Pearl TV Seeking Ample 3.0 Coverage for 'Big-Box Retailers' to Sell Devices
Pearl TV and its partners in the Phoenix ATSC 3.0 model-market project are “collaborating” with the Spectrum Co. consortium that Sinclair shares with American Tower, Cunningham Broadcasting, Nexstar and Univision to fashion a “transition model that we could offer to the industry as a way to move multiple markets, so that we’re all operating on the same sheet of paper,” Pearl Managing Director Anne Schelle told us Wednesday. The ultimate goal is to blanket the U.S. with coverage in a "rapid build" over three years, said Schelle.
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Having announced at the NAB Show that KFPH-CD Phoenix Channel 35, a Univision-owned Class A station, was “the first stick to go up” in the Phoenix model-market project during the early-morning hours of April 6 (see 1804080002), “we’re focused on a second stick that’s a little more, I think, similar to how future sticks in other markets will need to be modeled,” said Schelle. “We’ve made progress in our thinking toward a very simple transition, but we’re looking at a more complex one that we’ve been working on the model on with Spectrum Co.”
In fashioning their “transition model,” Pearl and Spectrum Co. need to “figure out how to value the bits and how the parties would work together to enable sticks in a methodology that could work market to market,” said Schelle. “That’s the model that we’re working on with them, and so we’ve made a lot of progress,” she said. Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley spoke similarly about the status of Spectrum Co.’s activities in the Dallas 3.0 market trials on an earnings call Wednesday.
Pearl and Spectrum Co. are “in agreement on many aspects of the methodology,” said Schelle. “I think when Phoenix and Dallas are fully aligned, that’s a great indicator for the rest of the industry to be able to have a model that’s uniform and we can take to multiple markets more easily.” If broadcasters are “looking at doing the transition” and are “using different valuations, it gets very difficult to move markets under different constructs,” she said. “So we’re coming up with a uniform construct that can be used by the industry.”
Schelle hopes that by “later this fall,” Pearl and Spectrum Co. will be able to announce additional markets to host trials, she said. “We’re working on that right now. One of our gating factors is the repack. We’re still in phase one of the repack. There’s not a lot of phase one markets because those are markets that tend to be isolated.”
Of the candidate phase two and three markets that might be tapped, “Pearl’s working on analyzing which ones we want to target next,” said Schelle. “We’re meeting a lot on that and talking to Spectrum Co. about that.”
Schelle won’t hazard any guesses for now on how many markets might be tapped to host 3.0 trials or rollouts in the next three years, she said. “I think in general our goal is to get a good percentage of the U.S. covered,” she said. “We’re gated by the repack” of TV-station frequencies by the FCC with the incentive auction complete, and there are markets “that have multiple levels of phases,” she said. “I think New York has three or four. Those get really challenging. We have to wait on those. So it’s hard to say. We’re doing all that analysis, but our goal would be to get rapid build so that we have enough coverage in the U.S. to be satisfactory for big-box retailers to sell devices.”