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SPECIAL REPORT TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

IMAGINE YOU OWN A NICE LITTLE RENTAL HOME. YOU HAVE SOME GOOD TEN-

ants, and the house brings in a tidy profit each year. The local govern-ment changed the zoning laws a few years ago, and now you can rent out separate rooms in the house. Good! More money.

Now imagine that little house is surrounded by high-rise condos where the luxurious penthouse units command top dollar and the rest of the floors are leased as retail and commercial office space. They bring in lots more money than your property, and for many potential renters, they’re extremely attractive. Would you be content to continue leasing your little single-family house to a dwindling number of potential tenants? Or, to fully capitalize on your investment, would you tear down that home and build your own high rise?

That’s an asset-value maximization question. And it applies to TV channels too. Why limit the use of a 6 MHz chunk of spectrum you’ve been leasing out as a single-purpose, linear entertainment and information channel – especially when viewership is fractionalizing in the face of on-demand streaming platforms?

Sure, you could continue to do that on a slice of the existing channel’s bandwidth. But wouldn’t it make sense to re-purpose the rest for other money-making data uses? This is a rhetorical no-brainer that underscores the importance of the NextGen Broadcast standard, otherwise known as ATSC 3.0.

Within 15 years of deploying NextGen services, broadcasters could make more money renting their data bits than from the advertising revenue they earn today.

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NextGen’sTOWERINGPROMISEWhat does ATSC 3.0 really mean for the broadcast TV? The possibilities are vast and are likely to supercharge the business.

BY JERALD FRITZ

Reprinted from the September/October 2021 issue of The Financial Manager magazine

Think about that. A broadcaster’s future is not tied to the sole purpose of video distri-bution, as it is today. Instead, it will involve a myriad of new data businesses that are en-abled by this new way of transmitting data. NextGen Broadcasting is our present and future way out of a limited, mature, linear TV world.

DEPLOYMENT HURDLESThe challenge is getting ATSC 3.0 de-ployed quickly. The U.S. government has not made this easy. Unlike the mandatory analog-to-digital transition that began in 1998 and was completed in 2009 – when every TV broad-caster received a second temporary simulcast channel – deployment of NextGen Broadcasting is a volun-tary, market-by-market, slow-rolling affair.

Broadcasters can’t even access tem-porary vacant channels to ease the process. Instead of having two channels, broadcasters that were fierce competitors in the past must work cooperatively to share facilities. In com-pliance with Federal Communications Com-mission (FCC) requirements, TV broadcasters must give viewers access to programming via the current digital transmission standard, ATSC 1.0, for a period of time. That means broadcasters will be sharing channels as they launch the transition.

This process is cumbersome. Markets best able to handle a ATSC 3.0 transition need to

be identified (the more populous a market, the better). Then a series of difficult questions needs to be resolved. For example, which ex-isting facility best meets coverage needs? (For example, which has the best VHF or UHF signal coverage?) Are there technical restric-tions related to network program carriage? Is there space on the 1.0 hosting stations for all the current diginets? Will the programming on the 1.0 host stations meet FCC require-ments for viewability by the current audience? And do the stations have available capital to pay for the deployment?

Once this channel mapping process is complete, program rights need to be se-cured for 3.0 programming and legal hosting agreements must be negotiated. Then there’s the “easy” part of configuring, ordering, pro-visioning and installing needed equipment and connectivity to link all the stations.

Topping off the process is more regu-latory approvals and notices to pay-TV providers and the public. Assuming no new transmitters are required, it is at least a five-month process per market. There are 210 markets in America. Needless to say,

much work is ongoing simultaneously.And that’s just for the primary-station de-

ployment. Enabling the embedded features of NextGen Broadcasting that permits integra-tion with the internet (converging broadcast and broadband services) requires a broadcast app. Designing, provisioning and installing this middleware is crucial to realizing many of the NextGen Broadcast benefits. Those include critical advanced emergency alerting and informing features.

On demand services also require a broad-cast app that enables menu features similar to

what most viewers experience when accessing streaming services on their smart TVs. In other words, viewers need to see the viewing choices as they change channels and access data from the internet. Constructing the means to do that on fixed and mobile devices takes vision and ex-pert software development support.

That work is ongoing in the bowels of several tech-centric broadcast groups.

For more complex, targeted programming and data service offerings and a better video experience on mobile devices, single frequency networks (SFNs) – essentially in-market signal boosters – will also need to be designed, pro-visioned and built. They’ll provide the signal coverage that mobile users are accustomed to. SFNs may have multiple, small transmitting nodes throughout a market. That is an addi-tional design, implementation and financial challenge for broadcasters.

This process gets repeated over and over on a market-specific basis. And as more stations are launched in a market (tied to the increase in deployed receive devices), the station de-ployment process will itself repeat all over again in each market.

Phew. Is it worth all the logistical head-aches? You bet!

Why? Because without transitioning to NextGen, broadcasters will be permanently anchored to a single-use world for linear pro-gramming that isn’t mobile and has limited competitive opportunities in a streaming over-the-top ecosystem.

Long, long gone are the days of a broadcast video monopoly on American eyeballs. Yes, enhancing the attributes of television video and audio quality is a good thing. And tar-geting video programming and advertising geographically and demographically has sig-nificant upsides. But if broadcast TV is to thrive moving forward, it needs a platform

BROADCASTER IMAGINATIONS RUN WILD WHEN CONSIDERING THE MANY POTENTIAL uses of NextGen Broadcasting. A bit is a bit is a bit. If it can be transmitted, broadcasters can

offer associated services. Here are some possibilities:■ Entire lectures downloaded to home devices in locations where broadband may never

be deployed (which could give a dramatic boost to closing the Educational Digital Divide);■ Telehealth information on targeted pandemic locations;■ Digital signage support, updates and real time information;■ E-book and news distribution targeted to geographic locations and specific

demographics;■ An internet of things backbone;■ Skinny programming bundles behind paywalls;■ Virtual reality game backdrops;■ Agriculture support for simple tasks, such as watering or tractor directions for plowing;■ Building maintenance, heating and cooling adjustments;■ Water-usage metering;■ Automobile telematic upgrades – from system monitoring to navigation system map

updates.

HEADER

THE SKY’S THE LIMIT

TV broadcasters can team up with radio brethren in their markets to carry multiple audio streams using a fraction of the available capacity in the data pipe.

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SPECIAL REPORT TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

that allows it to grow and enter new business-es – to rebuild that single family home in the high-rise condo canyon.

NEW UNIVERSE OF USESThink of a broadcast channel as a great big data pipe filled with lots of different-sized and interchangeable straws. Different types of data flows through each straw. If there’s a need for more capacity for 4K-ultra high-definition video, for example, you use a bigger straw. If you need tiny amounts of data to activate a remote water meter, you use a tiny straw. All of those straws can dynamically change size and accommodate multiple other data-bit use cases.

In the TV broadcast industry, data has been synonymous with video. But video is just one form of data. Text, audio, software and instruction algorithms are other types of data capable of being broadcast. They are just ones and zeros. And the sooner broadcasters understand that distinction, the sooner they will understand the remarkable flexibility and inherent opportunity to maximize the value of their data pipes.

HERE ARE A FEW EXAMPLES:Driverless Cars – What do autonomous driving vehicles need more than anything else? Huge amounts of data for 3-D mapping so they don’t bump into things. You can’t do that with wi-fi. You can’t do that at scale with an incomplete, fragile and overloaded cell phone system. You can do that with NextGen Broadcasting.

Data Offload – If, for example, you are Microsoft and want to update your operating system to 100 million people overnight using the internet, what would happen? You’d melt the cell phone network. The unicast (one-to-one) architecture of the streaming services is the least efficient way to accomplish that task. The “one-to-infinite” NextGen platform – renting bits from broadcasters – is a cheaper, more robust and infinitely more efficient way to reach devices.

Audio Services – TV broadcasters can team up with radio brethren in their markets to carry multiple audio streams using a frac-tion of the available capacity in the data pipe. This will increase a radio outlet’s reach while targeting listeners and potentially even offer-ing paid packages using conditional access capabilities built into the NextGen standard.

eGPS – There is a burgeoning concern in and out of government circles regarding

the fragile nature of our space-based global positioning system (GPS). It is vulnerable to jamming and spoofing and is quite difficult to protect against natural and man-made disasters, given the extremely weak signals bouncing off satellites orbiting thousands of miles above the earth.

Well, it just so happens that, using terres-trial broadcast signals that have power many orders of magnitude higher than satellites, GPS can be augmented in a significant way. Renting NextGen Broadcast bits is a demon-strably effective use case for some of that data pipe capacity.

Advanced Emergency Alerting – Targeted advanced emergency alerting and informing services use NextGen capabilities to display rich media instead of simple warning crawls.

It highlights live Doppler radar, evacuation routes and emergency shelter locations in multiple languages from a transmission sys-tem that doesn’t get overloaded or crumple in heavy winds. This advanced emergency system can take AMBER alerts far beyond today’s vastly inferior system by showing a missing child’s face and other critical in-formation including map locations, vehicle descriptions and automobile photos. The same enhancements would be available for hazmat spills, school lockdowns and law enforcement incidents.

In fact, as the sidebar on page 28 demon-strates, imagination is the only limitation on use cases for broadcasters. And by “broadcast-ers” we are not in any way limited to those with commercial licenses. Non-commercial, public broadcasters can also dedicate portions of their channels for these new data services. It will enhance their public missions and, im-portantly, allow them to cover parts of the country that even commercial broadcasters do not serve.

The broadcast data platform will likely be-come an integrated piece of high-speed data distribution. It will relieve stress on unicast broadband systems that are overloaded as they try to do what NextGen Broadcasting can do

so efficiently on a multicast basis.Aggregating bits from local broadcasters

in local markets and combining them on a national basis places the broadcast platform in the enviable position of providing CONUS (Continental U.S.) coverage for national data network services.

This data delivery as a service puts broad-casters at the forefront of using the cloud to deliver data storage, integration, processing and analytics via a very efficient delivery platform. Broadcasters are hard at work developing the core network capabilities to orchestrate the needs and capabilities of all users and providers in a market. Use of arti-ficial intelligence is key to that.

Think about the aggregation of all the straws in the data pipes from all the stations

in a market and determining the most efficient marriage of bits to meet the needs of selected users. Each broad-caster would then be compensated on the bits flowing through its data pipe.

It bears emphasizing that these data services can greatly expand broadcast-ers’ public interest service obligations without affecting their traditional over-the-air video business. In fact,

NextGen Broadcast can greatly improve the broadcasters’ video service – and the public interest value – while also adding new services that have great value to the public. Just ask the student who can now receive exceptional classroom lectures without a need to link to the internet; or the family seeking a way out of a fire evacuation zone; or the firefighter who can now have mobile access to a build-ing’s blueprints. These are services that can be provided as complements to the existing video offerings of over-the-air television broadcasters.

Looking backwards, broadcasting is a ma-ture distribution platform. Looking forward, though, it has reinvented itself technologically to meet new challenges and the ever-changing needs of consumers and businesses alike. It’s a dynamic future full of promise and opportu-nity. And frankly, it’s the only future for that little house surrounded by the tall condos.

Jerald Fritz is the executive vice president for strategic and legal affairs for ONE Media 3.0, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sinclair Broadcast Group. ONE Media 3.0 develops, authorizes and deploys NextGen Broadcast services domestically and internationally. He can be reached at jnfritz@ONEMediaLLC.com.

Data services can greatly expand broadcasters’ public interest service obligations without affecting their traditional over-the-air video business.

4Reprinted from the September/October 2021 issue of The Financial Manager magazine