False urgency or impending deadline? C-band transition divides NAB Show

The upper C-band spectrum transition is one of many regulatory conversations underpinning meetings at the 2026 NAB Show, with vendors, satellite operators and managed service providers offering starkly different assessments of how quickly broadcasters need to act — and what they should do when they do.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to issue final rules by the third quarter of this year, with an auction of between 100 and 180 MHz of upper C-band spectrum mandated by Congress no later than July 2027. What happens after that auction, how much spectrum is cleared, on what timeline and with what reimbursement framework, remains unresolved.

That uncertainty is producing a floor full of confident, contradictory advice.

“I think there’s a lot of misinformation and a lot of noise at the moment,” said Deepak Mathur, president of media vertical at SES. “It has the danger of encouraging people to make decisions that don’t need to be made as yet.”

Rick Young, SVP, global head of products at LTN, and Marc Aldrich, CEO of Zixi, disagreed.

“Hype? I don’t know,” Young said. “Whether it’s 100 or 180 megahertz, it’s still significant.”

The urgency question

At the center of the dispute is a factual point that SES has been pressing consistently: the July 2027 date is an auction deadline, not a repack deadline. Broadcasters are not required to vacate the spectrum by the time the auction concludes. The timeline for the actual transition will be set separately by the FCC in its final rules.

Mathur said that distinction is being lost in the conversation.

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“A lot of customers seem to feel that the clearing has to happen by 2027,” he said. “That’s totally not the case.”

LTN’s Young acknowledged the timeline uncertainty but argued it cuts the other way.

The FCC rules are coming this summer. The auction follows next year. And once those things are set in motion, the transition will move faster than many in the industry expect.

“I think it’s going to happen pretty fast,” Young said. 

Aldrich pointed to the economics of the first C-band auction as a signal. That proceeding generated $81 billion for the U.S. government. He said the administration has clear financial and geopolitical incentives — including the framing of spectrum expansion as part of U.S. competitiveness with China on 5G — to move the second auction aggressively.

“This spectrum is worth more money,” Aldrich noted, predicting this auction will raise nearly $100 billion.

Eddie Ferraro, vice president of global media services at Globecast, took a more neutral position. His company’s own C-band exposure is limited, and he said he is focused on helping clients audit their affiliate infrastructure and understand their options rather than advocating for a particular timeline.

“I’m not convinced it’s going to be an under-a-year type of transition,” Ferraro said. “But I am convinced it’s likely going to be a hybrid approach.”

“Everyone’s got their own vested interest in terms of what they’re presenting. Planning now is a smart thing to do — knowing exactly what you’re going to do from a solution perspective, going through that, checking the various vendors, doing the diligence. Do you have to pull the trigger? Well, no, until we know what the drop-dead date is,” said Marc Bruce, CEO of Encompass Digital Media.

What a hybrid actually looks like

Despite the disagreement over urgency, the conversations across multiple booths at the show converged on a similar end state: no single technology will cleanly replace C-band, and the working answer for most broadcasters will involve at least two delivery paths.

Ku-band satellite is the most direct substitute.

“We’re going to get to IP eventually,” said Aldrich, noting that “Ku-band is going to be our first course.”

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NBC, for example, uses Ku-band as its primary distribution path, a real-world proof point that other networks are now studying. SES has new satellites in development designed to cross-strap, receiving a C-band uplink and retransmitting in Ku-band, which would allow broadcasters to keep their existing uplink infrastructure unchanged while shifting the downlink to Ku.

Mathur said SES is also designing next-generation satellites with higher power for high-rain zones and is proposing the use of 3.7-meter receive antennas rather than the smaller dishes typically associated with Ku reception, to address rain-fade concerns that have historically made Ku a less attractive primary distribution path.

For the remaining cases where weather interrupts the signal, Mathur described a standards-based packet recovery network that delivers only the missing packets to the specific cable headend affected, not a blanket IP feed to the entire network.

“It’s only when it’s needed, where it’s needed,” he said.

IP-based managed delivery is the other leg of the hybrid, and for many broadcasters, the primary path forward. Young made the case that IP offers capabilities C-band structurally cannot, and that the transition presents an opportunity to capture them.

“Once you put something up on satellite, you have no idea whether it successfully arrives at every cable headend unless you’re monitoring each individual receiver,” he said. “That’s native to an IP solution.”

Beyond monitoring, Young pointed to customized ad loads and regional versioning as capabilities that IP unlocks and satellite does not. On C-band, a broadcaster pushing a large multiplex delivers the same feed to every recipient. On IP, different versions of a channel, with different ad markers, different regional cuts, can be delivered to specific destinations without requiring additional bandwidth for each variation.

“Why are you delivering the West Coast version to the folks on the East Coast?” Young said. “There’s a more efficient way to do this.”

Aldrich noted that Zixi’s platform carries 14 different transport protocols, with SRT currently the most common among its customers. He noted the industry’s multi-protocol reality, most large broadcasters use several protocols across their operations, makes interoperability a more practical priority than any single protocol standard.

Who decides and when

Across the conversations, a consistent split emerged between how broadcasters are approaching the transition.

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Some networks are generally moving methodically, albeit maybe a bit too slow. Others, meanwhile, are shoring up plans and assuming a swift transition is coming. 

Young said the advocacy LTN has been doing is aimed, in part, at bringing the conversation into the open rather than leaving it to bilateral discussions between individual broadcasters and their incumbent vendors.

“Right now it’s all positional,” Aldrich noted. “Let’s get the discussion in the open.”

Ferraro said Globecast is advising clients to start with the basics: audit what their affiliates are capable of receiving, map the cost structures of the available options and build a transition plan against a range of possible FCC outcomes rather than waiting for certainty that may not arrive until late in the year.

“They should prepare,” he said. “They should understand what their affiliates are capable of. So they can build a plan around that.”

Bruce put the tier one endpoint plainly.

“If you’re a tier one, you’re probably going to have some form of private solution,” Bruce said. “You’re going to have to have some satellite capability, and then if you can move to IP, fine — but there’s going to be some reasons for point-to-point delivery.”

The collapse of the regional sports network model has added a separate layer of urgency to distribution conversations for a different set of players, sports teams and leagues that are suddenly building direct distribution infrastructure for the first time, though that dynamic is largely playing out on a different track from the C-band transition itself.

What is clear from the NAB Show floor is that the transition, whenever it comes, will not resolve cleanly into a single technology or a single vendor relationship. The decisions being made now, or deferred, will shape how the U.S. broadcast distribution ecosystem functions for the next decade.

“I think it’s going to be a good thing for the industry,” Young said. “I really do.”