One of the most interesting announcements at CES this year came from four of the nation’s largest TV broadcasters. E.W. Scripps Company, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair announced the formation and launch of EdgeBeam, a new wireless venture.
The companies would use the spectrum that TV stations still own. You may recall a few years ago that the FCC held an incentive auction to try to lure TV stations to give up spectrum, and many of them did if they were offered enough money by an auction bidder. However, many TV stations retained the spectrum because they saw value coming in the future from owning it.
The number one use for the spectrum is to take advantage of ATSC 3.0 technology. ATSC 3.0 is a major upgrade for broadcast TV that overlays broadband into an over-the-air TV transmission signal. This opens up a whole world of possibilities for TV stations. When the technology was first introduced, stations talked about using it to provide reliable 4K video through the air, allow for video-on-demand, provide immersive high-quality audio, and greatly improve the broadcast emergency alert system. TV stations also envisioned a whole array of digital features that are standard with streaming services like program guides, actor bios, and any other kind of added information a station wants to send to customers.
The EdgeBeam venture is going to go far beyond that original vision. The CES announcement focused on three new ventures:
- Automotive connectivity, including software updates, infotainment, precision navigation, and safety enhancements.
- Content delivery networks (CDNs), where EdgeBeam could improve ubiquitous over-the-air streaming services.
- Improving the accuracy of GPS.
The broadcasters are envisioning a world where TV stations expand their viewership by delivering free programming to cellphones and cars, funded by their standard advertising models. A lot of people might still be happy with network TV if they can easily view it on the go.
There are a few unique aspects of the available spectrum tied to ATSC 3.0 technology. A TV station can deliver about 25 Mbps of broadband to all receivers in its over-the-air footprint, and as a broadcast technology, the bandwidth doesn’t get diluted by the number of users. ATSC 3.0 technology could be delivered to any device that has a chip capable of receiving it. That could be cars and trucks, drones, marine vessels, phones, tablets, and television sets.
There are a few interesting consequences if the group can hit the market. First, this creates real competition to AT&T and Verizon, which currently claim to serve over 55 million connected cars with 5G. EdgeBeam would be competing in the accurate GPS business with Iridium and NextNav that are tackling this with satellites.
Perhaps the biggest consequence of TV stations using their spectrum is that it won’t be available to the cellular companies that have been eyeing it and hoping for another incentive auction. It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out at the FCC, which clearly favors freeing up more spectrum for 5G.
The biggest hurdle will be getting device manufacturers to include ATSC capability into their chips. The technology has been built into some TVs, but not much of anything else.
It’s interesting speculation, but some of the items are a bit of a tall tale for a TV operator to get into.
‘broadcast’ with such limited throughput really eliminates any ‘on demand’, so from a practical perspective it’s not much different than a ‘tv tuner in your phone’ which IMO doesn’t have a lot of appeal.
Any sort of data broadcast is again, not ‘on demand’ so would basically have to be limited to things most people want to get *OR* nightly cachable content etc. Imagine your cell phone chewing on cached content and what that would do the the battery. Seems impractical.
As far as using this for improving GPS accuracy, that ship has sailed. RTK is already in mass production, super cheap, and incredibly accurate, and there’s just no money in it for a TV broadcaster.
Now, I do see some interesting possibilities around auto connectivity. Live broadcast of traffic data and maps, weather conditions. I guess you might do auto OTA updates after hours or something…. in concert with NBIoT/CatA cell for uplink/request data this could be a way for auto makers to reduce their ongoing costs for features.
Really just seems like a mostly obsolete amount of spectrum for 2025 looking for a use ‘within the context of a TV station’.
Agree. But this is the announced business plan goal of the new partnership. You never know in today’s crazy communications world.
There are a number of issues with ATSC 3.0. It has no return path (for TV, you need your own broadband connection to use the interactive features), it has built in DRM (which is not compatible with previously purchased models prior to the development of the DRM standard ), and while it has good signal propagation, they cannot get national coverage without building out along rural interstates (even with partners in every market). I’m betting this goes the way of 3D TV, unless the broadcasters persuade the FCC to mandate a conversion (which will cost all of us for a new TV).