On May 12, the LPTV Broadcasters Association, through its chairman and founder “SuperFrank” Copsidas, sent an open letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr asking the Commission to formally recognize the 3GPP 5G Broadcast standard as a voluntary transmission option under Part 74 for Low Power Television stations.
Two days later, Mark Aitken, the Sinclair Broadcast Group Sr. VP who also serves as ONE Media President, penned an opinion piece with the title “Stop the False Choice — 5G Broadcast Can Ride Inside ATSC 3.0, and We Can Deploy Now.”
Copsidas responded, only fueling the gulf between those who have wanted ATSC 3.0 to become the broadcast TV standard for a quarter century and a small but fervent group of LPTV licensees that believe 5G Broadcast is a better choice for them.
Where does the Advanced Television Broadcasting Alliance stand? We now know, as its Executive Director has spoken out against the LPTVBA initiative.
“I want to be direct with our members and with the broader broadcast industry about where the Advanced Television Broadcasting Alliance stands on this,” Lee Allen Miller, who heads the ATBA, said on Tuesday. “The issue is not innovation. It is control.”
Elaborating on the comment, Miller explained that his organization supports mobile delivery, datacasting, advanced emergency information, new LPTV business models, and a modernized broadcast platform capable of serving fixed, portable, and mobile users. “That is exactly why ATBA supports ATSC 3.0,” Miller said.
And to be clear, he added, “ATBA does not support asking the FCC to authorize 3GPP 5G Broadcast as a standalone Part 74 transmission standard on LPTV spectrum. That is the wrong policy path, at the wrong time, for the wrong reason.”
Miller’s reasons are rather blunt. “LPTVBA presents this as technology freedom. ATBA sees a spectrum trap,” he said. “The word ‘voluntary’ does a great deal of work in the LPTVBA request — but voluntary does not mean harmless. A voluntary authorization can still create a regulatory precedent, fragment an industry, weaken an ongoing transition, and give future spectrum-reallocation advocates exactly the argument they have been waiting to make. If LPTV channels are authorized to operate a 3GPP cellular standard, the next question will not be whether LPTV is innovative. It will be whether LPTV still needs to hold the spectrum at all.”
Thus, ATBA’s position is straightforward: “5G Broadcast capability should be explored within a broadcaster-controlled ATSC 3.0 architecture, not through a standalone 3GPP transmission authorization that recasts LPTV spectrum as cellular-compatible spectrum. Innovation within ATSC 3.0, not regulatory displacement around it,” Miller said.
Miller’s communique totals nearly 5,000 words. But his concluding statement makes it very clear as to how the Carr Commission should move forward. “ATBA is not asking the Commission to oppose innovation,” Miller said. “We are asking it to recognize that the innovation is already here, already standardized, and already broadcaster-controlled – and that the path the LPTVBA petition proposes is not the only path, not the consensus path, and not a path that can be reversed once taken.
“ATBA is not defending the past,” Miller concluded. “It is defending broadcaster control of the future. We respectfully urge the Commission to choose the path that keeps that spectrum, and that future, in the hands of the broadcasters it was meant to serve.”
