The one serious gripe I have with ATSC is the audio handling. When you have a drop out or freeze or other glitch due to poor signal it takes out both video and audio.
For most programs most of the time an audio loss or glitch is more damaging than a video loss or glitch. If they had given more bandwidth to audio so they could use more robust ECC ATSC would have been a lot more watchable for those of us who don't have strong signals.
They have ECC in ATSC (that's part of how they detect the glitches). The issue they have is the audio codecs used in ATSC simply aren't robust, don't degrade gracefully, and require a lot of bandwidth.
The issue we have is that just now, ATSC 1.0 has become the standard everywhere, yet that was a standard from 1995. As you could imagine, we've come a LONG way in the last 26 years in terms of codec capabilities.
If we could just get people to upgrade equipment... ATSC allows for much more robust error handling but it's not used because few devices support it.
ATSC 3.0 has a new modulation scheme with more robust error correction and modern codecs, but it will take years for people to upgrade and for ATSC 1.0 to be phased out. Here's a video giving a preview of how 3.0 compares to 1.0 in real world conditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIm01Tsmt4
Yeah, it'll be great once it starts rolling out. It'll just take a long time.
Right now it seems like the only people deploying it are paid services (which, IMO, shouldn't be legal. We shouldn't have to share public broadcast frequencies with private corps).
For most programs most of the time an audio loss or glitch is more damaging than a video loss or glitch. If they had given more bandwidth to audio so they could use more robust ECC ATSC would have been a lot more watchable for those of us who don't have strong signals.