Is ATSC 3.0 sputtering or out of gas?

The continuation of ATSC 1.0 broadcasting is only "wasteful" if you ignore the profligate selling of bandwidth to cell phone companies to have been beneficial. The FCC stole public airwaves to sell them to the highest bidder and now they are in a bandwidth crunch. Sorry Charlie let the market play this one out. We don't need our government overlords to force us into another total replacement of billions of dollars in electronics just to fatten the purses of a few hogs. They might consider relieving themselves of the OTA charging for programming to distributers as a gesture of accommodation in the discussion.
 
The key sentence is the following.

The single biggest factor in the success of this transition is almost completely out of our control – it is up to the consumer electronics industry to build the devices that consumers will use to access our signals.

They need to develop a low cost ATSC 3.0 tuner. The current tuners are expensive.


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I have two 3.0 Tuners one an HD Homerun Prime and the other built into my Sony X90J TV.

The picture on our local Hartford ATSC 3 channel is so much better than the ATSC 1.0 channels but they are much slower to load and are far behind the ATSC 1.0 broadcasts with a delay.
 
I'll quote my own post on another forum this morning.

"I mean, it's a voluntary transition, per their own request, so if it is in "peril," then it implies nobody volunteered. Doesn't help that there are still, seven years later (by their count), almost no receivers, and they're in the middle of breaking all the receivers that do exist with encryption that nobody outside the C-suite wanted or asked for.

This is what they wanted."

- Trip
 
I am in the Denver market and have had access to ATSC 3.0 for almost a year on my Sony A80CJ and 2 Evoca boxes. We have 4 channels doing the lighthouse thing on channel 34. I have yet to see anything in 4K or any great picture improvement over the ATSC 1.0 channels. The only thing I notice is that the sound is always screwed up on network programming. The sound always defaults to Spanish and the listing is backwards. I have to choose Spanish to get the English broadcast.

I have seen this reported many times but they really don't seem to care about fixing it.
 
I'm thinking that without another mandate, 3.0 will be a slow turtle dragging its feet in adoption. The problem is that there are too many alternatives now and so many people would rather stream their entertainment to their phone or tablet than to "tune in" a channel. Don't get me wrong, I don't like government interference, but I'm saying there is too much competition out there in the market for alternatives to simply tuning in to see a local TV station. What pushed the last mandate was the need to clear up the airwaves for the cell phone companies and make more efficient use of the bandwidth. If the FCC had mandated 3.0 adoption with the last repack, we would probably see more progress, but with the bandwidth crunch, younger viewers wanting to just "stream" content, and stations not wanting to spend out the extra money on transitioning equipment without seeing a big perk in revenue, it's probably going to be a slow adoption at this point. I would say that OTA viewing is sort of a niche thing now. I just purchased an HDHomerun 3.0 tuner to simplify my setup and put everything on the network. The picture quality on 3.0 does look great due to the better compression and fewer compression artifacts seen on 1.0, but nobody's racing to put 4K OTA. The best you can hope for now with 3.0 is HDR and 1080p with little to no macro-blocking.
 

Tropo this morning in Carrollton, MO.

Trinidad and Tobago of 1.4 millions people chose ATSC 3.0