NextGen TV Deployment Picks Up Steam

01/07/2020

WASHINGTON-ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGen TV)-got off to a flying start early this year, with the first TV sets for U.S. consumers being displayed at CES in January and rollouts across the country set to go like a line of dominoes set in motion.

Then came the pandemic.

We're now halfway through 2020. Has the scramble to maintain some sort of normalcy in TV station day-to-day operations pushed the plan for wide-scale deployment of this new breed of television to the wayside, or is it continuing to track?

There was a slight delay, but it was not a serious delay, said Mark Aitken, senior vice president of advanced technology for Sinclair and president of the company's NextGen TV arm, ONE Media. Things are back in gear now.

The starting gun fired on May 26 with the launch of NextGen TV in Las Vegas with network affiliates owned by Sinclair, Nexstar and Scripps. The stations, Sinclair's KSNV NBC and KVCW CW affiliates, Nexstar's KLAS CBS affiliate and Scripps' KTNV ABC affiliate, are sharing a single 6 MHz channel and transmitting from Sinclair's tower on Black Mountain outside the city.

The launch marked the first full-power, multistation commercial deployment of NextGen TV in the country. BitPath, formerly Spectrum Co., led the planning and coordination efforts to put the stations on air.

On June 16, Sinclair's WPGH (Fox) and WPNT (MyNet) and Hearst's WTAE (ABC) began broadcasting 3.0 in Pittsburgh. Stations in Nashville have also launched NextGen TV, and Aitken said Sinclair stations in Salt Lake City were fully on schedule for rollouts, with more waiting in the wings.

We have a succession of stations lined up to go this year, Aitken said. I think a total of 17 or 18 stations are scheduled to launch. We're tooling along as fast as we can, and we've worked around some of the encumbrances of Covid-19.

GROWING LISTATSC President Madeleine Noland, while acknowledging some slowdown in 3.0 rollout, praised industry efforts in moving the transition as far along as it's gotten already.

I know that some markets-for example, Las Vegas-were going to launch before NAB in order to be up on the air in time for the NAB Show, which, of course, was disrupted by the coronavirus, said Noland. But we're pleased that Las Vegas is now on the air. I've been very impressed with broadcasters' ability to move the ball forward even during this pandemic. I know it's slowed them down and I know it's been hard with the ad revenues [declining], but they're doing it.

Right now, we have seven markets with ATSC 3.0 on the air and we have an additional three markets that have filed for their FCC licenses, and a fourth market which has been announced, but they haven't actually filed for licenses yet. Not counting that last market, one in every seven households in the U.S. is going to have ATSC 3.0 very soon.

Noland reported that work on finetuning of the 3.0 standard and enhancements to it continues within the ATSC organization, with planning teams exploring such areas as automotive applications, intertower communications, new codecs, core network technologies and even companion devices to enhance the television viewing experience via touchscreens.

Sam Matheny, executive vice president and chief technology officer at NAB, also acknowledged the pandemic's impact, but remained upbeat.

Broadcasters remain committed to deployment, but there will be some unavoidable delays due to the coronavirus, said Matheny. Broadcasters are taking steps to minimize these delays, and I think the launch of NextGen TV in Las Vegas is a great example of the commitment to deployment, and we'll see other major deployments this year. I applaud Nexstar, Scripps and Sinclair-who all compete in that market-for their collaboration to launch NextGen TV.

NOT JUST FOR SHOWWith the difficulties in moving installation crews around, getting necessary equipment in place, and other impediments, will deployments this year be just bare bones, akin to lighting up the stereo light on an FM tuner while still transmitting monaural content-or will there be something new and different for those who bring home a NextGen TV set?

Aitken says it's the latter as far as Sinclair is concerned.

We're following our MO' so to speak, he said. In every market that we deploy, we've got a robust channel that's supported by the SL-HDR1 standard. For us, this is very important. If folks want HDR, this is the way we're going to give it to them.

Also, we've been developing and successfully deploying broadcast app extensions. In Las Vegas we have the ability to do notifications in the subpart of the AEA&I [advanced emergency and alerting and informing] part of the signal. This allows us to send additional companion content that uses the A/344 interactive layer, the browsing environment' of the NextGen TV standard. We'll be doing this in every market as deployments advance. People are used to this companion content in the environment of the internet in our OTT services and we're bringing some of this OTT flavor to OTA.

GETTING IT DONE REMOTELYAitken also observed that the Las Vegas rollout was not hampered by travel limitations or other restrictions.

Las Vegas got launched without a single person from the team being directly deployed, he said. We did everything remotely, meaning either literally remotely through IP tunneling into the facility and doing setups, [or] and in some cases instructing the skilled hands of engineers on site.

Joe Turbolski, vice president of sales at Hitachi Kokusai Electric Comark LLC, noted also that putting 3.0 in operation is easily accomplished once the decision is made within a market about carriage of ATSC 1.0 and 3.0 signals.

The actual technology implementation and service turn-on is likely the sim

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