Station Groups Prepare for Next Gen TV

Station group executives speaking at last week’s NAB Show New York appear to be taking a cue from the advice given to advertising vice president Martin Sloan, the main character of Walking Distance, a classic early episode of The Twilight Zone:  It’s best to look to the future.  Instead of dwelling on today’s rapidly declining broadcast viewership, they are looking ahead to a future of revenue-generating deployment of Next Gen TV (the new moniker for Advanced Television Systems Committee 3.0 transmission) and other advanced TV ventures.  Or, as Dan Mellon, sales transformation vice president at Sinclair Broadcast Group, declared during one panel: “Television stations, for the first time, will have an innovation platform with a lot more channels for all sorts of services [and will] deliver different options to advertisers.  The opportunity will only be limited by ourselves and who we deal with.”