(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
LAS VEGAS—The upgrade to broadcast television called NextGen TV has long suffered from two problems: Many Americans don’t know it exists, and those who do don’t have a cheap enough way to experience its video, audio, and interactivity advances on sets that lack tuners for the standard.
At the National Association of Broadcasters' NAB Show here, a consortium of broadcasters supporting NextGen aired plans to address that second problem with a rerun of a strategy from the first digital-TV transition: cheap, simple converter boxes for sets that can’t pick up the new signals
Trade group Pearl TV’s show-floor exhibit featured test hardware and samples of compact external tuners from firms like ADTH, Skyworth, and ZapperBox, all intended to sell for $60 or less by year's end. Current external tuners can cost twice as much, though the cheapest one listed in the NextGen TV site’s hardware database is available for just $70.
These cheaper boxes would not compromise on NextGen’s audio or video features: resolution as high as 4K UHD (although NextGen broadcasts today top out at 1080p, slightly higher than the best broadcast HD resolutions that they must share airwaves with), HDR color, and surround sound support, including Dolby Atmos.
The same antennas that can pick up ATSC 1.0 broadcasts should offer more reliable reception of 3.0, but as I’ve seen from watching Washington, DC stations, a reception glitch can leave you with a completely black screen instead of a blotchy picture until the tuner can pick up the signal in a few seconds.
This format also includes support for interactive features on internet-connected sets, which can be good (the ability to jump back to the start of a program) or not so good (targeted advertisements). NextGen also allows broadcasters to encrypt channels with DRM content controls; NextGen-compatible sets don’t have issues with that, but some add-on tuners do.
Something else has to give to get a list price of $60 or less while keeping NextGen’s audio and video upgrades and maintaining DRM compatibility, so the concept design Pearl is advancing would sacrifice features like multiple tuners, on-device recording, and internet connectivity.
Electronics manufacturers shipped standard-definition-only converter boxes at $40-ish prices for the digital-TV transition in 2009, but they were often free, courtesy of a government-run coupon program to help Americans adapt to the federal mandate to end analog broadcasts.
The switch to NextGen, also known as ATSC 3.0 (short for Advanced Television Standards Committee, the organization behind the earlier ATSC 1.0 standard for broadcast digital TV), doesn’t have a federal mandate, which means no federal subsidy.
“We're not going to have a coupon program,” said Pearl TV spokesman Dave Arland at the exhibit, before showing off a debit card from the 2009 program, run by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
To meet that $60 target, Pearl has to bring down both licensing and hardware costs. The latter factor is somewhat beyond its control, because the memory chips in these tuners are yet another category of hardware subject to inflation driven by runaway demand for AI data centers.
Buying a new TV does not ensure NextGen viewing. While Sony ships NextGen tuners in all but its smaller sets, Samsung, Hisense, TCL, and Panasonic are spottier in their support. No top-tier TV vendors have added support for the format since TCL did so at CES 2024, while LG stopped shipping tuners in its own sets in 2023 after losing a patent-infringement lawsuit over its implementation of the technology.
The Consumer Technology Association reports 18.6 million NextGen sales through 2025, plus 313,000 NextGen external tuners. That Arlington, Virginia, trade group, which produces CES, estimates sales of 5 million sets and 121,000 add-on tuners this year.
But total TV sales in the US have been around 40 million a year. CTA’s earlier estimates were more optimistic, but predictions like its 2021 forecast of 20 million NextGen sets in 2024 predated LG’s retreat.
NAB has been asking the Federal Communications Commission for a date when ATSC 1.0 broadcasts will end, and ATSC 3.0 broadcasts will become the new standard. Last February, NAB requested a February 2028 1.0 sunset in the top 55 markets and February 2030 elsewhere.
NAB also wants the FCC to mandate NextGen tuners in sets as it did for ATSC 1.0 tuners; CTA, however, has told the commission that it wants no such thing.
FCC executives at NAB’s convention were studiously noncommittal, sticking to generalities like “we share in the excitement of ATSC 3.0,” as deputy media bureau chief Evan Morris said in one panel. The FCC, however, voted in October to relax rules requiring stations to air the same programming on 1.0 and 3.0 channels.
Arland’s take on the odds of ATSC 3.0 replacing 1.0 without some sort of policy change: “It's never going to happen organically.”
Disclosure: I moderated one panel at NAB, with the organizers providing a travel stipend.