A Channel-Sharing Proposal for ATSC .0

JOHNSTON, IOWA-One of the questions that has been on my mind and the minds of many of my colleagues around the country is, how does ATSC 3.0 become a viable broadcast standard? Given the relatively short history of ATSC 1.0 compared to the NTSC standard it replaced, it will already be a challenge in the consumer market space given the number and relative newness of the televisions that have been purchased over the last few years. Add to the mix, the uncertainty of the spectrum auction, the associated quiet period and just when stations will be able to talk to each other again and what will they be able to say. However, planning for the future is a requirement, not an option and not an indication of whether a station is participating in the auction or not. Remember that participation doesn't guarantee a station that their offer will be accepted and if it is not accepted, they still have to deal with the future as a television station.

So for whatever reason or reasons, here I am working for a television station in a market with other television stations that are still on the air and we all believe that ATSC 3.0 is the future television broadcast standard. So we are all dealing with the same question, how do we get to the future without sacrificing the past? More succinctly stated, how do we get to the new mobile audience without disenfranchising the traditional fixed audience? Remember that for the foreseeable future, the traditional audience is either directly or indirectly paying the bills.

HYPOTHETICAL EXAMPLE

One proposal I have come up with is that one of the stations in each market should become the initial ATSC 3.0 facility and partner with some or all of the other stations in the market in a channel-sharing arrangement. I will use the Des Moines, Iowa market as my hypothetical example.

Iowa Public Television's KDIN currently broadcasts an HD stream, two, potentially three SD streams and an audio-only service. For KDIN to make the jump to ATSC 3.0, we would have to be able to continue to supply our existing services to our audiences. No single ATSC 1.0 partner station would have the capacity so it would require multiple partners each carrying a service, possibly two.

Fig. 1: Within a few kilometers of the KDIN transmitter site are six additional full-power television stations. This map shows the FCC contours with the projected coverage for each station is pretty similar with one exception.

Click on the Image to Enlarge

LINK:	http://www.tvtechnology.com/atsc3/0031/a-channelsharing-proposal-for-a...
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