Yeah... and that's one of the most innocuous new "features" in ATSC 3.0.
Almost everything I've seen (besides BPS, and maybe HDR if you're one of the few who has a really good home theater setup) is a benefit for broadcasters and advertisers, and a bit worse for consumers (especially requiring new hardware/decoders... and sometimes persistent Internet connections!).
Same feeling here. ATSC 3.0 with DRM and persistent Internet requirements tells me this is going to be the downfall of OTA television. I can see ATSC 4.0 being a discounted ISP subscription paired with some OTA location checks via BPS.
At NAB someone asked one of the ATSC folks what would happen if the key is compromised and someone didn't connect a receiver to the Internet. The answer was "the receivers have many built in public keys. They should last the lifetime of the device."
Concerning because they could have a situation like with some 4K blu ray discs, your hardware becomes obsolete because DRM requires that cat and mouse game...
Also with some manufacturers believing the lifetime of a device should be less than 5 years and ideally less than 3 years, and are treating software/firmware support in those lifetimes, there's a lot of perverse incentives hidden behind anyone suggesting "for the lifetime of the device". As bad as some of the old cable monopolies were, they were at least sometimes held to Ma Bell's "the lifetime of a device is supposed to be 60 years" standards (which Ma Bell didn't always follow either, but that's another matter). I realize the ATSC exists primarily to sell new standards, but maybe we need ways to get back to longer planning horizons than 3-5 years.
But what even is the business case here? I get the idea of encrypting pay TV, but isn't the entire point of free broadcast TV that it's... free?
It would be a different story if the DRM were available ubiquitously, e.g. in the way that arguably Widevine is for online streaming (but certainly not broadcast TV). Are rightholders that afraid of unauthorized out-of-market rebroadcasts that they'd rather obliterate their reachable market with stunts like that?
> But what even is the business case here? I get the idea of encrypting pay TV, but isn't the entire point of free broadcast TV that it's... free?
This should be a big clue that the spying is the point, and all the DRMs of the world are justification for spying instead of the other way around. Total Information Awareness is the path to completing the Great Work.
Yeah, if I squint and think back to the reasoning from previous generations of tech like this it’s that they don’t want people to be able to make bit-perfect recordings to save and share. By putting DRM on the broadcast stream they’re trying to make sure that it’s only usable as a one-time broadcast.
>When a SoC is compromised and the key is leaked from the TEE, all models of that device with the key are now untrusted for Level 1.
Has this actually happened? Especially for "appliances" like set-top boxes or blu-ray players, as opposed to something like a tablet which are presumably easier to hack.
Yes, it happens all the time, especially as the devices age.
L1 devices remotely downgrade to become L3 devices. This has different effects depending on content provided from "totally unavailable" to "lower resolution".
I'm not sure if it's confirmed, but it's believed Level 1 video output contains a watermarking scheme that ties the key to the media, so if it's leaked they can disable the key that leaked the content.
You can search around and find tons of angry consumers shouting into the void about widevine errors on older consumer devices.
It's not like anyone's gonna ask them. Networks will just label this as ${network name}'s HYPER NEXT GEN 10G TV EXPERIENCE (HNG TV), market the shit out of it, and offer free ESPN on it, tack on some Paramount HBO Supermax Plus for $0.99/year and throw in a half-decent Smart TV as a sign-on bonus, and adoption will skyrocket.
TV networks in the US are a living proof that, with enough marketing spend and a pinch of confusion in the offer structure, you can sell people on anything. Half the time you can just offer sportsball access and people will switch.
It's how previous versions of broadcaster overreach happened, and why Smart TVs succeed despite their shortcomings.
Or, the manufacturers will lose patience with slow adoption, the mess that is widevine DRM (what? Your TV isn’t based on Android? No, you can’t have DRM!), and customers really not caring because basically none of the broadcasts make the visual picture substantially better right now, so there is no incentive to move.
That’s what happened to LG [0]. They dropped ATSC 3.0 tuners. I’m sure this cost them precisely 0 sales as the industry incompetence destroys the broadcast industry.
> TV networks in the US are a living proof that, with enough marketing spend and a pinch of confusion in the offer structure, you can sell people on anything. Half the time you can just offer sportsball access and people will switch.
The cratering market values say otherwise. Few people under 40 even care about “TV”, and live sports distribution contracts (and the associated gambling) are the only thing holding it up.
I too used to think TV is dead and no one is paying for cable anymore, but every now and then I keep hearing it's still alive and well, and that's always in association with some big sportsball events; I can believe that their customers nowadays are almost entirely sports fans, but then the pull they have with that segment is still strong. In my mind, the term "ESPN" registers as "something to dangle in front of US customers to get them to buy some TV plan".
False, the majority of under 40 are still watching "TV" but just through intertube streaming. netflix, apple TV, amazon, and so on, all except apple have ads too.
The post I responded to mentioned TV networks, not TV. In a thread discussing over the air TV, I took that to mean linear programming sold by CBS (soon to be Skydance), NBC (Comcast), ABC (Disney), and Fox (also Disney, I think), and the CW (Nexstar).
The crux of the matter being that even if OTA channels didn’t track people’s location, it wouldn’t matter since OTA itself going the way of the dodo.
Fox TV stations are now Fox Corp, aka "New Fox", the more direct successor to News Corp. Disney bought most (but not all) of News Corp's TV studio and film studio but knew it couldn't get past the FCC if it bought the TV stations (especially the sports stations).
Some of it is still linear like broadcast, if that's your personal distinction. Pluto, for instance, has a surprisingly large audience. The return of linear TV is also a big buzzword in streaming today with a lot of the majors experimenting with or already reintegrating linear TV options (partly because services like Pluto proved it out, partly because some of the streamers realized linear again is the ultimate endgame of Netflix-like binge watching and YouTube-like autoplay and want to skip the intermediate steps and return to the original thing).
Yes, there definitely is linear programming over the Internet, both free and paid.
We've finally come full circle: Linear broadcast TV -> TiVo (finally, no more missed episodes!) -> VOD, i.e. Netflix, Max, Hulu etc. (why linear broadcast everything to everyone if we can just OTT stream everything individually?) -> FAST, i.e. Pluto TV etc.
Remember during the switch to digital TV, when marketers convinced half the population that they needed to buy a new "digital antenna" to keep viewing the same channels?
I came to the same conclusion when I saw a whole armada of new TVs from every manufacturer in the eve of any World Cup. Plus TVs tailored for football has a special mode called "sports" which make football arguably look/feel better.
This is so user-hostile that I don't believe there will be any adoption. It will have to be shoved down the throat of those who use broadcast, which are overwhelmingly older and more remote.
ATSC first generation will probably outlive this DRM-driven abomination.
You're not wrong, but don't forget about the upgraded modulation and coding schemes. That might actually help consumers on the edge of coverage receive broadcasts and will definitely be an improvement over creaky 8vsb
I live in an area that is on the edge of coverage and has lots of hills. On ATSC 1.0, CBS is hard to pick up. Frequently unwatchable - which means unreliable for sports. I picked up an HDHomerun Flex 4K a few years ago. Basically the same week that ATSC 3.0 went live.
For a few weeks it was glorious. I had no problem picking up CBS (it was broadcast from the same antenna as ATSC 1.0 - so it was the modulation that was helping out). And then, after a little over a month. Whack! No more CBS. They turned on DRM. They are still the only network that in my area with DRM. Ughh.
Under the previous administration I filled a few issues about this from a public safety perspective - I live in with the FCC an area with unreliable power. During severe weather, we often lose Internet and power (which knocks out cable TV too). Requiring working internet to watch TV to monitor the progress of a tornado in your area seems stupid and dangerous. Unfortunately, nothing happened then regarding the issue and given the way that Brendan Carr is taking the FCC, I don’t think there will be any progress on this.
I’ve had a couple of the original, the prime, extend, and now the Flex 4K. They’ve all been terrific devices. The extend was a little wonky because transcoding goes wonky on bad signals, but generally great.
They’re all a huge improvement over older cards like the pcHDTV or the really old Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 that I fought with for Freevo and MythTV so long ago. The switch to Channels was a huge quality of life improvement too.
>During severe weather, we often lose Internet and power (which knocks out cable TV too). Requiring working internet to watch TV to monitor the progress of a tornado in your area seems stupid and dangerous.
Radio can work, but again, I’m on the edge of reception areas and the hills make picking up FM and AM inconsistent.
In the event of a truly severe weather event (the ones where they hit the alert to make every cell phone go off), the visuals provided by television are hugely helpful.
Almost everything I've seen (besides BPS, and maybe HDR if you're one of the few who has a really good home theater setup) is a benefit for broadcasters and advertisers, and a bit worse for consumers (especially requiring new hardware/decoders... and sometimes persistent Internet connections!).