The deadline for biennial FCC ownership reports was extended from Nov. 2 to Dec. 2, said a Media Bureau order released Thursday. “The filing should still include information current as of October 1, 2015,” the order said. “We are aware that some licensees and parent entities of multiple stations may be required to file numerous forms, and the extra time is intended to permit adequate time to prepare such filings.”

Sinclair sees $2 billion worth of “substantial opportunities” in relinquishing some of its licenses in the incentive auction, CEO David Amy said on an earnings call Wednesday. Amy has expressed interest in the incentive auction before (see 1506250060), though a Sinlclair executive subsequently said it wouldn't be actively participating (see 1507230064). The $2 billion number was arrived at using the median numbers for specific Sinclair stations provided in the Greenhill estimates of auction prices, Chief Financial Officer Christopher Ripley said. “The ultimate outcome will depend on the many auction variables which are unclear at this time,” Amy said. Ripley said Sinclair's view of the auction hasn't changed, but there's an industry view that the company won't participate. “So that's one of the reasons we put that statement in the earnings release here or call today, just to give some people a little bit more specifics around what the upside is for Sinclair,” Ripley said. The earnings could even be improved with channel sharing, Ripley said. Sinclair is in “active discussions” on channel sharing, he said.

Sinclair’s memorandum of understanding with Samsung and Pearl TV to support the speedy commercial implementation of ATSC 3.0 (see 1506170046) signals “to the broadcast industry and to the world at large and the federal government that the broadcast industry is about ready to move” to the next-generation broadcast platform, Sinclair CEO David Smith said on a Wednesday earnings call. Samsung, “as the largest manufacturer in the world, is clearly now fully engaged in the process of preparing prototype products” for ATSC 3.0 “that will be likely on demonstration” at the January CES and April’s NAB Show, “in all probability,” said Smith, whose company has been a strong advocate of commercializing ATSC 3.0 sooner rather than later. Through the MOU, “I think when you look at what we're all going to be doing together, we're going to be demonstrating over the next three to five months some incredible capability to the technology,” he said. ATSC 3.0 is “really now on what I would say is a very fast track to being adopted by the industry,” Smith said. “And once that's done, then we'll go to the FCC and we'll say, it's time to go and we'll go through that process. And then we'll start to prepare for a transition.”

TP Vision, which makes and markets Philips-brand TVs in most regions of the world outside North America, Tuesday became the third TV maker to announce a collaboration with Dolby Labs to promote the adoption of the AC-4 audio codec. Dolby announced similar collaborations last month with Sony and Vizio. Dolby expects consumer TVs with AC-4 audio built in to become available in 2017, it said. AC-4 is vying against the MPEG-H consortium of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor to be chosen as the audio codec for the next-gen ATSC 3.0, and a decision on that selection is expected within the next two weeks (see 1507240030). AC-4 was published last year as an international spec at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (see 1501210023), and is available in a toolkit for use with European-based DVB broadcast systems, Dolby said.

The FCC Public Safety Bureau and Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau will host a workshop Aug. 27 on improving the use and accessibility of the emergency alert system, the FCC said in a public notice Tuesday. Attendees at the workshop will discuss methods to “empower and encourage” state and local use of EAS and Wireless Emergency Alerts for localized alerts, the PN said. The workshop will also address accessibility issues for EAS visual alerts, such as synchronicity of EAS audio with EAS visual crawls, and text-to-speech technology, the PN said. The workshop will be open to the public but will have limited seating, it said.

The FCC Media Bureau scheduled a public workshop Sept. 9 on access and use of commercial broadcast ownership data gathered through Form 323 submissions, the bureau said in a public notice Thursday. The workshop will include how to access and study the data, and mechanisms for querying and visualizing it, the PN said. Attendees should preregister and bring their own laptops, the PN said.

NAB offered to accept FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s statement that duplex gap impairments would affect no more than six markets, the association said in a filing posted Monday in docket 12-268. NAB said the commission should be limited to six markets with one TV station each affected, and that none of the six should be among the top-25 markets nationwide. The FCC also shouldn't add any new TV impairments in the wireless band after the clearing target is reached, NAB said. “If a volunteering station elects to drop out of the auction and cannot be repacked in the broadcast portion of the band, the Commission must buy that station at its last accepted price.”

Some of the most “pressing work” facing the many specialist and ad hoc groups working to frame ATSC 3.0 “relates to reaching consensus on a few remaining open items” for ATSC 3.0's physical layer transmission system, ATSC President Mark Richer said in the August issue, published Monday, of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. ATSC’s many subgroups “will be very busy in August putting the finishing touches on documenting core building blocks” of the physical layer transmission system as it heads toward ATSC 3.0 “candidate standard” status, Richer said. Work “in parallel” on ATSC 3.0's “upper layers,” including decisions about the ATSC 3.0 audio system, also continues unabated,” Richer said. Under ATSC’s call for audio proposals issued in December, the S34-2 ad hoc group that’s studying ATSC 3.0 audio proposals faces an Aug. 14 deadline for delivering a recommended audio standard to its parent S34 specialist group on "applications and presentation," and Richer told us recently that work is “generally on track” toward completion (see 1507240030). “While there’s a flurry of ATSC activity focused on our aggressive short-term goals of moving various ATSC 3.0 elements” to candidate standard status this year, “we also have our eye on the horizon,” Richer said. One “exciting opportunity for many ATSC members” that the ATSC board has identified “is the desire for prototype broadcast and reception hardware” based on the ATSC 3.0 candidate standard, Richer said. “A critical mass of equipment from various manufacturers will be needed for laboratory and field testing as ATSC 3.0 moves toward Proposed Standard status in 2016. And we encourage our members to begin developing such prototypes as the suite of standards collectively known as ATSC 3.0 solidifies in the months ahead.”

Proposals connected with the incentive auction's vacant channel proceeding that would freeze the service contours of broadcasters could impair TV broadcasters' ability to take full advantage of ATSC 3.0, said a group of broadcasters in meetings last week with Commissioner Mike O'Rielly and aides to Chairman Tom Wheeler and Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, according to an ex parte filing from pro-ATSC 3.0 group Pearl TV. Pearl's members are Cox Media, Graham Media, Hearst TV, Media General, Meredith, Raycom Media, Schurz Communications and Tegna. ATSC 3.0 development is in its final stages, is being promoted by Samsung along with Pearl and will be launched in South Korea in time for the 2016 Summer Olympics, the filing said. Under the new ATSC standard, it will be easier for broadcasters to channel share, but doing so would involve possible changes to service contours, the filing said. Proposals to prevent that would leave broadcasters with “no ability to adapt to the very different engineering and technical landscape that will exist post-repacking,” the ex parte filing said. The FCC should allow six years after the repacking to allow for broadcaster adjustments, it said. “That period will give broadcasters an opportunity to respond to the repacking process. It also will give broadcasters interested in channel sharing the confidence that they can enter the auction and be able to serve their existing audience,” Pearl said in the filing.

The FCC’s decision to fine Schurz Communications' WDBJ Roanoke, Virginia, the maximum allowable $325,000 for having "inadvertently aired a fleeting sexual image in a newscast“ is "tantamount to imposing a sentence of life imprisonment for petty theft,” said NAB and RTDNA in comments on the notice of apparent liability (see 1507010066) filed Tuesday. “The proposed sanction on WDBJ cannot be squared with relevant legal standards, common sense, or fundamental fairness,” the filing said. The “extraordinarily punitive” fine and the NAL’s focus on the content of the news story at issue -- which involved a volunteer firefighter found to have participated in online pornography -- suggest “that the Commission’s subjective view of the merit of WDBJ’s underlying news story drove the unprecedented decision here,” NAB and RTDNA said. “As such, the FCC’s action is a direct affront to First Amendment values that undoubtedly will further chill broadcast speech,” the filing said. The proposed fine is legally indefensible and should be rescinded, they said.