The Smart Bet for Broadcasters Amid New Standard Uncertainty

It’s a tough time to be a broadcaster. Not only is the business becoming more challenging in general, but firms have choices before them that are existential. As linear TV declines, the future of “next gen” broadcast TV is in doubt, with ATSC 3.0 having failed to gain traction. The emergence of 5G Broadcast as an alternative complicates matters further.

But unfortunately for broadcasters, there’s no time for a “wait and see” approach. Despite the uncertainty, the need for the broadcast business to change its trajectory is growing more urgent. That requires that decisions be made now. What individual broadcast businesses invest in today will shape their fortunes as television in general, and broadcast TV specifically, enter a new era.

With a new broadcast standard, new equipment will be needed. While that remains important, independent of hardware considerations, broadcasters need a streaming strategy. How will they reach their audiences when cable, satellite, virtual pay-TV, and antenna-based viewing dwindles? Adding to the challenge, regulatory issues cloud the horizon, with the Trump administration targeting broadcast and spectrum licenses. Despite the number and magnitude of these threats to broadcast businesses, navigating the coming era doesn’t need to be a roll of the dice. There are smart solutions available today that can continue to serve well in a wide variety of scenarios.

A Stalled New Standard and an Alternative

Behind the two now-competing standards are two visions for the future of broadcast. ATSC 3.0 is a modern overhaul for broadcast TV in its current form, bringing advanced features like 4K resolution, HDR, enhanced audio, and interactivity to free over-the-air TV channels. This was long expected to give broadcast TV a boost at a critical time, making it a compelling complement to streaming in the new era of television, after decades as an inferior alternative to pay TV.

Amid ATSC 3.0’s troubled rollout, 5G Broadcast offers a different way forward. Rather than designing around a legacy format, 5G Broadcast is built for a future in which video is delivered by over-the-top services via bandwidth and consumed on a wider variety of devices. Unlike traditional 5G bandwidth, it allows for one-to-many transmission for more efficient bandwidth usage and greater resilience during events that may otherwise spike traffic and congest traditional wireless networks.

While the future of broadcast TV up in the air, the current paradigm is undoubtedly coming to an end. Linear TV is in rapid decline, and with it, the retrans revenues that broadcasters depend on. This crisis is becoming especially acute for channels beyond the big four, who are often left out of virtual pay-TV bundles. However, unlike with cable, there’s really nothing guaranteeing the major broadcasters a place in these web-delivered bundles, so as streaming costs rise and operators look to trim costs, even NBC, CBS, ABC, and FOX could find themselves dropped from packages or moved into higher tiers.

A Streaming Strategy for the Future That’s Already Here

While broadcasters look down the road to envision “Next Gen TV”, it’s important not to forget that a new generation of television has already arrived. Independent of the debate over new broadcast standards, the way consumers access video has changed. In recent years especially, the media industry has reached a tipping point, with streaming overtaking traditional linear TV.

As smart TVs become the norm, consumers are being steered towards FAST services for free linear channels. In the past, turning on a TV without a cable connection likely dropped you in to a local broadcast channel. Today, it drops you onto a TV OS home screen, with free and ad-supported content from the web front and center.

Every TV station needs a streaming strategy, at least if they want to continue to have an advertising business. That strategy cannot be, as it has been for so many media firms before, simply to launch an app or streaming service. Multi-billion dollar media empires have not had great success with this approach, and small local broadcast TV stations are among the least equipped to devote resources to developing and promoting a new app or service. Likewise, the last thing that consumers want is dozens of new apps or services to manage (per city), even if they are completely free to use.

Regardless of which new standard prevails, as video shifts to streaming and bandwidth is increasingly delivered via the airwaves, broadcasters risk becoming “dumb pipes” that provide bandwidth for other services (at a relatively low margin) rather than destinations themselves.

The most efficient solution for broadcast TV stations is to offer their linear feeds in the form of a FAST channel. This is easy and cost-effective to do. FreeCast is able to convert these broadcast signals to HLS feeds and distribute them both on its own platform and to other FAST services. These channels can carry the same ads as broadcast channel, or FreeCast can provide ads, including geo-fenced ads for local businesses and advanced hyper-targeted advertising powered by its user profiles. And because FreeCast also shares a portion of revenues with the originator of the eyeballs, by informing their viewers that the channel is also available on FreeCast, these TV stations can earn as much as a 50% revenue share, in addition to their own in-channel advertising.

This allows TV stations to monetize the trends that are already at work and eating away at their current business. No need to wait around for a new standard to bring viewers back or transform the business; it can start today.

Forward Thinking Tech Solutions

FreeCast’s platform was designed with broadcasters in mind, allowing them to reach new and existing audiences, without cannibalizing their existing business. In addition to the ability to easily launch FAST channels, FreeCast Home is a network-attached solution allowing users to stream their local broadcast channels to other devices in their home. FreeCast’s devices are among the few that support ATSC 3.0, and are fully backwards compatible with ATSC 1.0 signals as well, for stations that have not yet adopted the new standard. Should a mandate or other development give ATSC 3.0 the boost it needs to fulfill its next-gen TV promise, FreeCast will remain well-positioned to capitalize on those benefits and pass them through to its partners.

Should 5G Broadcast overtake ATSC 3.0, FreeCast is still a safe bet, as the company has recently launched a direct-to-mobile offering for telcos. 5G mobile devices are already widespread, and don’t come with the limitations of services that primarily depend on fixed television sets as endpoints. While each Smart TV manufacturer has its own OS, and its own default FAST service, FreeCast is the only company offering a unified media experience tailored to mobile devices.

This makes FreeCast an ideal partner, as it offers broadcasters a monetizable way forward regardless of which new standard prevails, effectively derisking a lot of the decision-making around those choices.

Perhaps more importantly, FreeCast is able to serve as a neutral and affordable means to reach customers digitally. As streaming takes over from video-specific delivery mechanisms like cable, satellite, and broadcast, smart televisions have become the norm, giving the tech companies that manufacture them or provide their operating systems new power to steer consumers. They have been quick to monetize this new position between consumers and the content they want to access, charging programmers for their apps or content to be featured, and directing users based on what generates the most revenue. This has already hit over-the-air TV the hardest, as smart TVs are more eager to steer viewers to FAST services for free channels.

FreeCast also offers some degree of protection from regulators who might look to seize unused spectrum in the future, as was recently demonstrated by the FCC’s fight with EchoStar. Just as FreeCast can convert broadcast signals into HLS feeds, they can also convert FAST channels into feeds for broadcast television. This provides monetizable linear broadcast content that can easily be tapped to utilize excess capacity, eliminating the potential claim by regulators that spectrum assets are underutilized.

For consumers, FreeCast has always offered a one-stop-shop for streaming media. But for its programming partners, FreeCast is also a versatile business solution, creating opportunities that are either multi-pronged or independent of the rapidly-changing factors that make the media industry so risky right now.