What’s supposed to be the next big thing in broadcast TV has reached a strange and silent sort of success: Sets that support NextGen TV are now selling in the millions, but many buyers may not realize that their new hardware supports the broadcast standard known as ATSC 3.0.
The Consumer Technology Association, the trade group that produces CES, has seen shipments of NextGen sets to dealers steadily rise as more manufacturers include NextGen tuners: 3 million in 2021, 3.4 million in 2022 (granted, less than half of the 4.5 million CTA forecast at the start of that year), and 3.8 million in 2023.
That brought NextGen’s share of the 40.4 million TVs shipped that year past 9%—a far better showing than 8K's 1% sliver of the market, even though manufacturers have spent much more time hyping that essentially pointless format.
Local stations, meanwhile, have put free NextGen signals on the air in 78 markets, covering 75% of the US population. These broadcasts typically feature HDR color, a bump in HD resolution to 1080p, and Dolby Atmos surround sound, plus support for interactive online features. But how many people bought these sets with NextGen in mind?
"There are not consumers, for the most part, demanding a NextGen TV set," said Curtis LeGeyt, president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters, during an onstage Q&A at a conference in Washington hosted by the Advanced Television Systems Committee, the broadcast-standards group behind both ATSC 1.0 and 3.0.
“We've sold 10 million sets, and we haven't really told people why we should buy it,” added Robert Folliard, Gray TV SVP for government relations and distribution.
TV manufacturers, however, often leave discovering a new set’s NextGen tuner as an exercise for the purchaser. Sony, for example, has been an especially enthusiastic supporter of the format, adding NextGen tuners to most of its sets. But the descriptions on its site bury that feature, and the labeling on the boxes of Sony sets prominently displayed at a Costco in Arlington, Va., also offered zero hint of its existence. (Asked for comment about that, Sony publicists did not provide any.)
“There's not a lot of awareness out there,” Richard Kowalski, CTA’s senior director for business intelligence, said on a panel at the conference.
CTA projects a steep increase in NextGen TV shipments, rising to 5.5 million in 2024, 11 million in 2025, and 27 million in 2026. While today it’s confined to a handful of brands and generally reserved for premium models, Kowalski said he expects NextGen support to become “table stakes." In addition to Sony, you can find these tuners on some newer sets from Hisense, Samsung, and TCL, as well as older models from LG.
The other, much cheaper way to experience NextGen is to buy an aftermarket tuner, with prices starting at under $100. But these small boxes from such little-known brands as ADTH and Zinwell suffer from limited retail availability, and some have had issues with the encryption that the NextGen standard allows stations to add to their broadcasts as a copy-control measure.
Only 100,000 aftermarket NextGen tuners were shipped to dealers last year, and CTA doesn’t project much progress: 200,000 shipments in 2024, 300,000 in 2025, and 400,000 in 2026.
The potential audience should be much larger, and not only because of cord cutters fleeing cable and streaming rate hikes: CTA estimates that 9% of US households only get TV via an antenna, while 25% have at least one set with an antenna.
But viewership stats for ATSC 3.0 compared with 1.0 have yet to be published. Local stations—which can use NextGen’s interactive, web-connected features to sell targeted ads—may have to make their own case to viewers.
Gray TV’s Folliard outlined how that Atlanta broadcasting company worked to elevate NextGen’s visibility in the runup to the Kentucky Derby by rolling out HDR and Dolby Atmos support at its stations and telling viewers about the better picture they’d get on its broadcasts.
“We promoted the hell out of it,” he said. “You're going to see that coming this fall with football.”
NBCUniversal, meanwhile, developed an interactive app that its stations are now putting on the air in such markets as Washington that lets viewers restart a broadcast to catch up on what they missed (selecting that switches the TV from the over-the-air signal to a stream) and check weather forecasts.
But if viewers don’t know to press the right-arrow button on the remote to invoke this app, they won’t know they just got a free version of one of the features that put TiVo on the map.
The most obvious upgrade that NextGen can deliver—4K video, courtesy of its use of much more efficient video compression than ATSC 1.0’s decades-old MPEG-2 codec—remains a theoretical benefit. Broadcasting in the ultra-high-definition resolution supported by 83% of the sets shipped in 2023 would require over-the-air bandwidth that today is taken up by ATSC 1.0 broadcasts.
The Federal Communications Commission’s rule requiring stations to simulcast in both formats runs through July 17, 2027, four years later than first planned. NAB’s LeGeyt said the FCC should not grant further extensions: “I believe that setting a date to end mandatory simulcasting is a necessary step to completing the transition to NextGen TV.”
But even after the simulcast rule sunsets, local stations will need to decide on their own to shut down older digital broadcasts to clear the airwaves for a better future. And for that to go over remotely well, viewers can’t be wondering what that future is.