at global scales “built on top of TCP/IP with a novel decentralized content routing protocol that allows distribution meeting latency targets…with deterministic global switching” and “multipath SMPTE 2022-7 routing throughout.”
“One distribution serves all receivers, and along with that, each receiver is dynamically able to become a new output,” she added. “We have the flexibility, I think, this is really about. It’s not just about replacing satellite. It’s the transformation of the industry into what could be a truly over-the-top, flexible, simple, data-driven kind of workflow that we’ve really not been able to take advantage of before.”
Learn more about the challenges facing C-band users in the TV Tech Talk, “C-Band Spectrum Changes: The Next Infrastructure Shift for Broadcasters,” July 29 at 2 p.m. ET. To register, click here.
