
The Castanet Pilot: Proving the Broadcaster Stays in Control
A live Las Vegas network carried 5G Broadcast inside ATSC 3.0, and the station never stopped running the platform. Why that matters for spectrum, distribution and revenue.
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A live Las Vegas network carried 5G Broadcast inside ATSC 3.0, and the station never stopped running the platform. Why that matters for spectrum, distribution and revenue.

There are now two petitions at the FCC asking that LPTV stations be allowed to transmit a cellular standard instead of a broadcast one, and the newer of them is written well enough that it deserves a real answer. The first arrived in 2025. In May of that year the

There’s a pattern I’ve seen enough times to name it. Revenue is fine. Sales are steady. The programming works. And the station is still barely breaking even, because a handful of fixed costs eat everything before it reaches the bottom line. Almost always, the tower is one of them. Fixed

Every radio standard your station touches was written by a private club. That is not the scandal it sounds like. There is an argument going around the LPTV business that sounds technical and is actually about legitimacy. It goes like this: one standard is written by a private membership organization,

Most LPTV owners have never had their station properly valued. A lot of us bought on a number that had more to do with what the seller wanted than what the asset was worth, and it worked out or it didn’t, and either way nobody wrote down why. I’m not

ATBA responds to the August 10 petition, and to the headlines calling it an industry initiative On August 10, 2026, XGN / X1 Mobile and Tyche Media LLC petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to amend Part 74 so Low Power Television stations could voluntarily transmit using the 3GPP 5G Broadcast

Four proceedings in Washington will do more to determine the value of your license over the next year than anything you buy, build, or sell at the station. That is an uncomfortable sentence to write to an audience of operators who fix their own transmitters. But it is accurate. The

By Lee Allen Miller, Executive Director I want to close this series the way I opened it. With a practical framework, not a prediction. Over the last ten weeks we have covered where AI belongs in LPTV operations, traffic and scheduling, news writing, sales, playout, captioning, audience analysis, digital and

By Lee Allen Miller, Executive Director Your station’s website, social media feeds, and email communications are the digital front door of your broadcast operation. For many viewers, particularly younger ones, the digital presence is the primary way they interact with your brand, even if the broadcast signal is still where