Media’s Next Defining Battle: Integrating Broadcast Tech

There’s a transition going on in the media industry right now: consumers are abandoning cable and satellite TV for the new frontier that is web-based direct-to-consumer distribution. This shake-up of a decades-old business model is what triggered the “streaming wars” as tech companies have entered the fray, and big media companies have attempted to compete on that new battlefield.

While it’s now clear that the streaming wars can’t be “won” by any single SVOD provider, there are other fronts in the battle for the future of media. With so many streaming services sticking around and no clear winner among them, big tech has turned its attention to the TV OS wars, hoping to gain control of this key access point for consumers. Here too we see a fragmented landscape, with little consistency in user interface or app compatibility across smart TVs and other devices from various manufacturers. Another stalemate in this space is likely.

That brings us to the next battle on the horizon: integrating new broadcast tech into the modern (streaming-based) media ecosystem. As cord-cutting accelerates and even becomes the norm, broadcast TV is becoming a larger and more mainstream part of more consumers’ media mix. This has coincided with the debut of new broadcast technology, specifically the ATSC 3.0 standard, which promises higher quality and a slew of new advanced features.

This boost to broadcast could have a major impact on the media landscape. But so far, it hasn’t. While broadcasters are being pushed into adopting this new technology, few consumers have ATSC 3.0 compatible hardware in their hands. Ten or twenty years ago, this problem might have been easily solved by a simple converter box to translate the signal, as was the solution when broadcasters switched from analog to digital signals. But today, as consumers seek to build their own television experiences with a variety of hardware and software, broadcast is one piece of a larger puzzle. Integrating with those other pieces is critical, and a problem that the industry has thus far failed to solve.

A Slow Start for ATSC 3.0 Despite Broadcast Boom

The ATSC 3.0 standard was approved in 2017, and since then broadcast TV has been a booming business. But the renewed consumer interest in broadcast has had nothing to do with the new standard; broadcasters hadn’t begun implementing it and consumer hardware that supports it hadn’t been available until just recently. Cord-cutting has been the trend driving consumers back to broadcast TV, as a simple antenna has been the easiest solution for these consumers to get local news, sports, and their favorite network shows.

Fast forward seven years, and broadcasters are now under pressure to implement ATSC 3.0, a costly endeavor with no clear benefit, as few consumers will be able to take advantage of the new features. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem, as manufacturers are also questioning why they should invest in new hardware to support a standard that isn’t yet widely used. Consumers are largely unaware of ATSC 3.0 and its benefits, but as interest in antennas surges independent of the new standard, they would certainly welcome the new features and advancements.

For now, an entire industry, even an entire technology, seems caught in a quagmire, with neither broadcasters nor device manufacturers eager to make the first move, and few options for consumers as a result.

Consumer Confusion Reigns Again

Unfortunately for consumers, many don’t know that their purchasing decisions today will impact whether they can take advantage of ATSC 3.0 tomorrow. Those who are aware and seek to purchase an ATSC 3.0 compatible device have few options to choose from, and even those offer clunky experiences and have been plagued by DRM compatibility issues.

For network-connected devices, like those in homes that use a single large antenna for televisions in multiple rooms throughout the home, the situation is even worse, with compatibility issues between different devices in this system.
Here’s why this is becoming a major problem. The future of television is coming into focus, and it’s content delivered by a variety of technologies: streaming, virtual MVPDs, and broadcast. Broadcast TV is essential to supplementing streaming options, and across the media and tech industries, companies are racing to develop devices and software that can bring streaming and broadcast together in a single device and a single experience. While this is happening to some extent with current-gen OTA
broadcasts, the state of ATSC 3.0 implementation of support makes it much more complicated. It’s not a stretch to say that ATSC 3.0 broadcasts are almost not compatible with the current generation of solutions out there.

Industry-Wide Solutions are Needed

There’s only one way this mess gets solved. Competing broadcasters, or competing hardware manufacturers, are never going to get together and agree on some standard. Everyone wants to control the platform or give themselves an advantage. There’s got to be a third-party technology solution that can mediate, or this technology is going nowhere.

This is what FreeCast has aimed to do with streaming, where a similar problem still plagues the industry in the wake of the Flixcopalyse. However, the need is far greater when dealing with hardware and technology, rather than content and distribution. For consumers, subscribing to multiple streaming services has become the norm. Juggling multiple set-top boxes, or multiple TV operating systems, is much more cumbersome and never going to fly with consumers. The next generation of broadcast TV depends on finding a solution to the current challenges.

Again FreeCast has been at the forefront of this effort, partnering with SiliconDust and utilizing their ATSC 3.0-ready HD Homerun boxes to power its FreeCast Home service. But even this solution has its limitations.

Currently broadcasters are being pushed into supporting a technology that consumers do not have the right equipment to take advantage of. TV hardware-makers of all kinds, from actual television manufacturers, to those producing set-top and streaming stick hardware, to the tech giants responsible for the software and branding that many of these devices sport, everybody needs to work to get consumer hardware caught up with broadcast tech.

If at least devices can achieve some uniformity in their support for ATSC 3.0 broadcasts, companies like FreeCast can develop software solutions that blend the OTA with OTT content.