Over-the-air broadcasting returns with perks

For most people, over-the-air (OTA) broadcast TV is either a distant memory or the stuff of old-timey TV watching lore.

As households increasingly replace cable with streaming services, can OTA TV broadcast still compete?

Many say yes. The reasons? Today’s OTA broadcasts, called NextGen TV, offer a combination of benefits no other content delivery option can: interactivity with greatly enhanced picture clarity and audio quality.

In the beginning

The story of NextGen TV begins at least four decades ago when the federal government, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), and private industry envisioned that OTA TV transmission architectures would transition from analog to digital. After many years of haggling over specifications, regulations, and other details, digital TV broadcasting came into focus as did efforts to bring it to fruition.

It’s difficult to overstate the challenges faced by the broadcasting, content, and TV manufacturing industries when transitioning from analog to digital transmission. It was a massive undertaking that included spectrum auctions, channel reallocations, development of new transmission blueprints, aspect ratio conversion, expensive equipment changes, and more. As of 2009, legacy tuners could no longer receive OTA broadcasts in the U.S. so the most onerous of these tasks was to modify tens of millions of televisions to accept digital OTA signals.

Although stations broadcasted in both analog and digital forms for several years, consumers needed to update their TVs with adapters at their own cost.

With this in mind, the government provided up to two $40 coupons for digital-to-analog converters for each household. Like rapid COVID-19 tests today, demand exceeded expectations and allocations fell short. Still, most everyone who needed the converter got one.

This and other factors resulted in three postponements of the analog-to-digital conversion deadline that only in June 2021 appears to have ended. The last holdout was Alaska, granted an extension because of the state’s unique combination of small remote populations and extreme weather that made deployment extremely difficult.

Fortunately, the previous hard work makes the transition to NextGen TV much easier for consumers, thanks in large measure to advances in semiconductor, RF, and digital signal processing technologies that reduce the size and cost of the required converter.

For retrofitting existing TVs, the solution is a small box connected to the TV’s RF coaxial input. Most major TV manufacturers have already integrated the tuner within their latest models, and all will have them in the next few years. This leaves the antenna, but as NextGen TV signals are far more robust than their predecessors, these antennas no longer need to be massive roof-mounted structures of years past. Today, they are small enough to fit behind the television, on or near windows, and in rare cases outdoors.

So, what do you get?

Public safety is one of the most important beneficiaries of the new standard. It expands the current minimal capability provided by the Emergency Alert System (EAS) to a new Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN). For viewers, this means that in addition to the usual text and tone alerts, it can deliver photos, surveillance video, storm tracks, evacuation routes, shelter instructions, hospital wait times, power outage locations, and other information. AWARN also “wakes up” devices that are not powered on.

Monetizing the technology

A big benefit for broadcasters and their advertisers is the ability to collect personal information they can use to micro-target advertising to individual users based on their viewing and buying habits and other metrics.

By merging OTA antenna TV with the internet, local stations will be able to personalize news, sports, live events, and shows with interactive features. Broadcasters never had this ability before as there was no two-way path between the station and the user.

Now, when a user watches an ad, they can use a remote control to click on a link that brings them a webpage and enables the user to perform all activities now associated with web browsers or smartphone apps.

With all the competition and promotion from streaming, cable, fiber to the home, and increasingly fixed wireless access at millimeter-wave frequencies, NextGen TV has received much less exposure.

The big question is how well it will fare against the constantly changing array of streaming services that increasingly provide access to local stations as part of their bundles. As the deployment of NextGen TV expands throughout the country, it won’t be long before we get an answer.