Sinclair Broadcast Group - May 2022

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Sinclair was a key pioneer in developing NextGen Broadcast technology that is revolutionising the broadcast world, advancing a technology and sharing it where others could not

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inclair Broadcast Group officially started as one television station in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1971.

Now it is one of the largest media providers, operating almost 200 television stations across the United States, is the largest U.S. local sports and tennis broadcast provider, and has a diversified business, including the manufacture of TV and radio transmission antennas and pioneering broadcast technology that it is bringing to the world.

Sinclair has built a reputation as a leader in broadcast technology and media evolution, serving multiple local US markets with linear and digital content, and paving the way for service to rural parts of the developing world. Its pioneering work on the NextGen Broadcast standard has made it possible for the new IP-based TV transmissions to engage with new 5G technology standards directly reaching mobile users worldwide.

“We started as one independent station that was built by Julian [Sinclair] Smith, the founder of the company. We now own or operate over 185 stations across the country in 86 markets, almost all of which are network affiliates. This includes ABC, NBC Fox, CBS, CW,” says Chris Ripley, President and Chief Executive Officer. “We cover about 40% of the country with many top local news franchises attached to each Example of one of those markets.” an image caption

“ Our thesis is that local news and sports are the most durable types of programming” CHRIS RIPLEY

PRESIDENT & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

Del Parks, a veteran of the company and its President of Technology, explains how the founder started Sinclair. Julian Smith and a small group of shareholders had formed a broadcast trade school in 1958 (Commercial Radio Institute, known as CRI), the same year that he applied to build an FM radio station. Smith saw that FM radio had better quality and better signal propagation to cover markets than AM radio.

“Julian Smith started this company with an FM radio station, which he built in 1964,” says Parks. It was a big gamble. “In the

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United States, in the 1960s, AM radio was king, even more so than TV.” “The FM station was broadcasting in stereo when stereo pretty much didn't exist,” says Parks. “So, he built the equipment himself including consoles and multiple accessories. He was also running the technology school, which is where I met him. I started at the school in 1970 while he was building the TV station. So, some of the students pitched in and helped him build it.”

The company then built its Baltimore studio and another one in Pittsburgh in 1976, then another one in Columbus, Ohio in the 1980s. Acquisition of key stations and television groups throughout the country followed, as Sinclair grew to gain its status as a Fortune 500 company in 2021.

Five years ago, the company entered the sports broadcasting market, acquiring Tennis Channel. In 2019, the group established itself as the major regional sports program provider when it acquired the Fox Sports regional sports networks, which it rebranded as “Bally Sports.” As the largest regional sports broadcaster in the United States, Bally

SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

CHRIS RIPLEY TITLE: PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER COMPANY: SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP INDUSTRY: BROADCASTING

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: MARYLAND, US Christopher S. Ripley has served as President & Chief Executive Officer since January 2017. From April 2014 to January 2017, he served as Chief Financial Officer. Prior to Sinclair, Mr. Ripley was a managing director at UBS Investment Bank’s Global Media Group and served as head of the Los Angeles office where he managed, advised and structured various financings and merger and acquisition transactions in the broadcast and entertainment sectors. Prior to UBS, Mr. Ripley was a principal in Prime Ventures and an analyst at Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette.

Mr. Ripley graduated from the University of Western Ontario, Richard Ivey School of Business, with a Bachelor of Arts in Honors Business Administration.

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Linear roots, digital growth.

Your evolution starts here.

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IP technology is transforming the television industry. However, determining the best IP transmission solution is often challenging. The right IP solution needs to deliver operational consistency in content distribution while also enabling audience growth and new revenue streams.

Sinclair has always been a pioneer in adopting new technologies that elevate the viewing experience. For Sinclair, leveraging the power of IP to distribute live sports content to viewers across platforms and devices while ensuring optimized viewing quality and efficiency was critical. In addition, ATSC 3.0 and NextGen TV transform how viewers consume content bringing a host of new immersive and interactive experiences. NextGen TV also creates more complexity for media companies that have to simulcast in the current and new broadcasting standards.

Sinclair selected LTN Global’s powerful and intelligent transport network to overcome the complexities in ATSC 3.0 deployment and simplify the live stream distribution workflows.

LTN Global delivered the technology solution that met Sinclair’s business needs without compromise. The LTN transport network ensures that every single link delivers live feeds accurately, seamlessly, and with ultralow latency to any destination.

Following the successful launch of the first commercial ATSC 3.0 deployment in May 2020, LTN Global has become the preferred transport network partner for Sinclair Broadcast Group and its subsidiary, ONE Media 3.0, as the companies look to bring the most significant broadcast technology upgrade to new TV markets across the United States.

LTN Global provides the technology solutions that bring the fragmented broadcasting ecosystem together, driving the technology innovation that will revolutionize how we consume live content.

SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

Sports broadcasts about 5,000 live professional baseball, hockey and basketball games annually. Sinclair is seeking the same success as the growth of its television broadcast division as it joins hands with approximately 45 US-based teams. The sports play does not stop there.

“Our thesis is that local news and sports are way more durable than entertainment programming, which has become ubiquitous, and for a smaller company like ours within the media landscape, we could carve out a niche there, and have truly exclusive content,” Ripley says. “We did that by acquiring Tennis Channel and immediately began plans for increasing its distribution. It's now going global. It operates in eight countries now, including the UK, where it launched in August 2021.”

The growth of any company isn’t accomplished alone. Over the years, Sinclair has developed a significant partner ecosystem that has allowed the company to diversify and enter new areas rapidly. Those companies have been critical to Sinclair’s success and include: Televes, Fincons Group, Saankhya Labs, Rohde & Schwartz, DigiCap, and LTN Global.

DAVID SMITH TITLE: EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN COMPANY: SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP INDUSTRY: BROADCASTING

EXECUTIVE BIO

David Smith has spent over a half century in the broadcasting business. From the beginning, he has focused on all its interrelated facets from enhancing transmission capabilities to the content distributed over the channels. His vision that "content is just digital bits" forms the company's guiding principle to enhance its video offerings and enable the future of datacasting. Building on the business founded by his father, he remains the controlling shareholder of the family enterprise turned Fortune 500 Company.

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“ We have people on staff that are very serious technical patent people, electrical engineers and big picture industry planners who think about all these things in an effort to drive the future value of the broadcast industry” DAVID SMITH

EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

Sinclair breaks technological boundaries with NextGen Broadcast

Competition Through Diversification and Niche Dominance By some metrics, Sinclair is relatively small within the media landscape currently dominated by tech giants like Google, Amazon, Apple, Disney, and Paramount.

However, Sinclair, through its focused strategy, is pushing a huge range of agendas focused on direct-to-consumer content delivery.

“We are a very diversified company,” says Ripley. “The three big divisions are Broadcast, the Regional Sports Networks and Tennis Channel. But we've got other assets - some broadcast-related, like an antenna manufacturer, and some wholly unrelated, like a funeral home company.

We have a basket of these other assets, which we call our investment portfolio, that amounts to about US$1.4bn.”

“We operate two data centers currently one in Seattle and one in Baltimore - but we are in the process of a major transformation.

We're moving much of our on-premises systems to the cloud,” says Parks. “The idea for centralisation really is not centralisation, it's really content sharing.” It serves as the forward-thinking growth infrastructure for all current and future content distribution.

An Entrepreneurial Mindset at Sinclair’s Core The people at Sinclair drive a constant search for market gaps and innovations. They approach the company as entrepreneurs, with visions and missions that push them to find more profitable strategies.

“I think we're entrepreneurs to the core.

If you go back and look at the history of the evolution of technology and the broadcast sbgi.net

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“ We have people on staff to drive the future value of the broadcast industry” MARK AITKEN

SENIOR VP OF ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

industry, especially the transmission side of the equation, we're really the leader in the industry,” says David Smith, the company’s Executive Chairman.

David took the company with its couple of stations founded by his father and grew it to the titan it is today. While entrepreneurial and tech-focused, Sinclair has retained the 14

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benefits and traditions of a family company.

Smith carefully adds to that family by taking on people equally focused on an entrepreneurial vision for long-term growth and not constrained by “how things have always been done.”

Smith emphasises his approach by noting, “We have people on staff who are very serious, technical patent people, electrical engineers and big picture industry planners who think about all these things in an effort to drive the future value of the broadcast industry. This value is based on its ability to have a piece of the spectrum, through which we can deliver all different kinds of services and products to the country, to the individual, to the government, anybody who needs it. You have to think of us – the broadcast industry – as a gigantic highway.”

MARK AITKEN TITLE: SENIOR VP OF ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY COMPANY: SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP INDUSTRY: BROADCASTING

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: MARYLAND, US Mark A. Aitken has served as Senior Vice President of Advanced Technology since July 2011 and prior to that, he served as Director of Advanced Technology.

Aitken is responsible for representing the group’s interests in regulatory, technical and standards issues within industry-related organisations and before regulatory agencies both in the US and internationally. Mr. Aitken has been involved in the broadcast industry’s migration to advanced services since 1987, from his participation in the FCC’s Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services to his current involvement with the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC). Mr. Aitken was the primary architect in the formation of ONE Media, and a driver of key ATSC 3.0 breakthrough technologies.

He is a member of the NAB TV Technology Committee which is focused on the broader technical issues facing the broadcast industry. Mr. Aitken is the author of many papers dealing with innovative RF product developments, advanced

digital broadcast systems designimplementation strategies, and holds patents for various RF devices and Next Gen systems. Mark is a member of the AFCCE, IEEE and SMPTE, as well as an active participant in NAB, ATSC and other industry organisations. He is a recipient of the 2008 “Broadcasting and Cable” Technology Leadership Award, 2013 recipient of the ATSC “Bernard Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award”, 2018 awardee of “Future’s” Industry Innovator Award” and the “2018 NAB Television Engineering Achievement Award”, and serves as a member of the Board of ATSC, ATBA and Saankhya Labs.

A responsive partner for ATSC 3.0 innovation and development

For the past 20 years DigiCAP has used advanced software and clould development to make television and telecom systems easier to use, less costly, and more profitable.

DigiCaster, DigiCAP’s ATSC 3.0 air chain, was introduced in 2017 and is now deployed throughout South Korea and in half of ATSC 3.0 markets in the US.

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Cultivating partnerships for the future of TV with Sinclair Sinclair’s Mark Aitken and DigiCAP’s Sang Jin Yoon on the pair’s partnership and how, together, they will make their mark in the future of TV Sinclair Broadcast Group is one of the largest and most diverse television broadcasting companies in the US. It aims to make a significant mark in the television industry with the development of ATSC 3.0 technology, which offers 4K resolution and HDR content for over-theair broadcasts.

To help with this, Sinclair recognises the need for sound, strategic partnerships.

This is why it enlisted the help of Korea-based DigiCAP, providers of digital media transport technologies, and content protection and rights management solutions.

Commenting on the partnership, Sang Jin Yoon, Senior Vice President at DigiCAP, says: “Sinclair has helped us to fire up our receiver business, which enabled us to establish a supply chain of components, as well as manufacturing, and those devices are now ‒ with the advent of COVID ‒ used for distance learning.”

“It’s been a great partnership. But, by working with DigiCAP, we’ve taken a

standard and put it into action when it comes to ATSC 3.0 technology,” adds Mark Aitken, Senior VP of Advanced Technology at Sinclair.

The significance of this technology is why DigiCAP were keen to support Sinclair as it works on ATSC 3.0., as Yoon explains: “We bring our experiences in the mobile environment to the partnership which we believe fits well with Sinclair’s direction. We developed content protection technologies for mobile devices and also streaming services; Sinclair is our first customer as we enter the broadcast market.”

Both Sinclair and DigiCAP are open to collaboration based on trial and error.

Reflecting on this, Aitken concludes: “What’s great about the relationship is that we don’t mind putting impossible problems on the table and then solving them. This flows out of our walls and into DigiCAP. In years to come, this industry will be reliant on close personal relationships built on trust, where you have the ability to ask difficult questions and work through problems.”

SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

DEL PARKS TITLE: PRESIDENT OF TECHNOLOGY COMPANY: SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP INDUSTRY: BROADCASTING

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: MARYLAND, US

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Delbert R. Parks, III has served as President of Technology since March 2022, holding various operations and engineering positions with Sinclair for the last 50 years. In his current position, he provides the vision, resources and leadership to coordinate all Sinclair’s technology activities and ensure these efforts support the company’s current and future business goals. Prior to his current role, Mr. Parks was the company’s Chief Technology Officer since 2014, and Senior Vice President and Vice President of Operations and Engineering from 1996 to 2014. Mr. Parks is a SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) Fellow and is a member of the Society of Broadcast Engineers. He is on the Board of Directors of the Baltimore Area Council, Boy Scouts of America. Mr. Parks is also a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel who held various commands during his 26-year reserve career.

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Pulling an Industry into the Future with NextGen Broadcast “Historically, the television broadcast highway was essentially unusable as it relates to anything on a mobile basis whatsoever,” says Smith. “So this new standard for the United States and other parts of the world provides absolute mobility, and it is a world-class standard that will provide the broadcast industry with the opportunity to do other things that it's never been able to do, therefore really expanding the value of the broadcast industry.”

“ It is a world-class standard that will provide the broadcast industry with the opportunity to do other things that it's never been able to do” DAVID SMITH

EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP sbgi.net

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GSERTEL AND TELEVES LEAD THE ATSC 3.0 TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE As ATSC 3.0 quickly ramps up, broadcast Operators search for key partners that can swiftly develop professional tools to manage and control their DTT network site deployments. Sinclair has found in Gsertel the perfect ally when it comes to state-of-the-art portable field spectrum analyzers.

Gsertel is the measuring equipment subsidiary of Televes, a technological corporation with more than 60 years of experience designing and manufacturing broadcast distribution equipment in Europe, providing now dedicated technical support in the ATSC 3.0 roll-out in the United States.

The Gsertel Hexylon field spectrum analyzer has been chosen by Sinclair for its versatility and realtime precision on any signal measurement required.

The Gsertel engineering team´s flexibility allows for new features to be developed promptly as the ATSC 3.0 roll-out calls for new demands.

Hexylon is intended for professional users requiring advanced features and precise measurement accuracy, analysis and diagnose of TV and radio signals. Designed with the premise of an intuitive tool, Hexylon is not just a portable meter with a touch screen, but rather a new way of measuring network signals, developed on the basis of a multi-touch screen. With Hexylon, the content becomes the user interface and everything flows in an intuitive way through gestural commands.

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Javier Ruano Televes USA General Manager

The future of ATSC 3.0 is already here. Javier Ruano, Televes USA General Manager, is very clear on the starring role of both Gsertel and Televes in this scenario.

“We need to persevere, to continue to provide dedicated and exquisite local support and knowledge to our network Operators, and our advanced technology will take care of the rest. Good things are ahead for broadcast networks in the US and we expect to be a key partner in the ATSC 3.0 and SFN roll-out process”.

And in that near future is evolving the RCS+Gprobe tailor-made SFN monitoring solution, that can be integrated onto any ATSC 3.0 Operator NMS platform for real-time network monitoring and reporting.

Smith is talking about Sinclair's contribution to landmark innovation - ATSC 3.0, also known as NextGen Broadcast. It essentially enables broadcasting to be an integral piece of the 5G telecommunications ecosystem. The project is led by Sinclair’s Senior Vice President of Advanced Technology, Mark Aitken.

“We've invested tens of millions of dollars helping to develop the NextGen Broadcast standard, and no one else in our industry was willing to do that,” says CEO Ripley, “but that's the sort of entrepreneurial spirit and technology focus that we have, the expertise we have with guys like Mark [Aitken] and Del Parks and their teams that enabled us to do that.

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“It was that long-term vision, which caused us to be able to take that leap and invest in the future for which the rest of our peers had no appetite,” notes Ripley.

The technology repurposes the 6 MHz channel that television stations around the world use to transmit their signal. Developed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee - an international standards setting body - with substantial input from Sinclair ATSC 3.0 - also known as NextGen Broadcast utilises the existing infrastructure to do so much more than linear video programming to a fixed TV set in the home. Using the same “language” of the Internet - Internet Protocol or IP - broadcasters can now use their

SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

“It was that long-term vision, which caused us to be able to take that leap and invest in the future for which the rest of our peers had no appetite” CHRIS RIPLEY

PRESIDENT & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

channels to enhance traditional programming significantly, reach mobile devices for the first time, hyper-localise content and advertising, combine over-the-air content with streaming content and distribute wholly new forms of non-video data. This brings the modern, fully mobile world, to old broadcast setups using technology already in place.

“It's never been used for anything other than typically delivering network television or news or entertainment to the television in your house,” says Smith. “Now we have the ability to talk to cars, telephones, anything that's mobile, any place, anywhere in the United States and we're working toward getting the adoption of the standard into all devices, into cars and mobile devices into everything that's capable of receiving over-the-air television signals.

“The incremental value to our local TV stations by expanding to mobile viewers and targeting programming and advertising alone is worth the investment before you even get to all the new businesses created by this technology,” says Smith. “[It gives] the ability to talk to mobile devices, and being in the news business and the weather business, it gives us the ability to tell people, ‘Hey, there's a hurricane and there's a tornado. There's whatever coming in your neighborhood, get undercover’,” he says.

“We're the only ones that can do that because

we're on the ground live, real-time and have that ability to connect two devices.”

Smith says this technology can save lives from extreme weather events, hazardous spills, police emergencies or any other critical events since the broadcast tech is one-to-infinite – everyone can receive the message simultaneously with no buffering, pixelation or lost signals. The broadcast tech can’t be overloaded.

“That's what we do. We're in the business of serving everybody that isn't rich,” says Smith. “A local television station covers a radius of typically 45-50 miles. We are able to touch everybody inside that radius, which is millions and millions of people across the country. We do that every day with a new broadcast standard.

“We're going to be able to build that out, so you won't have to be sitting in your house to watch us. You'll be able to watch us everywhere you are.”

Journeying to the Technology to Connect People Mark Aitken worked for a small company, COMARK Industries, at a time in the TV industry when videotape was replacing film and the UHF spectrum was just beginning to be used by independent broadcasters. In 1979, COMARK’s founder, Richard Fiore Sr., started a partnership with sbgi.net

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SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

“ You won't have to be sitting in your house to watch us. You'll be able to watch us everywhere you are” DAVID SMITH

EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

David Smith and began manufacturing television transmitters. Those were the old analog days when people just had a square box monitor in their living rooms to watch a linear TV programme. The world changed in 1995 when the United States began converting from analog to digital broadcasting - the so-called ATSC 1.0 standard. Suddenly, we had the promise and flexibility of a digital standard. But how best to exploit it?

“It made great HD pictures, but there's more than pictures in the minds of entrepreneurs and what you can do with the spectrum,” says Aitken. “We were already thinking about - how do we get into these small devices? How do we address a population of devices besides the TV set in the living room? Cell phones were around, people were now communicating, holding conversations and beginning on a personal level to communicate and flinging data to one another.”

After several years of trying to get the US to accept the European digital standard as an alternative to the more limited US version, Sinclair saw its attempts fail due to political factors, industry alignment, and a lack of vision.

“The vision of TV broadcasters was always about better TV, better pictures, better sbgi.net

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SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

sound. So if your vision is better pictures, better sound then HDTV is king and you view the world one way,” says Aitken.

“If you're trying to address a universe of devices that don't yet exist, you have a very different view of the world.”

The company has continued to focus on a more robust digital standard that would enable this future vision. Sinclair pushed the industry to develop and adopt a new standard. That became the new ATSC 3.0 standard and was officially approved by the Federal Communications Commission in 2017. Ripley notes that the existing TV standard is not nearly as efficient as the new one. The new tech, making use of the one-to-many efficiency of IP broadcasting, is more advantageous than the oneto-one distribution of the traditional broadband business. And importantly, the new IP-based standard can do so much more than just TV programming.

“When you think about it, the best use cases are data that a lot of people want,” says Ripley. “Video is a good example of that because a lot of people watch the same videos. But then cars need a lot of information on a regular basis, especially as they become more autonomous and they generally need the same information, especially in a certain geography. So it's way more efficient to send it out once to all devices as opposed to one-to-one to every device.

“On top of that, in terms of just the spectral efficiency and ability to be received below noise levels, the technical performance of the NextGen standard versus any sort of multicast mode in 5G, demonstrates it has a much much greater spectral efficiency.”

“An example of that is LTE Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS), 26

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SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

“ We've always leveraged our size and our editorial strength to deliver a service to the people that we serve, and technology is extremely important to that” CHRIS RIPLEY

PRESIDENT & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

which not many carriers use, but it is available in normal cellular. These types of unicast services have a huge data overhead compared to ATSC Broadcast. That means if you're using LTE MBMS, you are only able to use a fraction of your bandwidth to actually carry the data.”

Sinclair plans to provide a hybrid experience combining NextGen Broadcast and traditional broadband delivery technology in one seamless experience.

“At least from an entertainment perspective and from a content perspective, that's going to be the main mode of operation and then having to be available on a direct consumer basis is a big push for us,” says Ripley. “Gamification is also another big push.

We believe in the convergence of media and gaming. So think video gaming, but also sports betting, I think social gaming is all merging and we want to be on the forefront of that trend.”

Acceleration of Industry in the Most Underserved Areas A couple of decades ago, newspapers kept local government in check, but the landscape is different now as local newspapers have declined. Sinclair considers itself the heir of that legacy.

“What we do in local news is very important, and that then transcends into digital, into our websites, into our mobile apps and then extending that out to regions,” Ripley says. “We've always leveraged our size and our editorial strength to deliver a service to the people that we serve, and technology is extremely important to that.” sbgi.net

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The company believes NextGen Broadcast will allow them to be even more focused on delivering more local news to local communities.

“It's leveraging all our local TV station assets: local programming and local news with reporting “boots on the ground” on a nationwide basis,” says Aitken. “We're ideally positioned to leverage those assets that are going into local news and bringing those all together.

“Newspapers are suffering and failing in large quantities by virtue of the fact that they're still doing what they did a hundred years ago, that's just a fundamental design problem. They haven't adapted to the marketplace,” says Smith.

“This new technology will allow the broadcast industry to do essentially the same thing as everybody else from a delivery perspective. And remember: there's nobody that does what we do in the marketplace. Local television is the primary source of all news in the marketplace because we're live in real-time delivering everything that's going on, that's relevant in our view to the people. That's what we do.”

This technology, instead of implanting several million separately addresses phone numbers in cars or other gadgets, allows information to be distributed straight to a device without needing separate phone numbers, relying on IP addressing instead.

Sinclair, through its ONE Media division and Indian partner Saankhya Labs, is involved in proving out this NextGen Broadcast technology in India. “That's one of the focuses of this trial that we have in Bangalore. The wireless carriers are very interested in this one-to-many offload feature because their networks are so congested. And so they can do a seamless offload from a cellular unicast network to an NextGen 5G broadcast network,” says Ripley.

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“From a consumer perspective, you don't know that you've switched networks, but now all of a sudden you're offloaded from a one-to-one network in 4G or 5G to a oneto-many network in broadcast land using a different piece of the spectrum that's low-band, generally in the 600-700 MHz range. It's a nice complement in terms of offloading data types, where there's a lot of people who want the same thing.”

The alternative distribution system is well received in India where hundreds of millions of people have little to

SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

“There's nobody that does what we do in the marketplace.

Local television is the primary source of all news in the marketplace” DAVID SMITH

EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

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SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

“ This technology will be universal.

The only issue is what day and how fast, that's all” DAVID SMITH

EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

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no connectivity. It goes through the broadcasters as the company puts transmitters on cell towers.

“This solution [was used] for things like e-learning, obviously video consumption, which is really big on mobile devices in India. This is a really powerful technology that can be way more efficient and costeffective,” Ripley says. “It's being tested in big cities, too, where congestion on mobile networks is really the target, but then you get out into the rural areas where you've got a lot of people that really have very, very poor service to the internet.”

The technology enables a population of a billion-plus users to access the same or similar content broadcast at a lower cost.

“That's a big drive over the next 12 to 18 months and it also fits in with this wireless technology because it will open up new ways to use the wireless technology. Most of our business today is done through other people's distribution points,” says Ripley. “We distribute our local sports through pay-TV – through cable and satellite – and we do over-the-air.

But only 15-20% of the people actually use the over-the-air signal. They generally get it retransmitted through cable and satellite.

“NextGen Broadcast will get to over 75% of the country [USA] by the end of this year. Approximately 5 million TVs will be sold in the US this year that are NextGen ready. And then we've got all this activity in other countries like India, where we're doing a huge trial in Bangalore with the local public broadcaster there.

“We hope to get into mobile devices as this market matures. Then you've got Jamaica, Brazil and Korea, which are actually looking at rolling out mobility within the 5G Broadcast deployment, so there's a lot going on internationally that we help support. Domestically, we've sort of hit escape velocity on this technology.

The next stop for the speeding technology is mobile devices and personal devices here in the US.” NextGen Broadcast is on the road to becoming the premier global digital standard. It has significant advantages over the European, Japanese and Chinese standards and is compelling as countries like Brazil and India look to upgrade their content distribution technologies.

“It is set to become a significant global standard – probably not every country, but large, significant countries will adopt this standard because it is a much more efficient use of the spectrum, it is all IP-based, it unlocks the spectrum from a mobility perspective and it has massive cost advantages over traditional cellular networks you can imagine coming down the pipe and that really helps the underserved,” says Parks.

“This technology will be universal. The only issue is what day and how fast, that's all,” Smith says.

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