WASHINGTON, D.C. — The National Association of Broadcasters on Wednesday filed reply comments in the FCC’s proceeding on the advancement of the new broadcast television standard known as ATSC 3.0, urging the Commission to waste no time in getting more licensees on board. The ultimate goal? Saying goodbye to the current digital TV standard, which isn’t so easy.
In a 28-page ex parte filing tied to GN Docket No. 16-142, the Commission’s look at authorizing permissive use of the “Next Generation” broadcast TV standard, NAB Chief Legal Officer and EVP of Legal and Regulatory Affairs Rick Kaplan states that the record “confirms that the Commission’s central task is no longer to debate whether NextGen TV is worth pursuing.”
As the NAB asserts that stakeholders across the ecosystem recognize that it is, Kaplan and his team believe its No. 1 goal is to decide whether the transition will be allowed to succeed “through an orderly, coordinated framework, or instead be stranded indefinitely in a regime of regulatory uncertainty and half-measures, all to the detriment of the viewing public.”
That explains why the NAB reiterated “the core actions the Commission should adopt to move the transition forward and protect consumers’ continued access to free, over-the-air broadcasting” in its filing:
(1) establish clear, date-certain sunsets for ATSC 1.0 that provide the focal point necessary for marketplace coordination
(2) modernize the receiver standard so consumers can continue to access broadcast service reliably and consistently as the transition proceeds
(3) ensure continued MVPD carriage of ATSC 3.0 signals and associated advanced features so viewers are not deprived of NextGen TV capabilities through distribution bottlenecks
(4) protect broadcasters’ ability to deliver high-value programming in a video marketplace where content protection and modern technical capabilities are increasingly prerequisites to obtaining and sustaining premium content
“Broadcasters, technology providers, and public-interest stakeholders converge on a simple reality: a voluntary framework has reached the limits of what it can accomplish, and further progress depends on regulatory certainty and coordinated action,” the NAB legal team believes. “Accessibility advocates, in particular, underscore that moving forward with ATSC 3.0 is not only compatible with existing accessibility obligations, but opens the door to meaningful improvements once the transition is complete.”
Meanwhile, the NAB believes the principal opponents of a transition that could end up “stuck in indefinite dual-operation” offer “a familiar mix of classic delay advocacy: resisting receiver modernization, resisting regulatory certainty, resisting any step that would move the transition from pilot to scale, all while recasting the Further Notice [of Proposed Rulemaking] as a forum for collateral disputes and speculative anxieties.”
As such, opposition fueled by the Consumer Technology Association and MVPD advocates are in the NAB’s view “an effort to keep free, over-the-air broadcasting tethered to legacy constraints while other segments of the video marketplace move forward unencumbered and without having to worry about broadcasting as a viable competitor.”
