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Convergence Benefits of Next-Gen TV (ATSC 3.0) for Public Broadcasting

Learn more about next-gen TV at Streaming Media East 2022.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Susi Elkins: I think most public broadcasters are very interested in education, civic, engagement public safety, those kinds of things. And so when I first started to learn about the convergence benefits of ATSC 3.0 or NextGen TV, I really wanted to think about that convergence piece of what happens if we now have the power of this IP infrastructure, what would we do serve our communities? Because public broadcasters in particular are always looking for ways to tailor their services to connect with their communities. They want to provide key services. But the use cases that we were thinking about were particularly exciting for us around the education piece and civic engagement and public safety. And we just saw a real opportunity to think about how we could create applications, so not necessarily the rollout and the technology piece and all of those kinds of things, but given that core proposition of the convergence, what would we do to hyper-serve our local community?

So when you think about education, are there ways to essentially combine the services that we create online, where we send people to go online and look at videos or lesson plans just to learn about what we're sharing through the broadcast. It really now can be powered together all at once in an immersive experience that makes a lot more sense, that can be tailored, that can be localized and individualized in ways that we hadn't really thought about doing before.

So that was really what our interest was in creating the lab at Michigan State was to think about assuming this technology rolls out, how would we use it to better serve our communities, and thinking about the ability to not only utilize data and serve it and creating services, but to collect data that informs in real time what our services could be.

There are more specific things I can talk about related to the lab, but I think that those key bucket areas for public broadcasters, that's really where our interest lies is in creating more educational services and informing the general public. So they can be civically engaged and have the information they need to make strong decisions for their local communities. And then of course we are the backbone for public safety services already. What does this look like in this new world? We think we could really target and localize using this technology to create better services there too.

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