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ATSC 3.0’s skeptics — and they are many — will argue that the new broadcast standard and its nationwide implementation are too complex, too fraught with unwranglable forces and facing too much consumer indifference and ignorance to ever become a viable revenue stream for broadcasters.
To which John Hane says pshaw.
Hane, president and CEO of the BitPath NextGen consortium between Nexstar and Sinclair, says data leasing revenue could start rolling in within select markets or regions inside of the next year. He sees that the mountain NextGen TV has yet to scale is massive, but argues the progress made so far in lighting up new ATSC 3.0 markets is also considerable.
In this Talking TV conversation, Hane takes the measure of that progress, lays out the challenges still in front of the technology’s implementation, and ventures a guess as to when it will finally become a significant percentage of broadcasters’ bottom line.
Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.
Michael Depp: BitPath is a spectrum consortium between Nexstar and Sinclair built on ATSC 3 architecture to deliver data and create new revenue streams for TV broadcasters. So, how is that whole new revenue stream thing going?
I’m Michael Depp, editor of TVNewsCheck, and this is Talking TV. My guest today is John Hane, president and CEO of BitPath. We’ll be doing a check in with how far along BitPath has come in building its network, the challenges it continues to face in its growth and the biggest question