NAB’s Allison Martin on NextGen TV: Firm deadlines, DRM and MVPDs

The U.S. broadcast industry is awaiting a decision from the Federal Communications Commission on the future of NextGen TV. At the center of that process is the National Association of Broadcasters, which has been pressing for a firm shutdown date for the legacy ATSC 1.0 standard to accelerate the transition.

Allison Martin, vice president of innovation and strategy at NAB, spoke at length with NCS about where that push stands, why the marketing of NextGen TV has been uneven across the industry, how content protection is playing out in the field and what a little-known signal embedded in the broadcast stream could mean for national infrastructure.

The case for a hard deadline

The FCC’s proposal, which drew comments from industry stakeholders before the window closed last month, would give broadcasters flexibility in completing the transition away from ATSC 1.0, the standard that has carried over-the-air television since the late 1990s.

“If the FCC gives the firm deadline that we’ve asked for, for an ATSC 1.0 sunset, everybody is going to focus around that deadline,” Martin said. “There’s going to be a lot of work going on under the surface between now and that date in order to make that date possible.”

She said a fully voluntary approach would produce a different outcome — one without the same collective urgency.

The logic behind a deadline is straightforward: as long as broadcasters are required to maintain both their legacy and next-generation signals simultaneously, they are splitting spectrum capacity and engineering resources between two systems. Shutting off the 1.0 signal would let stations put the full weight of both behind the new standard.

NAB pushes FCC for date-certain end to ATSC 1.0 in latest regulatory filing

“Getting to the point where we can actually turn off those 1.0 signals and dedicate 100% of our both spectrum capacity as well as engineering capacity to this new standard actually will provide a lot of benefit,” she said.

Consumer awareness of NextGen TV remains limited, and Martin acknowledged the transition has not been promoted with the same consistency as the shift to digital television in the early 2000s.

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Part of the explanation is structural. During the DTV transition, broadcasters could immediately broadcast a full-quality digital signal on a second channel from day one. The NextGen transition works differently. Stations currently carry the new signal through a sharing arrangement called a lighthouse, which gives each broadcaster roughly one-fifth of a channel’s capacity for their ATSC 3.0 signal.

“You’re seeing 1080p with HDR, which is a meaningful experience, but you’re not seeing 4K because they just don’t have the bandwidth for it,” Martin said.

App development, one of the more distinctive features of the new standard, is still in its early stages across most stations.

“They don’t necessarily want to make a big splash about advertising that before they’ve fully developed it,” she said. “So it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem.”

She pointed to work done by NBC around the Super Bowl and Olympics as a sign of where the app experience is heading. When tuning in to the Super Bowl, she said the channel immediately offered a summary of key plays — presented as part of the channel itself, not a separate streaming app.

“Those kinds of experiences, which are still being thought of, let alone built out, can really make NextGen TV a major consumer benefit,” she said.

Content protection in the field

One of the more contested aspects of ATSC 3.0 has been the rollout of digital rights management, or DRM. For over-the-air television, which has historically been unencrypted, the addition of DRM has drawn criticism from consumer advocates and some industry observers.

Martin said NAB’s position is grounded in a practical concern: without content protection, broadcasters will be at a disadvantage in rights negotiations with sports leagues and other content providers.

“Broadcast is the only platform that can’t protect content,” she said. “It is an important thing to make sure we get it right so that broadcasters aren’t at a disadvantage when it comes to rights negotiations.”

She also sought to put early reports of DRM-related problems in context.

The Washington, D.C., market only began carrying encrypted ATSC 3.0 signals last spring, so for roughly a year. Devices like the HD HomeRun network tuner, which lack built-in support for the encryption system, have been unable to receive that protected content. Other early converter boxes have had firmware-related issues.

Martin said the number of affected devices should be viewed in proportion to the overall market. Roughly 40 million households use over-the-air antennas, according to figures from the Consumer Technology Association.

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“We’re talking about the order of magnitude tens of thousands of devices that are fielded that have this in them,” she said, referring to the early converter boxes experiencing DRM-related issues.

She said content recorded for personal use, time-shifting and trick play features like pause and rewind, are explicitly permitted under the encoding rules published by A3SA, the organization that administers the ATSC 3.0 content protection standard.

“A3SA put out encoding rules that explicitly allow for time shifting and that sort of thing,” she said. “There’s no intention to limit what people can do as far as play, time shifting, things of that nature.”

MVPD carriage and device mandates

Beyond the consumer antenna market, NAB is also focused on ensuring that pay TV providers, cable and satellite operators collectively known as MVPDs, carry NextGen TV signals under the same terms that have applied to ATSC 1.0.

Martin said some providers have sought to use the transition as an opportunity to revisit the underlying must-carry rules governing how local broadcast stations are distributed on cable and satellite systems.

“MVPDs have raised some concerns at the FCC — really, they’re basically trying to relitigate must carry in the first place,” she said. “Making sure that the MVPD carriage is the same in 3.0 as it was in 1.0 — that’s all broadcasters are interested in.”

On the device side, NAB is calling on the FCC to update its tuner mandate to require that all new television sets include a NextGen TV tuner. Currently, the mandate covers only the ATSC 1.0 standard. Pearl TV, the consortium that promotes ATSC 3.0 adoption, has announced efforts to bring down the cost of converter boxes for viewers who want to receive the new signal on existing sets. A low-cost device was announced at CES earlier this year.

A GPS backup inside the broadcast signal

One feature of ATSC 3.0 that has received relatively little attention outside of trade publications is the Broadcast Positioning System, or BPS. The capability uses a broadcast signal to provide highly precise position and timing data, independent of GPS.

Martin described BPS as using “almost no capacity within the broadcast signal” while delivering what NAB sees as a meaningful alternative to satellite-based positioning in scenarios where GPS is unavailable or unreliable.

NAB has been running trials of the system with a local electric utility as well as with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Defense.

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She acknowledged BPS is not something consumers will interact with directly in the near term. Its relevance, she said, is more in critical infrastructure and national security, sectors where GPS dependency has been a recognized vulnerability.

With the comment period now closed, the industry is waiting to see how the FCC weighs the competing interests of broadcasters, pay TV providers and consumers. How the commission rules, and whether it sets a firm deadline for shutting down ATSC 1.0, will shape the pace and scope of a transition that has been underway for nearly a decade.