LG is the first TV maker to implement Verance’s Aspect watermark detection on its NextGenTVs, enabling reception of ATSC 3.0's two-way interactive capabilities via cable, satellite or antenna, Verance announced Tuesday at the NAB Show. As NextGenTVs expand to more homes, interactive experiences will be “on the horizon,” said Verance, including the opportunity to tune the set’s audio to hear only hometown sports announcers. “The watermark detection process allows the information required for two-way next-generation services in a connected smart TV set to pass through any distribution environment seamlessly, including over HDMI links and through existing distribution equipment and set-top boxes,” said Verance.

Multiple stations are using Sinclair's open-source broadcast app and it's being used to offer ATSC 3.0 viewers interactive content, said Rob Folliard, Gray Television senior vice president-government relations and distribution, on an NAB Show panel Tuesday. Folliard said Florida stations are using the app, and So Vang, One Media vice president-emerging technology, said it's running on every Sinclair 3.0 station. When the app is in use, “essentially a browser appears on your TV set,” Folliard said. U.S. broadcasters are looking to Europe for use cases and applications that can be adapted to 3.0 from Europe’s hybrid broadcast broadband TV (HbbTV) internet television standard, said Francesco Moretti, CEO international for Italy-based Fincons Group. HbbTV has close similarities to 3.0 and its IP backbone, so systems built for the European standard can be made to work with 3.0 in just a few days, said Kerry Oslund, E.W. Scripps vice president-strategy and business development. The app also enables broadcasters to collect data on viewers and to create “flash channels” offering specialized or geotargeted information for consumers that choose to use them, said Vang. Such channels could be used to convey weather warnings to a small segment of a broadcaster’s market, or offer a secondary camera view of live sports, said several broadcasters. Interoperability between the app and MVPDs is still being tested, Folliard said.

Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle expects the NextGenTV logo for ATSC 3.0-compliant TVs to become “widely adopted,” she said on a prerecorded NAB Show video preview that debuted Monday on ATSC’s YouTube channel. “Once we get past 80% household penetration” on 3.0-compliant sets, “you’ll see some of the big-box retailers really jumping in” to promote and support the logo, Schelle told ATSC President Madeleine Noland in an interview on the video. “More and more consumers, with our advertising, are going in the store and they’re asking for NextGen. The more that happens, the more you’ll see the logo out there.” Schelle sees the industry “doubling down” on 3.0 marketing in 2022 and into 2023” she said. “It’s incredibly important that we get that message out there, to let consumers know. We need that consumer pull. That consumer pull drives retailers, talks to the TV manufacturers.” The industry needs to “get to scale as fast as we possibly can, because that then brings in the opportunities” for broadcasters' return on investment, said Schelle. “From there, I think you’ll see a lot of the activity around datacasting, which is a longer-term play, but it’s definitely a viable play,” she said. “We need to have a really successful television play in order to get to that datacasting play.”

Sinclair plans to offer HDR content in the Technicolor format for its Bally Sports regional sports networks beginning in Q3, it said Thursday. It plans demonstrations at the NAB Show, it said. SL-HDR1, part of the ATSC 3.0 suite of standards, uses a backward-compatible approach, letting content producers deliver a single video stream to new and legacy TVs that's viewable as HDR on newer devices and standard dynamic range on legacy sets, it said. Sinclair's "no compromise" approach renders "the highest quality viewing experience possible today, supplementing events captured in HDR," said President-Technology Del Parks. "On the distribution side, it is the smart way to deliver SDR and HDR content efficiently in a single, universal transmission format.”

The FCC should link the sunset of ATSC 3.0 multicasting arrangements to a station’s sunset of its ATSC 1.0 signal rather than imposing a five-year time limit, said NAB in calls with Media Bureau Chief Holly Saurer and 10 other Media Bureau staffers March 25, said an ex parte filing Thursday, posted in ECFS Friday. “Any effort to freeze broadcasters” by restricting their content to what they aired under 1.0 “can only harm consumers,” NAB said. The FCC also should allow a station’s license to cover multicast streams that are broadcast only in 3.0 rather than simulcast under both standards, the filing said.

Harmonic added HDR10+ support to its VOS360 cloud streaming platform and is doing the “first trial” of that enhancement with Evoca, an ATSC 3.0-based pay-TV service, said Harmonic Thursday. The Samsung-developed HDR10+ technology, supported by more than 130 companies, “adds dynamic metadata to HDR10 source files to optimize the color contrast and image details of each frame of the HDR video to the consumer's display capabilities,” said Harmonic. Evoca “could become the world's first ATSC 3.0 service that offers an ultra-high-definition channel encoded by HDR10+ for exceptional high dynamic range," said Michael Chase, Evova vice president-systems. Evoca "has been broadcasting a 4K stream over our 3.0 system for close to two years," emailed CEO Todd Achilles. With Evoca's carriage of Insight TV, "we are the only U.S. broadcaster with a full-time 4K channel over-the-air," he said. "HDR10+ is a new encoding format that offered more efficiency without sacrificing quality," said Achilles. "Collectively with Samsung and Harmonic, we encoded our 4K feed using HDR10+ and then watched it on a Samsung TV -- and everything worked great! This was just an initial test, but the results are very encouraging.”

Evoca, working with several “technology partners,” successfully transmitted TV content using ATSC 3.0's “cross-polarization” functionality, a first for the U.S., it said Tuesday. Evoca touted the accomplishment as “a new way of transmitting TV signals that could dramatically change the number of channels available from over-the-air broadcasters,” including higher bandwidth for 4K transmission options. “This week on Channel 35 in Boise we successfully demonstrated the creation and transmission of a MIMO signal,” said Evoca CEO Todd Achilles, referring to multiple-input and multiple-output. “MIMO has the potential to dramatically increase the available payload for TV broadcasts, possibly even doubling the amount of data that a broadcaster can send to improve choice and robustness.” Evoca’s MIMO cross-polarized TV broadcast involved simultaneous transmission of two discrete streams within one 6 MHz channel, said the company. Its partners included Rohde & Schwarz, Enensys Technologies, Kathrein Broadcast, Avateq and Televes. Though MIMO broadcasts have been demonstrated in other countries, it has mostly been as a “proof-of-concept effort,” said Achilles. Evoca intends to “make full use of the potential for MIMO transmission and reception,” he said.

Pearl TV and MediaTek are partnering on a "FastTrack to NextGenTV" program designed to seed manufacturer adoption of ATSC 3.0 smart TVs and other receiver devices, said the companies Tuesday. The program gives consumer tech makers “an easier, faster, and more cost-effective process” to introduce 3.0-compatible products via MediaTek’s “reference platform,” which will be pre-certified for compliance with CTA’s NextGenTV logo and other authenticity and security requirements. Pearl thinks the program can “usher in high-volume, low-cost televisions that consumers desire and are buying today, particularly among millennials,” said Managing Director Anne Schelle.

The launch of the Run3TV web platform enables broadcasters to offer two-way interactive services and streaming content to over-the-air viewers for first time, PearlTV said Tuesday. Pearl, which developed the platform with various technical partners, will launch Run3TV through a subsidiary, the ATSC 3.0 Framework Alliance. Run3TV gives broadcasters the ability to “leverage” 3.0's new A/344 interactive content standard to create television applications that enhance OTA viewing “with interactive and on-demand content delivered over broadband,” said Pearl Managing Director Anne Schelle. Run3TV’s web-based platform architecture “enables stations to develop, innovate, and differentiate at the application services layer, allowing a consistent viewer experience” across all 3.0-compliant receiver devices, said Pearl. “The broadcaster controls the product vision, audience engagement, and customer experience,” said Pearl, and broadcasters can choose their technical partners and draw from the contributions of the Run3TV “developer community,” it said.

The 40-year-old National Translator Association has rebranded as the National Television Association, said the group Monday. “The change, while difficult, was due,” said Jack Mills, NTA president. “Our service goals are largely the same but binding these just to the mountain-top repeaters, or 'translators,' began to feel constraining.” NTA's name change “helps the organization to expand its advocacy, welcoming [low-power] LPTV and even possibly new technologies such as ATSC 3.0 broadcast services,” it said, calling translator an “archaic” word. NTA’s goal of “assuring universal access to free over-the-air television remains the same,” it said. The NTA’s annual meeting is May 19-22 in Phoenix.