By Cora Leighter
Special to RBR+TVBR
BALTIMORE — Did you hear the one about the guy who got more than 12 times the Kickstarter funding he requested to develop a new ATSC 3.0 device?
“I quit my ‘day job’ when ATSC 3.0 came around,” said Nick Kelsey, founder and chief technology officer of Silicon Dust, maker of networked TV tuner and DVR devices. Silicon Dust was already making products when ATSC 3.0 pivoted Kelsey’s attention. Intrigued, he turned to Kickstarter last April to raise $50,000 for a 3.0-capable device.
“The response was just incredible,” he said during a Sept. 15 webinar focused on ATSC 3.0 innovation.
The webinar was moderated by Skip Flenniken, Senior Finance Manager for Sinclair Broadcast Group.
“We hit our funding goal in the first hour,” Kelsey says. “We hit more than $600,000 [to date]. It was a highly successful exercise. It’s clear people want to be involved with this technology.”
The IP based foundation of ATSC 3.0 opens up broadcast TV spectrum to third-party developers in a way that wasn’t possible with legacy systems. Automakers and fleet managers are keen on it because its one-to-many capability is a far more efficient way to reach connected vehicles than the one-to-one cellular network.
“We have more services and features available in vehicles than anywhere else,” said George Ayres, an auto industry veteran who recently joined Vinli, creator of an AI-enabled vehicle data platform. “One of the issues is the cost of sending that data to those vehicles. What’s exciting about ATSC 3.0 is to be able to send data to those vehicles in a low-cost way.
Map updates, for example, are data heavy and expensive over cellular, he said. Vehicle makers would like to dynamically update mapping in real time. “The big driver will be how to push that data in as low a cost way as is available,” Ayres said. “Car makers are looking at this.”
Madeleine Noland, president of ATSC, wants car makers and others to know ATSC 3.0 is ready for product development right now.
“There’s a lot of headroom for innovation in the standard as it is today,” she said of ATSC 3.0, which is more of a set of standards with one underlying physical configuration that can support future development without obsolescing legacy applications. As a result, it can handle everything from 4K TV, object-based audio, multiple languages to connected cars, game console updates, interactive advertising and things yet to be discovered. Plus, it won’t leave developers and users stranded when it’s time for an update.
“We can continually upgrade 3.0 without orphaning legacy devices,” Noland said. This type of adaptability is imperative in a world where upgrades are par for course. “How old do you think your Netflix or Amazon Prime app is? Two or three months?”
This type of future accommodation was one of the most difficult things about developing the standard, according to the man who conceptualized it decades ago.
“We didn’t do any hard-wiring or any sort of short-cutting,” said Mark Aitken, Sinclair Broadcast Group SVP and president of its subsidiary ONE Media 3.0. Of the many goals in creating ATSC 3.0, supporting an environment for entrepreneurship was high on the list. The evolvability of this standard supports an “agile” development approach versus a “waterfall” model, a process in which the requirements are expected to change and evolve.
“In the agile context, you have this continuous cycle of improvement. That gets layered on by the universe of web (and other) activity around us,” Aitken said.
Reaching scale is key to the success of ATSC 3.0. Pearl TV Executive Director Anne Schelle is devoted to this objective.
“Certainly, by the end of next year we’ll be at 70 percent household coverage,” she said. For her constituents, the focus is television—specifically, the advanced audio and video features ATSC 3.0 enables. “If we can drive scale within our core business, that will help bring opportunities.”
Information in this article originated from a webinar from the ATSC 3.0 Monetization series from Sinclair Broadcast Group. To watch a video of this webinar on demand go to this link.
Watch all webinar in the series on demand here.
