ATSC Touts 3.0 Progress Despite Spectrum Challenges
ATSC Touts 3.0 Progress Despite Spectrum Challenges - NewsLab
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Washington, D.C. — Broadcasters traveled to the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC)’s annual NextGen Broadcast Conference in Washington last week to emphasize the impressive progress they have made to date in deploying the new ATSC 3.0 digital television standard, countering a growing perception in the broader media industry that the 3.0 rollout has stalled amidst regulatory challenges and increased competition from streaming services.
Pearl TV, a consortium of station groups that has been championing the 3.0 standard since its 2017 FCC approval, announced that 75% of U.S. households now have access to NextGen TV signals. Moreover, after focusing for the past few years on simply getting on-air, 3.0 stations are now starting to take advantage of the standard’s capabilities to offer an enhanced product compared to legacy 1.0 broadcasts.
Fifty-seven markets covering 70 million viewers now have 3.0 broadcasts with better color reproduction due to High Dynamic Range (HDR) technology, Pearl said. And more big station groups are using the Run3TV broadcast application platform to deliver interactive content to 3.0 sets through a broadband connection, including Sinclair and the NBC- and Telemundo-owned stations. Some 200 stations are expected to be using Run3TV by year-end.
ATSC used the conference to unveil a rebranding, with a new logo and a new tagline, “The Broadcast Standards Association,” along with new mission and vision statements. ATSC President Madeleine Noland touted 3.0’s gains on the receiver side, with more than 100 NextGen-capable TV models currently available at retail and an estimated 15,000 new NextGen sets
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