PORTLAND, Ore.—ATSC 3.0 is on its way to Portland, Ore., as Meredith Corporation and Nexstar Media Group have announced their plans to launch the city’s first NextGen TV services.
Meredith and Nexstar, along with local TV station owners Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tegna, have filed applications with the FCC for the commercial transition of the Portland market to ATSC 3.0. Pending FCC approval, Meredith’s KPDX-TV (MyNet) and Nexstar’s KRCW-TV (CW) will serve as NextGen TV host stations for the market, enabling network programming from ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, PBS, CW and MyNetwork to be available via NextGen TV broadcasts. KPDX will host Meredith’s KPTV (Fox) and Tegna’s NBC (KGW), while KRCW will help broadcast signals for Nexstar’s KOIN (CBS) and Sinclair’s KATU (ABC).
Oregon Public Broadcasting also plans to file its application for participating in the ATSC 3.0 transition in the near future. Both KPTV and KRCW will broadcast certain PBS programming.
Broadcasters are expected to collaborate on the launch of the NextGen TV service as well as maintaining existing digital TV over-the-air ATSC 1.0 signals in Portland.
Meredith, Nexstar, Sinclair and Tegna are all members of Pearl TV, a group collaborating on the build out of ATSC 3.0 station launches in the top 40 U.S. television markets. Portland is the 22nd largest U.S. TV market.
“This transition in the Portland market is a significant milestone on the road toward full deployment of NextGen TV,” said Brett Jenkins, executive vice president and CTO of Nexstar Media Group. “This is the next step, beyond experiments and trials, as broadcasters move forward with actual commercial deployments of NextGen TV in 2020. Nexstar is excited to be a part of this cooperative effort. It demonstrates that the entire industry is driving forward with technology that will bring new benefits to our viewers and additional opportunities for growth across the entire television industry.”
The ATSC 3.0 rollout is beginning in earnest in 2020. At the 2019 NAB Show it was announced that new TV transmission technology aimed to be in the top 40 markets by the end of 2020. In addition, TV manufacturers have announced they will begin to rollout TV models with ATSC 3.0 receivers this year.
No timeline was provided for when Portland's NextGen TV stations would go live.
TVT has everything you need to know about ATSC 3.0 in one place.
