Groups representing low-power television stations in the United States are calling on the Federal Communications Commission to allow them to use 5G Broadcast as an alternative to ATSC 3.0, which is promoted as NextGen TV. Their proposal raises a wider question for broadcasters around the world: what might 5G Broadcast offer that existing terrestrial television standards cannot?
The groups have petitioned the FCC to permit low-power television stations to transmit using 5G Broadcast while maintaining at least one free-to-air linear television service. It follows an earlier petition from HC2 Broadcasting and calls from the LPTV Broadcasters Association for the regulator to open a rulemaking process.
The immediate issue is particular to the United States, where television broadcasters are migrating from the original ATSC digital television standard to ATSC 3.0. Yet the underlying question is relevant elsewhere because different transmission standards represent competing propositions for the use of valuable terrestrial spectrum.
ATSC 3.0 represents a necessary evolution from a first-generation digital television standard. It provides broadcasters with a modern, internet protocol-based transmission system offering much greater flexibility than its predecessor.
5G Broadcast comes from a different direction. It applies technology from successive generations of mobile communications to one-to-many distribution, without requiring an individual connection to a mobile network. It is part of the global 3GPP family of specifications, developed within an ecosystem that has historically evolved rapidly through successive generations and achieved adoption on an enormous scale.
That potentially changes the question of what a terrestrial broadcast network is designed to reach.
Traditional television transmission has generally been engineered around reception through rooftop or fixed antennas. 5G Broadcast potentially extends the proposition to portable and handheld devices, including smartphones, with greater emphasis on mobile reception.
There are reasons for caution. The history of mobile television is littered with technologies that demonstrated that television could be delivered to handheld devices without demonstrating that enough people wanted to watch it that way. DVB-H is among the obvious precedents.
The circumstances are different today. Video viewing on mobile devices is commonplace, while the smartphone has become a near-universal personal media platform. The question is therefore no longer whether people will watch video on phones, but whether there is an advantage in delivering some of that video through an efficient one-to-many network rather than millions of individual streams.
That could also be relevant in markets such as the United Kingdom. 5G Broadcast could form part of a future television distribution strategy without requiring a binary choice between terrestrial broadcasting and broadband. Broadcast remains particularly efficient for simultaneously distributing popular services to large audiences, while fixed and mobile internet connections provide effectively unlimited choice and personalised delivery.
Service discovery then becomes important. DVB-I has already been demonstrated and integrated with 5G Broadcast, providing a global standard for discovering and presenting television and other audiovisual media services independently of the network used to deliver them.
That makes the technologies complementary rather than competitive. A receiver could discover a service through DVB-I and receive it over 5G Broadcast, another terrestrial network or conventional fixed internet protocol delivery. Hybrid implementations can combine those networks and provide transitions between broadcast and broadband reception.
None of this establishes that 5G Broadcast will achieve widespread adoption. Device support, spectrum availability, network economics and consumer demand will ultimately determine its prospects.
The American petition illustrates why it deserves serious consideration. The choice may not simply be between successive generations of television transmission. 5G Broadcast offers another proposition: applying a global mobile technology ecosystem to retain the efficiency of broadcasting while extending its reach to the devices on which audiences increasingly consume media.