Why Broadcasters Belong In America’s Resilience Future

The debate over ATSC 3.0 and 5G broadcast is increasingly being framed as a battle between broadcasters and wireless providers.

That’s the wrong debate. The real question facing policymakers is far more important: What communications infrastructure will the country depend on when everything else fails?

For decades, broadcasters have defended spectrum allocations by emphasizing television service. While local television remains important, the national conversation has moved beyond traditional broadcasting.

Today, we face a much larger challenge.

The electric grid is becoming increasingly distributed, dynamic and local. Millions of consumers are installing batteries, solar systems, smart thermostats, electric vehicles and intelligent appliances. Utilities are deploying Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS) and advanced grid orchestration platforms that depend on reliable communication with devices and resources at the grid edge. At the same time, natural disasters, cyber threats and grid emergencies are becoming more frequent.

The question is no longer how we deliver television. The question is how we deliver trusted information when cellular networks are congested, damaged, overloaded or unavailable.

Broadcasters Already Own The Missing Piece

Broadcasting remains the only communications platform capable of simultaneously reaching millions of devices with a single transmission. There is no authentication bottleneck, no network congestion, no per-user connection and there are no scaling limitations.

Whether the message reaches one or 10 million receivers, the cost and performance remain essentially the same. That is not simply a media capability. It’s a national resilience capability.

The Grid Needs Broadcast

As utilities modernize the electric grid, they increasingly require a secure method for distributing:

• Emergency load reduction requests
• Dynamic energy pricing information
• Wildfire evacuation notices
• DERMS and VPP coordination signals
• Critical infrastructure communications

Many of these applications depend today on cellular networks that may themselves be compromised during emergencies. Broadcast provides an independent pathway. It’s not a replacement for cellular, nor a competitor to wireless networks. It’s a complement to both.

The same layered resilience philosophy used by emergency managers should apply to communications infrastructure.

The FCC And Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Should Work Together

Instead of arguing whether ATSC 3.0 or 5G broadcast should “win,” regulators and broadcast groups should recognize the larger opportunity.

The FCC and FERC should jointly explore a national resilience framework that recognizes advanced broadcast networks as critical infrastructure. Under such a framework, broadcasters could support:

• Advanced Emergency Information (AEI), formerly the AWARN initiative
• Grid resiliency messaging
•Public safety communications…

… using modern broadcast technologies, including ATSC 3.0 and future 5G-enabled broadcast applications.

The objective should not be preserving a television business model. It should be strengthening the country’s energy and communications networks.

Broadcasters Must Think Bigger

Broadcasters understandably fear another spectrum reallocation battle. But the strongest defense against future spectrum loss is not arguing for yesterday’s business model; it is demonstrating new public value.

Spectrum survives when it becomes indispensable. If broadcasters position themselves merely as television providers, they will continue to face pressure from competing spectrum interests. Alternatively, if broadcasters become a critical component of the nation’s energy, emergency management and public safety infrastructure, the conversation changes entirely.

Encouragingly, the technology foundation already exists. Utilities increasingly rely on standards such as OpenADR and IEEE 2030.5/CSIP to communicate demand response events, distributed energy resource status, pricing signals and grid reliability information. NextGen TV was designed from the outset as an IP-based data delivery platform capable of reaching millions of devices simultaneously, regardless of cellular congestion or broadband outages.

More encouragingly still, there is no shortage of talented broadcast engineers capable of transporting these energy-related data streams over NextGen networks today. The challenge is not technical capability, but the coordination required among broadcasters, utilities, regulators and technology providers to bridge these two worlds in service of a larger public purpose.

As consumer adoption of NextGen TV continues to face headwinds, with or without an FCC mandate, the nation’s largest broadcast groups including Sinclair, Nexstar, Gray and E.W. Scripps, through their EdgeBeam partnership, appear increasingly focused on datacasting opportunities with their valuable NextGen spectrum. That shift makes sense.

The larger opportunity is to redefine broadcasting itself — not merely as a media business, but as a foundational layer of the nation’s communications and energy infrastructure.

Dave Hutchinson is the founder & CEO of WattsNewz, a cleantech media company in Los Angeles.

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