I'm suspicious that Next Gen won't turn out any better for the consumer than DTV did. I see the bigger station groups being the much more likely (if not the sole) beneficiary of what Next Gen promises.
Once they start testing in areas that have more complex topographies and more channels (where the repack and simulcasting will demand usage of the entire band), we should begin to find out if the new technologies work as theorized.
The tie-in being that both are going to put a heavy burden in engineering staffs to prepare for two mostly different things. They didn't speak to the additional cooperation that is going to need to happen at management levels to negotiate who gets what when the stations buddy up.
To avoid such a failure, much marketing is needed to get people interested, like they did with DTV during the 2009 switch. I do believe Next Gen TV is important for the future of broadcasting.
I have a feeling they might take away all the spectrum after radio astronomy UHF channel 37, which they could then use as a "guard band," but that would take a big bite out of the usable UHF TV spectrum. I hope whatever digital subchannels that get displaced move to a a lower UHF or VHF channel, or get remapped as digital subchannels on one of their sister stations.
Have you been following the "Repack"? There was an auction and broadcasters sold the spectrum above 36. Here are the new channel allocations.
We're seeing a lot of chatter from a few on the scale of Sinclair and PBS, but not much from the others. I don't think it is fair to say that they're all on board.
This is a show stopping failure should it come to pass and it is entirely possible absent a mandate. It doesn't matter what the technical merits of Next Gen are if the OTA hold-outs aren't interested.
It doesn't seem likely that those who have lost interest are going to rediscover OTA; especially if they can't conveniently consume it on the devices that they now use to view content. This is not necessarily a Field of Dreams as consumer intertia is a formidable force; especially if there's little compelling on the other side (see more at Ultra HD programming choices and successful applications of interactive programming).
The broadcasters theoretically have the option of making DTV stinky but absent a mandate, the repack and what the Next Gen order allows are the only official orders. Congress has asked for an alternative to DTV but they haven't chosen one.
If the broadcasters don't find a way to fund their operations, they'll take their marbles and go home. The government licenses an environment in which broadcaster may operate and be afforded some protections of DMA exclusivity but they don't guarantee that they will be able to remain solvent..
I agree. I too am standing by the sidelines watching all this unfold. The DTV transition wasn't all that smooth. People that once had a decent analog signal couldn't get their station in digital. I remember people buying UHF antennas and of course the station they wanted was VHF. Stations changed frequencies in some cases, after the initial change. You can read various forums all day long where people in the boonies still have no OTA channels. I know I can hardly wait to replace all my Hdtv's with this breaking new technology lol
I'd like to find it again too. The pre-auction search results have been replaced by post-auction results. Wading through the 2012 act has proved pretty fruitless.
