“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,” Simon Applebaum writes in a column for MediaVillage.com. “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.”

The piece quotes Dan Mellon, sales transformation vice president at Sinclair Broadcast Group, saying 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.”

Applebaum adds: “Mellon and J.W. Linkenauger, Sinclair’s vice president of advanced advertising support operations, see 2020 as ground zero for a mass Next Gen TV rollout among consumers nationwide. Some research agencies predict that up to 61 percent of all TV households (and at least the top 40 markets) could have Next Gen TV channels and capabilities available to them by the end of the year.”

We encourage readers to click on the link above to MediaVillage to read Applebaum’s full piece.