How ATSC 3.0 Could Reinvent Local Media Access
BCAT: Bloomington Community Access Television / Bloomington, MN
Broadcasters have invested heavily in ATSC 3.0, the ‘NextGen TV’ standard touted for its 4K video, immersive audio, targeted advertising, and IP-based datacasting. The industry has framed it largely as a new revenue engine, with occasional nods to public benefits like improved emergency alerts and enhanced newsroom tools. But what’s still absent is the element most likely to win Washington’s full backing: a genuine civic bargain.
If broadcasters truly want the FCC to more formally accelerate the transition (one suspects the NAB and other 3.0 enthusiasts were expecting much more from the FCC than the clarified-guidance-but-well-short-of-a-mandate Public Notice its Media Bureau published earlier this week) — they need to offer communities something more valuable than higher-def sports or better sound. One potential solution: reviving and reinventing public access television.
PEGs And The Public Interest Gap
Public, educational, and government (PEG) channels once flourished under 1990s-era cable TV franchise deals. “Public access TV” provided towns and neighborhoods a ready-made, hyper-local platform for showing school sports, council meetings, community news, and even ethnic/foreign language programming that no commercial outlet dared to provide. As MVPD cord-cutting erodes cable franchise fee revenue and FCC rules have allowed in-kind contributions to supplant cash payments, PEG channels are being increasingly starved of funding — forcing many to cut back or even shut down.
Yet, the core need for such programming hasn’t gone away. If anything, today’s hyper-fragmented digital media landscape makes trusted, community-specific information even more important: live town hall Q&As, tribal council coverage in native languages, high school theater productions, or emergency updates with reliable captioning.
Cable no longer ensures that access. NextGen TV broadcasting could.
Designing A NextGen Civic Compact
ATSC 3.0’s multiplexing and IP-based architecture open new possibilities for public-service and community-oriented programming:
Dedicated civic streams: Broadcasters could reserve a multicast channels for local public content in each market — clearly and specifically labeled in the NextGen program guide — ensuring viewers can easily find council meetings, school events, and neighborhood programming.
Niche and multilingual access: Stations could allocate capacity to underserved communities, including immigrant populations, tribal governments, and other cultural or linguistic groups that rarely appear in commercial programming lineups.
Civic datacasting: Leveraging the IP layer, broadcasters could transmit emergency alerts, local school closures, weather updates, or municipal documents directly to TVs and connected devices — effectively creating a “public service data channel” layered on top of the existing NextGen signal.
Support for local production: As part of transition plans, stations might dedicate a portion of potential NextGen revenues — such as income from enterprise datacasting or enhanced ad serving — to local media centers for equipment upgrades, staff training, captioning, and production support.
None of these measures requires new legislation; they only rely on voluntary, enforceable commitments that regulators could attach to ATSC 3.0 authorizations, linking the technological upgrade to tangible and measurable public benefit.
Incentives For Broadcasters And Regulators
Critics may argue that dedicating spectrum to civic programming reduces valuable commercial capacity. Yet such commitments buy something equally vital: political goodwill. Regulators, consumer advocates, and local governments are cautious about upgrades that appear to benefit only media margins. By tying NextGen TV implementation to concrete public benefits, broadcasters can strengthen their case for accelerated approvals and encourage wider adoption of the new tech required to access it.
A civic compact could also ease concerns over the current wave of proposed consolidation. Large broadcast groups are pressing regulators to relax ownership caps and approve major M&A deals — efforts that collide with longstanding worries about declining localism. A credible pledge to support community channels, multilingual or niche programming, and civic datacasting gives policymakers a tangible justification for approval, re-framing consolidation not as unchecked empire-building but as a tool to sustain local service in the digital age.
From a business perspective, embedding and augmenting local civic services makes NextGen TV more indispensable. It gives viewers reasons to keep their tuners active beyond HD sports, and reinforces broadcasters’ broader argument: in a fragmented media landscape dominated by subscription services and walled gardens, free over-the-air television remains the universal, accessible — and uniquely local — medium.
Ensuring Accountability
That said, token gestures by the broadcasting industry won’t cut it. A channel no one can find watches or a limited grant that expires after a few years won’t convince anyone.
To be credible, a civic compact must spell out service levels, ensure transparent reporting on hours aired and funds spent, protect community producers from interference, and guarantee access for ethnic, tribal, and immigrant communities that would otherwise go unrepresented.
Only with these safeguards can skeptics be confident that the effort is more than a corporate public relations exercise.
A Window of Opportunity
The NAB and other industry interests are already in Washington lobbying for greater spectrum flexibility, retransmission concessions, and smoother ATSC 3.0 rollout rules. The timing is ideal. Rather than framing NextGen TV as merely a business lifeline, broadcasters could present it as both a technological upgrade and a civic improvement.
Public access television once thrived because regulators demanded value in exchange for cable monopolies: communities received guaranteed space on the cable dial. That arrangement eroded as cable subscriptions and franchise fees declined.
NextGen TV offers a second chance — not to replicate the past, but to reinvent local access for a hybrid broadcast-IP future. Broadcasters seeking regulatory support, legislative goodwill, or community backing — whether for NextGen approvals or large-scale mergers — can achieve it by dedicating some spectrum and revenues to a durable, modernized system of public access.
Civic reciprocity made cable’s growth politically sustainable. A similar commitment could do the same for broadcast’s NextGen TV ambitions.
Local News To Peruse
Fox, CBS May Want In On Local TV Station Buying Spree - Alex Weprin [The Hollywood Reporter]
Scripps To Sell Fox Affiliate WFTX To Sun Broadcasting For $40 Million - Lucas Manfredi [The Wrap]
Back to Laboring In The Local TV Station Business - Kirk Varner [TVND.com]
‘The FCC Is Trying To Roll Back Protections Won Over The Past 60 Years’ - Janine Jackson [Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting]
Lack Of Local News Tied To Government Secrecy, New Report Says - John Volk [Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative]
Two Groups Tell FCC: ATSC 3.0 Plan Will Harm Consumers - Jim Kimble [Antenna Land]
