Sinclair Free Chips Offer Key To Mobile Future

Sinclair Broadcast Group is determined to press the accelerator to the floor and drive TV into a future that’s mobile, fixed, enhanced and personalized.

The latest sign of Sinclair’s urgency to move things along came last week at the annual meeting of the Advanced Television Systems Committee in Washington, D.C.

There, Mark Aitken, Sinclair VP of advanced technology, offered 1 million ATSC 3.0 receiver chips designed for mobile applications at no charge to any cellphone maker that would commit to adding them to their devices.

Coupled with the acquisition deals and coverage partnerships it’s been making, the move is bold step to reach consumers wherever they are throughout the United States powered by ATSC 3.0.

“Our mobile-first strategy is not incongruent with other broadcasters that are looking toward ATSC 3.0 to enhance traditional television broadcasting,” says Aitken. “It doesn’t mean we are ignoring targeted advertising and data analytics. It just means we have a more aggressive view of getting to the future sooner than later.”

For Sinclair, a big part of that future revolves around mobile. Near term that means offering new OTA products like skinny bundles of premium video content and a terrestrial alternative to SiriusXM, Aitken says.

Longer term, it means helping to power the Internet of Things (IOT) with IP data streams delivered over the air.

The Pearl Group, a consortium of six major broadcast groups, has worked side-by-side with Sinclair on making the next-gen TV standard a reality, but at least for now it will focus on enhancing the experience of viewers at home, according to Anne Schelle, managing director of the consortium. Schelle declined to comment further for this story.

(Nexstar, which is a member of Pearl, has joined a spectrum consortium with Sinclair aimed at achieving national reach.)

The effort to seed the mobile market with 3.0 receivers is more complicated than simply providing receiver chips, however, says John Taylor, SVP of public affairs at LG Electronics USA.

“Working with cellphone manufacturers is only part of the equation,” he says. “As we learned in the early days of mobile DTV [A/153], it will be critical for broadcasters to work with wireless carriers to come up with a business model that works for all.”

At least in the United States, the wireless carriers define the features of devices, Taylor says.

The technology powering 3.0 will make it possible for Sinclair to be mobile first while at the same time offering next-gen TV enhancements to home viewers, says Aitken.

To transmit IP video streams to mobile phones, Sinclair will use 3.0’s implementation of scalable high efficiency coding (SHVC) as well as layered division multiplexing (LDM), Aitken says.

SVHC is composed of a base layer — the one used by the mobile phone—and an enhancement layer, which adds the data needed and used by a home display, such as a 1080p/60 HDTV. “The base layer is one-quarter HD exactly. It’s 540 by 960 pixels,” he says.

LDM will let broadcasters deliver mobile programs and 1080p/60 with high dynamic range (HDR) or UltraHD with HDR content to home viewers at the same time, he adds.

In phones and other mobile devices, scaling the video to the screen size required by the particular device equipped with Sinclair’s ATSC 3.0 receiver chip will be done by the device itself, just as it is done today with streaming video.

Sinclair has chosen Indian chip maker Saankhya Labs to design and fabricate the next-gen TV receiver chip needed to enable new smartphones and other mobile devices to receive 3.0 broadcasts.

A few important differences set this receiver chip apart from the chips used in the next-gen televisions being sold today in South Korea, Aitken says.

First is size. The actual integrated circuit die that is in the receiver is no bigger than a period on a printed page, he says. When delivered to mobile device makers, that die is packaged on a chip less than a quarter-inch square.

The small size of the chip not only will be appealing to makers of space-constrained cell phones but also to future makers of IOT devices, which may be far smaller than a mobile phone, he says.

The second difference is power consumption. The ATSC 3.0 UHD televisions being sold by Samsung and LG in South Korea are “essentially power-unlimited devices,” Aitken says. Not so, in the mobile phone market where manufacturers pay special attention to maximizing the time between charges, he adds.

“When you talk about these mobile devices, the fact of the matter is they are power-constrained, space-constrained and performance-demanding,” Aitken says.

Sinclair may be walking a bit of a tightrope with the offer of free 3.0 receiver chips when it comes to cellphone makers.

For instance, while LG Electronics is helping to make 3.0 a reality in the living room, which is of great importance to all broadcasters, it also is making its own 3.0 receiver chip with mobile capabilities, says the company’s Taylor.

The chip being designed for Sinclair is not simply designed to receive 3.0, but rather all digital television standards. Doing so should broaden its market and bring greater economies of scale to its production, Aitken says.

However, the Sinclair offer of 1 million free receiver chips per mobile phone maker comes with an important stipulation. The phones they end up in must be sold in the United States.

“I’m not going to give away a million chips to be put in the DVB market because I’ve got no business in the DVB marketplace,” he says.

Aitken, who met with the president of Saankhya Labs in Baltimore this week to discuss the chip, says he holds weekly calls with the company’s engineers to discuss their progress.

These are still early days for the design, and Aitken says he hopes to hear from many mobile phone makers.

“We want the engagement of those manufacturers earlier rather than later because it allows us to build a package that is best in line with their needs,” he says.

Already, Aitken has had a nibble. Moments after he announced the offer May 18, a mobile phone maker, which Aitken declined to identify, attending the ATSC annual meeting expressed interest.

Working samples of the receiver chip will be available “inside a year — plus or minus four weeks,” he says.

To seed the market with millions of 3.0 receiver chips has “a relatively small cost,” according to Aitken. He estimates the price of 10 million 3.0 receiver chips for mobile use may cost between $10 million and $12 million.

And Sinclair doesn’t intend to give away receiver chips indefinitely. Eventually, it will begin charging for the silicon, which means Sinclair could eventually recoup its initial investment and begin making a profit from the sale of 3.0 receiver chips.

However, Sinclair is hopeful the real money will come from the long game of building entirely new mobile services that generate never-before-available revenue streams, Aitken says.

“Look at our [recently announced] consortium with Nexstar. Look at the consolidation in the industry [the acquisition of Tribune Media],” he says.

“We are going to build out a national network, with sufficient entities as part of that to provide an offering to the public that we think becomes compelling. That means we need millions of end devices in the hands of consumers.”

But before it can get there, the station group must generate the revenue it needs to make investments in its future using the tools at hand.

“At the end of the day, we’ve got to build a new marketplace that doesn’t exist today in the mobile world for ourselves,” he says, “and we’re going to build that on the backs of increased earning and opportunity from what I will call the more traditional parts of television.

“We are embracing, not precluding, all the other things [like personalization, analytics and HDR] that go along with 3.0.”

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