This column originally appeared on TVND.com, and is republished here with permission. Subscribe to TVND.com’s e-mail newsletter by clicking or tapping here.
In our rotation of rewatching various chapters in the Star Trek television canon, we’ve recently been enjoying the “Star Trek: Voyager” series.
It was the only one to feature a woman in the captain’s chair (in the form of the great Kate Mulgrew as Captain Kathryn Janeway). But watching the show on Paramount Plus brings the painful reminder that once upon a time, there wasn’t high-definition TV, let alone 4K that could be shot on smartphone cameras in everyone’s pocket.
No, back in the good old 1990s, there were only 525 lines of glorious “standard definition” NTSC television. (Engineers from back in that analog era would jokingly refer to NTSC as standing for “Never The Same Color” twice, which wasn’t far from the truth.) Episodes of Star Trek: Voyager now come complete with portions festooned by the giant, ugly black bars on the right and left of our magnificent 85-inch LED-powered screen, reminding us of when TV was only a small 4-by-3 picture, rather than the widescreen, 16-by-9 image that we take for granted now.
Fortunately, the show is still fun enough to watch — even with the low-res picture. However, it appears that Paramount has done its best to clean it up for streaming.
We were thinking about this when we read about FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s latest “initiative,” which appears to be to get the long-delayed transition from the current ATSC 1.0 digital standard for America’s broadcast television stations changed over to the “new and improved” ATSC 3.0 standard, better known by its snappy trade name: “NextGen TV.”
Since we are on a roll with this whole Star Trek theme, we can’t resist the apparent reference to “The Next Generation” of television. (Especially since “Star Trek: The Next Generation” has lasted longer than any other part of Gene Roddenberry’s franchise.)
In 2017, some eight years after the great digital television (or DTV) migration, which moved America’s TV stations over to the ATSC 1.0 standard that brought true HDTV into your living room, the FCC adopted rules that would allow the nation’s broadcast television license holders to begin transmitting in a newer, more-efficient ATSC 3.0 standard. There had been some experimentation efforts in the preceding few years, the most notable one from WRAL-TV in Raleigh, North Carolina. WRAL’s owners have always been “early adopters” of new technology. In 2016, they launched an experimental station to transmit the 2016 Olympics in 4K video using a new signal that was then being called “Futurecast” by the industry.
The one problem, of course, was that there weren’t very many televisions available that could receive the new signal.
So, obviously, most television broadcasters weren’t jumping in to spend the money needed to broadcast in a standard that nobody could watch. Mainly because they had all made significant investments to upgrade their facilities in the 2009 DTV transition. The FCC made the ATSC 3.0 standard voluntary, with no hard deadline for completion. One reason for this was that the plan used for the digital transition in the previous decade couldn’t be easily repeated.
Why? The FCC significantly reduced the frequencies used for television broadcasting. First, they cleared the old channels 52-69 for non-broadcast uses. Then, they sold off the spectrum that had previously been used for channels 41-51 for cellular telephone service, bringing billions of dollars into the federal government’s coffers. And it turned out that in the digital TV world, UHF frequencies (Channels 14 to 40) were superior to VHF ones (Channels 2-13), so that is why most digital TV stations are now on UHF channels.
No matter what channel number your local television stations claim to be on, the likelihood is that they are actually transmitting on channels between 2 and 36. Still, they are allowed to identify themselves by their legacy numbers via a technology called “PSIP” (short for Program and System Information Protocol, if you must know.) So now there’s not really enough room “on the dial” for broadcasters to operate simultaneously on two channels to be on both ATSC 1.0 and 3.0. This means they can no longer have two channels as they did at the beginning of the 2000s and gradually migrate to the new standard over time.
The solution to this problem was to have one station in each market convert to the new ATSC 3.0 standard and cooperatively carry all local broadcast TV signals on a single channel. The first market to launch a “lighthouse” station to broadcast local television channels via the ATSC 3.0 standard was Phoenix in 2018. The new standard allows for carrying multiple digital television signals compressed into a single channel. The lighthouse roll-out has been criticized for not carrying all stations in a given market, often excluding public television and smaller, independently owned stations.
As of the time this article was written, only 80 of the nation’s 200-plus local television markets have a station broadcasting in the new standard. That represents about 75 percent of all U.S. television households being able to receive an ATSC 3.0 TV station, if they wanted to.
In 2019, the Consumer Technology Association gave ATSC 3.0 the catchy new trademark of “NextGen TV.” While there have been events touting the arrival of the next generation in various markets, the problem remains that public demand for the new standard is minimal. There are more than a few reasons for the weak demand to date. There are still a limited number of TVs available that come with the tuners needed to receive NextGen TV. (Try looking them up at your favorite retailer.) And as if all that weren’t enough, there is a pretty significant dispute over just how the adoption of the new standard should be fully implemented.
Early this year, the National Association of Broadcasters filed a proposal with the FCC to implement a mandatory, two-stage transition to move all the nation’s television stations onto the NextGen TV standard. Many groups came out in opposition, including the National Cable Television Association (NCTA), Americans for Tax Reform, the Low-Powered Television Broadcasters Association and Consumer Reports. Even the chairman of the Consumer Technology Association, the group that coined the name “NextGen TV,” criticized the proposal for a mandated transition.
Enter FCC Chairman Carr, who is bringing the whole matter to a head with a proposal that the commission is expected to vote on a “Notice of Proposed Rule Making” (NPRM) in its public meeting later this month. The NPRM stops short of embracing the NAB’s mandatory transition proposal, leaving it basically up to each broadcaster to determine when they want to begin broadcasting in the newer ATSC 3.0 standard, and when they would cease using the older ATSC 1.0 standard. The proposed rules would also allow broadcasters to operate both ATSC 1.0 and 3.0 signals simultaneously, but curiously, they would not require broadcasters to simulcast their programming across both signals. Also on the docket is whether the FCC should now require that all new television sets have tuners capable of receiving the new ATSC 3.0 signals.
Of the flurry of proposed rule changes in the NPRM, one that may get the most public comment if the FCC votes to approve, is about whether the commission should impose “standards and/or rules concerning the encryption and/or signing of free, [over-the-air] television broadcast signals and what authority the Commission has to impose such standards and/or rules.” One of the features that NextGen TV currently includes is the ability for broadcasters to enable “digital rights management” encryption for their signals. You may remember DRM as an issue when downloading music over the internet first became popular. DRM was the technology deployed to combat music piracy via programs like Napster and LimeWire.
The use of encryption on TV signals for DRM purposes has some severe critics in the online world. Much of their complaint is, why should “Free TV,” as broadcasters often call themselves, need to prevent their signals from being received by their taxpaying audience? They, in theory at least, actually own the air waves, which the FCC licenses them to operate “in the public interest.” The anti-encryption advocates also note that the DRM in use actually prevents the development of cheaper devices and external adapters from being available to receive ATSC 3.0 signals. For their part, broadcasters and their trade groups claim the DRM encryption is needed to prevent the digital theft of their valuable content.
Listen, we are sure that your head is already hurting from all of these technical details. We know ours certainly is. If you are so inclined to dig deeper into this topic, we’d invite you to follow the excellent coverage provided by our friends over at TheDesk.Net.
Right now, there is no deadline for when you might have to get a “NextGen TV” set for yourself. The NAB has proposed two deadlines: larger markets by 2028 and everywhere else by 2030. Since the FCC didn’t buy into that, it is unclear when there might ever be a deadline.
And whether there will still be television as we currently know it by then. Maybe it’s that Star Trek got wrong.
It won’t be space that is “the final frontier,” but it might be broadcast television’s.
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Kirk Varner spent more than five decades in the television broadcast industry. He most recently served as the news director of KSTP (Channel 5) in Minneapolis, and has worked with Hubbard Broadcasting, Sinclair Broadcasting Group, Nexstar Media Group and others. During his semi-retirement, he writes at the website TVND.com. Follow Kirk on LinkedIn by clicking or tapping here, and sign up for his e-mail newsletter at TVND.com.
The author’s opinions are his own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Desk or its parent company, Solano Media.
