ATSC 3.0 Transition Gets a Boost from FCC at NAB

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are collaborating to make the transition to the new ATSC 3.0 broadcast television standard as smooth as possible. The Future of Television Initiative, which was announced on April 17 at the NAB Show 2023, will be a public-private partnership to address hardware, technical, and regulatory issues associated with the implementation of the new standard.

ATSC 3.0 is the result of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), a non-profit international organization that develops standards for digital television technology. It enables consumers to receive free high-quality video (4K Ultra HD UHD video with High Dynamic Range) and immersive 7.1.4-channel audio via a simple over-the-air antenna. It also provides an interactive viewing experience, with display options, on-demand content, and hyper-localized information such as news and weather alerts, with an internet-connected television.

Consumers must have a device capable of receiving and decoding the new signal—either a TV with an integrated ATSC 3.0 tuner or a converter/tuner device connected via HDMI to an older TV. So far, Sony is the only television manufacturer to include an ATSC 3.0 tuner in all of its new televisions.

As an IP-based technology, ATSC 3.0 has been described as "the internet over a television broadcast signal." Broadcasters can consider the viewer's television screen as a browser window capable of receiving and displaying multiple discrete elements simultaneously, allowing program content to be displayed alongside weather updates, sports statistics, and targeted advertisements.

Market Impact

ATSC 3.0 offers broadcasters the chance to provide viewers with better quality entertainment content in a customizable interactive experience, which they believe will attract and retain viewers and, in turn, advertisers. Datacasting will bring new revenue opportunities in applications such as the distribution of software updates to a fleet of motor vehicles or delivering educational content to homes in areas without internet access.

The appetite among sports fans for more statistics, data, and opportunities to participate in their favorite sport or team’s activities remains strong. In Q1 2022, 48% of households who watch live sports have participated in at least one interactive activity while watching.

Over-The-Top (OTT) streaming services, like most Internet-based applications, follow a one-to-one paradigm, delivering a separate copy of the content to each viewer. Distributed content libraries can mitigate some of the data transmission requirements but introduce other costs such as storage and content management. Streamed live events are subject to other issues that include buffering and latency, which can detract from the viewing experience and make them impractical for things like sports gambling. In fact, mistrust still exists about live sports betting due to latency issues. While placing a live wager on the next play, touchdown, or goal may be the ultimate gambling experience, many fans are wary of the latency of streaming services. This distrust may contribute to the 51% of consumers who are not willing to place a wager on content they are watching via streaming.

OTA broadcasting, on the other hand, remains a classic one-to-many technology, and ATSC 3.0 broadcasting is ideal for instantly distributing a large volume of IP-based data, whether in the form of TV programming or not, to a broad base of distributed receivers, helping to solve latency for sports gamblers.

ATSC 3.0 offers numerous advantages to consumers and broadcasters, but unlike the conversion from analog to digital television in the early 2000s (ATSC 1.0), the FCC has so far deemed this transition to be voluntary with no firm deadlines. In fact, broadcasters are required to maintain their ATSC 1.0 signals for five years after they turn on ATSC 3.0 and the FCC has provided no additional broadcast spectrum to facilitate the changeover. In what may have been an attempt to stay out of the way or to postpone another reason for consumers to have to buy a new TV, the FCC inadvertently made it more difficult to realize the benefits of the new standard.

The FCC-NAB initiative announced earlier this month is a welcome attempt to smooth over some of these roadblocks, hopefully putting an end to the chicken-and-egg standoff in which TV manufacturers are reluctant to get on board until there is consumer interest, and consumers are reluctant to purchase a new TV or converter for features and benefits that they know little or nothing about.

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