From TV Technology
Major market stations take to the air
WASHINGTON—ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGen TV)—got off to a flying start early this year, with the first TV sets for U.S. consumers being displayed at CES in January and rollouts across the country set to go like a line of dominoes set in motion.
Then came the pandemic.
We’re now halfway through 2020. Has the scramble to maintain some sort of normalcy in TV station day-to-day operations pushed the plan for wide-scale deployment of this new breed of television to the wayside, or is it continuing to track?
“There was a slight delay, but it was not a serious delay,” said Mark Aitken, senior vice president of advanced technology for Sinclair and president of the company’s NextGen TV arm, ONE Media. “Things are back in gear now.”
The starting gun fired on May 26 with the launch of NextGen TV in Las Vegas with network affiliates owned by Sinclair, Nexstar and Scripps. The stations, Sinclair’s KSNV NBC and KVCW CW affiliates, Nexstar’s KLAS CBS affiliate and Scripps’ KTNV ABC affiliate, are sharing a single 6 MHz channel and transmitting from Sinclair’s tower on Black Mountain outside the city.
