Richer Plans Clean Break When He Leaves ATSC Helm, Says He Has No Regrets

In addition to “tweaking” the 3.0 standards suite, there’s a group within ATSC that’s “looking at the potential for automotive applications using 3.0,” said Richer. “That’s becoming a really, really hot topic.” There’s also an “implementation team” working on 3.0 receiver “conformance.” A document on conformance "test suites" and strategy “is probably one of the most important things ATSC and the larger industry will get done in the next six to nine months,” he said.

There are ATSC groups working on implementing 3.0 interactivity and emergency alerting, plus "planning team 4" is studying ways to adopt future video codecs like Versatile Video Coding (see 1903210057), said Richer. "Everybody believes now's the right time to start thinking strategically about where we're going next. That's healthy for the industry, so hopefully ATSC will always be out front."

When ATSC started planning last fall for this week's NAB Show, Richer told his team “the most important thing” is for broadcasters "to announce what they’re doing” to deploy 3.0 nationally, said Richer. “If you don’t hear the broadcast industry say, ‘Here’s our plan,’ then nothing we demonstrate is going to make a difference.”

Richer is “thrilled about what we’re hearing this week,” he said of plans announced Monday at the show to deploy 3.0 in the 40 top U.S. TV markets by the end of 2020 (see 1904080071). “It’s all steps in the right direction.”

It will be a “big thing” to watch over the next few years “what happens internationally” with 3.0 deployments, said Richer. “Every country may not adopt exactly ATSC 3.0, but use it as a standard and add their own twinkle to it.” He thinks there’s a “good chance we’ll see many parts of the world move toward an ATSC 3.0-like system” because of its internet-protocol “backbone.”

Of his contributions in the 1980s to the PBS team that developed the Line 21 closed-captioning system, “I thought that was the coolest thing I would ever work on,” said Richer. “That was my career, because it was so much fun to be on that team.”

The “connections” he made through the closed-captioning work landed him a front-row seat in the “journey” getting the original DTV system off the ground, said Richer. “It was a different time. You had the government involved, for good or for bad.” The framing of ATSC 1.0, as it later came to be called, at least in the “initial development,” was very “political,” and “really highly competitive,” he said. Richer, and other “people in the leadership” of the effort, spent “a lot of time making sure we were running a process that would be fair, but as importantly, end up with the best system that we possibly could,” he said. “We accomplished that in that period of time, with what we could do with the technologies.”

When Richer chaired the testing and evaluation “working party” for the FCC Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service under former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley, “one of my fondest memories was sitting in a conference room in Dick Wiley’s office,” he said. “We’d be having a meeting and talking about serious things, but eating popcorn at the same time. He always used to make fresh popcorn.”

The working party would hold monthly meetings, “and this was before email was really big, so everything was done by paper documents,” said Richer. “People were very passionate about their positions. They weren’t just taking technical positions, but they were getting push from back home by the CEO of the company.” In the end, “everybody tried to do what was technically correct,” he said

Richer learned “an immense amount” from the 1.0 process, “both about the technology and about people, how they work together or don’t work together,” he said. “It takes some diplomacy but also sometimes takes some pushing. You can’t be just all love and flowers. Sometimes you have to find them a way to move forward. A group will get stuck with different opinions.”

Choosing HD video formats was “probably the most contested thing during the development of the original DTV standard,” said Richer. Picking “the two major HD formats" in 1080i and 720p "proved to work out fine,” he said. “They both worked well in the marketplace at different times.”

During 1.0's framing, there was a “general feeling” that it should be only an HD system, “that you wouldn’t be able to transmit more than one program or service,” said Richer. PBS stepped forward to argue for the ability to beam four or five standard-definition kids’ educational programs during daytime, he said. “We were able to convince the advisory committee and ultimately the FCC” that SD programming “should be in there,” he said. “Just in the last three or four years, commercial broadcasters have discovered the value of being able to transmit other services. Those things almost didn’t make it into the standard.”

“Now, it’s not enough” to offer a diversity of broadcast services, said Richer. “It adds another challenge to the transition to 3.0 because broadcasters aren’t getting more bandwidth, yet they already offer more services.” Under the 3.0 regime, “they’ve got to figure out a way to keep those operating,” he said.

Richer thinks all possible 3.0 services “are going to happen, and I believe they should,” he said. “Broadcasters need to leverage the fact that they’re local and that they’re wireless.” The challenge in offering a diversity of 3.0 services “is that transition step, because the capacity is so limited,” he said. “Once we get past that step, there’ll be more breakout services. The technology is so flexible, which means so many choices, that I think there’s going to continue to be experimentation.”

Madeleine Noland’s consensus-building leadership qualities served her well in the past year as chair of 3.0's supervisory committee, Technology Group 3, and make her the standout choice as next ATSC president (see 1904050003), said Richer. Noland will “hit the ground running,” he said. “Madeleine is a terrific diplomat, among her other great traits.”

Richer said he’ll have no regrets watching 3.0's national deployment from the sidelines. “This is the right timing” to leave, he said. “I don’t feel like I have to be right in the middle of it anymore.”

Though Richer was diagnosed with Parkinson’s 13 years ago, “I’ve been fairly lucky” the disease hasn’t progressed rapidly, he said. “Because I’m in relatively good health, I want to take advantage of that.”

He takes a boxing class three days a week with friends who also have Parkinson’s, he said. “It’s a big workout. I’m a real pacifist, so it’s pretty funny that I’m taking a boxing class. But it’s been really good for me.”

NAB Show Notebook

A “form 2100" FCC license application to commercially deploy 3.0 services is what “everybody is waiting for,” said Mark Aitken, Sinclair vice president-advanced technology. “We earnestly hope at the end of this quarter we will have that form.” Lack of an application form has been a “serious, serious headache,” because there’s “not a clear path to the licensing provisions” of 3.0, he said. FCC Media Bureau Chief Michelle Carey told us the form “hopefully” will be available before June (see 1904080066), a point Chairman Ajit Pai later expanded on (see 1904100069). One reason for delay is that forms are linked with the agency’s licensing management system, emailed Jerald Fritz, executive vice president with Sinclair’s One Media. “The FCC's IT contractor has to design the ‘front end’ that allows applicants to populate fields in the application,” he said. “New fields have to be created and that information then needs to be tied into the database. All of that isn't that difficult but takes time to design and test.”