[Robert Grant]

I doubt that there will be widespread use of 4K in OTA DTV when 3.0 rolls out. Broadcasters would likely prefer three streams of 1080 to a single stream of 4K, just as many have chosen one stream of 720 and three streams over a single 1080 low-compression stream with ATSC 1.0.

HDTV on a 50" screen looks better than NTSC at 50", but on a 19" screen, you'd need a special display and reading glasses to tell the difference. 4K looks better than 1080 on a 100" screen - but not everyone sees (no pun intended) the need for that. Yes, 4K looks better than 1080 on a now common 50" set, if one is standing close to it - but how often do people watch TV standing up?

My suspicion is that there will be a flash-cut transition day when everything switches from 1.0 to 3.0., and it could work beautifully, if it were to be done correctly. They would have to market converters that automatically decoded 1.0 or 3.0, whichever was being received. The customer could install the new converter as soon as he brought it home. The user would not notice transition day at all (unless he noticed fewer dropouts, less pixellation, and new subchannels).

They would have to equip newly manufactured sets with the capability for receive 1.0 or 3.0 almost as soon as the new standard is chosen (not nine years after broadcasts started, as was the case with ATSC 1.0)

They owe it to the environment to see that converters with NTSC outputs (not just HDMI dongles) are available. There are still millions of sets (including some HDTV sets) that either lack any HDMI input or have only one HDMI input that is likely to be claimed by another HDMI device. If only HDMI dongles were to be distributed, there will be another large flood of E-waste.

They will also need to rethink the power limits on the three different television broadcast bands (scientifically, channels 2 to 6 and channels 7-13 are really two different bands). The current power levels were chosen in an attempt to give stations, be they on low-VHF, high-VHF, or UHF, a "level playing field". Since VHF signals of a given power travel farther than a UHF signal of the same power (and low-VHF travels farther than high-VHF), stations on UHF actual channels were allowed much more power than those on high-VHF, and the few going to low-VHF were allowed even less power. The problem was that the power levels were based on natural noise, not taking into account the fact that modern consumer electronics was already producing RFI often far more severe than natural noise. Power limits for VHF stations (especially low-VHF) need to be raised to combat real-world RFI.

The FCC really should evaluate the possibility of using the second transition to "rationalize" the use of the DTV spectrum by broadcasters. Channels could be "de-intermixed" as had been proposed in the 1950s (and had actually done in a few markets) so that any area would have either low-VHF, high-VHF, or UHF, not a mixture of them, so they could get good reception with only one antenna. In markets where TV transmitters are scattered, they could be realigned to one "union tower" so viewers could have reliable reception without a rotator (which almost nobody has nowadays). In markets with rugged terrain, the primary transmitters could be low-VHF, while populated valleys would have low-power UHF translators (by being in the valley, they would not be interfering with the stations in nearby UHF markets, or their own translators on the same channel in other valley cities). European TV divorced itself from the "one TV station has one transmitter" model fifty years ago.