NAB’s Smith To ATSC: Next-Gen TV Is Vital

NAB President Gordon Smith today encouraged television engineers to get on with the task of developing a new broadcast TV standard that can provide truly ubiquitous service.

“As broadcasters, it is our job to make sure our signals are available on every device and everywhere — smartphones, laptops, tablets — and of course, multiple channels of digital TV,” Smith said at the opening of the annual conference of the Advanced Television Systems Committee, which is working on the standard.

“In order for TV to succeed, we must continue to move quickly to increase the number of distribution channels and platforms for our valuable local content, and we must respond to the needs of an ever-more mobile audience.”

While ATSC works on the so-called ATSC 3.0 standard, Smith said, NAB will work to preserve TV spectrum.

“As the FCC remains myopically focused on broadband and delivering our spectrum to wireless companies, we must remind policymakers that in times of crisis, those wireless companies cannot match the reliability of broadcasting to deliver critical information to the masses.

“I think the irony here is that the wireless industry covets our spectrum so that they can deliver video as efficiently as broadcasting’s one-to-many architecture, but their networks can never truly achieve this, no matter how much spectrum they obtain. And even worse, they want to charge viewers for this service that we provide for free.

“The focus of the FCC shouldn’t be how can spectrum be taken away from broadcasters in order to bolster the wireless industry’s goal of developing an architecture with the reach and reliability of ours, but rather, how can we continue to expand broadcasting’s robust and efficient architecture to other platforms, allowing us to continue innovating and delivering the content and services viewers depend on every day.”