ATSC Denies Its Lawyers Muzzled Qualcomm Executive in ATSC 3.0 Talk
Events took an unexpected turn in London Tuesday at the Cambridge Wireless Technology and Engineering Conference when Qualcomm Vice President-Technology Kent Walker took the podium to speak on the subject of “ATSC 3.0 and TV integration.” Walker was going to…
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cover ATSC 3.0's "implications for Europe" and argue that U.S. TV networks "would be significantly more efficient if the new technologies being specified in ATSC 3.0 and DVB T2 and 3 could be more aggressively deployed." The result, the conference program said, "would be a step function improvement in the delivery economics of terrestrial broadcast and a substantially improved (and hence higher value) user experience." Instead, Walker said ATSC didn’t want him talking about ATSC 3.0. “Whoever spoke to me when we were setting this up said that I was going to talk a lot about ATSC,” Walker said in introductory remarks. He said ATSC “doesn’t want me to talk about what’s going on at ATSC, so I’ll talk about what Qualcomm thinks about television.” He twice uttered the word, “lawyers,” with no further explanation. "ATSC lawyers have not had interaction with Kent or Qualcomm," emailed ATSC President Mark Richer Tuesday. Meanwhile, at Qualcomm, "I was heavily involved with MediaFLO and can tell you the technology worked, but the business plan didn't," Walker said of the technology developed by the company and later abandoned for transmitting audio, video and data to portable devices. "We never got to more than 10 percent penetration and 3 percent adoption." Consumers who bought into MediaFLO "were very loyal, but the business plan was wrong," he said. Technologies like dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP taught Qualcomm the value of running "your TV service in a browser," he said. "Why a browser? A browser works. You can download an app. You can have encryption and DRM [digital rights management]. We should have thought of that sooner for MediaFLO."