Leading U.S. broadcasters announced that they are jump starting the nationwide rollout of Next Gen TV beginning in 2020.

Senior executives from Fox Television Stations, NBC Owned Stations Group, Nexstar Media Group, Pearl TV, Spectrum Co., TEGNA Inc., Telemundo Owned Stations Group and Univision announced plans to launch ATSC 3.0 in markets across the country in 2020.

The announcement was made at the 2018 NAB Show New York today.

ATSC 3.0 is a new TV standard that marries broadcast and broadband for the first time. Created by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), ATSC 3.0 comprises around 20 standards covering different aspects of the system.

The standards are designed to offer support for newer technologies, including HEVC for video channels of up to 2160p 4K resolution at 120 frames per second, wide color gamut, Dolby AC-4 and MPEG-H 3D Audio, datacasting capabilities, and more robust mobile television support.The capabilities have also been foreseen as a way to enable targeted advertising and finer public alerting.

The first major deployments of ATSC 3.0 occurred in South Korea, with the country's major television networks launching terrestrial ATSC 3.0 services in May 2017 in preparation for the 2018 Winter Olympics. In November 2017, the United States' Federal Communications Commission approved regulations allowing broadcast stations to voluntarily offer ATSC 3.0 services (Next Gen TV); however, they must be offered alongside a standard ATSC digital signal, and there will not be a mandatory transition as was done with the transition from analog NTSC to ATSC.