Sinclair’s One Media Technologies will bring broadcasters, receiver manufacturers and technology vendors together later this month for its annual ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV Interoperability Event, as the industry continues to refine advanced broadcast services built on the next-generation television standard.
The four-day event will take place from June 23 to June 26 at Sinclair’s headquarters in Hunt Valley, Maryland, and is designed to test interoperability across a wide range of ATSC 3.0 devices, applications and transmission technologies.
Participants will have access to live over-the-air NextGen TV broadcasts in the Baltimore market, allowing engineers and developers to evaluate real-world performance while validating compatibility between receivers, networks and services, Sinclair said in a statement.
“The continued success of NextGen TV relies on interoperability across devices, networks, and services,” said Mark Aitken, the Senior Vice President of Advanced Technology at Sinclair Broadcast Group and President of One Media Technologies. “Our annual event provides an important opportunity for industry participants to collaborate, validate implementations, and accelerate innovation across the ATSC 3.0 ecosystem.”
This year’s interoperability event will focus on several areas viewed as critical to the continued deployment of NextGen TV services. Testing plans include broadcaster application interoperability, with particular emphasis on the Run3 TV Framework and Advanced Emergency Information capabilities designed to enhance emergency alerting and public safety communications.
Engineers will also evaluate Digital Rights Management and signal-signing technologies across both DASH and MMT delivery environments, helping ensure secure content distribution across compatible devices.
Additional testing will focus on signaling enhancements, including support for new service categories, broadband signaling servers, dynamic service changes and implementation of RSAT technologies.
The event will also examine hybrid broadcast-broadband delivery models, an area many broadcasters view as central to unlocking new consumer services and advertising opportunities through ATSC 3.0.
On the transmission side, participants will test dynamic ModCod changes, Layered Division Multiplexing and Broadcast Positioning System technologies. The agenda also includes evaluations of Dynamic Ad Insertion capabilities, A/344 application programming interfaces and backward-compatible MIMO configurations.
Consumer-facing applications are expected to play a prominent role as well. Testing will include ROXi’s interactive music platform, GameLoop gaming services and the Broadcast-Enabled Streaming TV (BEST) channel, alongside live Baltimore-area ATSC 3.0 broadcasts.
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The symposium comes at a time when some broadcasters, including Sinclair, are pushing for federal regulators to mandate a full shutdown of the current digital broadcast standard in favor of NextGen TV on a full-time basis. That ambitious plan would call for most of the country’s TV stations to transition by 2030, with major-market stations making the switch as soon as 2028.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently scrutinizing the proposal. Last year, it adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that, if it becomes a rule, would allow the broadcast industry to set their own timelines for a full transition to NextGen TV. The move has been opposed by a handful of smaller broadcasters like Weigel Broadcasting.
