Cool. Add this to "Yet another reason why I pirate".
Nobody EXCEPT the parasitic data miners/advertisement class want this. I'm certainly never going to entertain hooking up a internet connection for continual adverts and data mining to a TV tuner. Fuck that, no way.
Torrents, Usenet, and DVDs have everything I could ever want. And that list is also decreasing.
People have become so obsessed with movies and TV franchises, but I wonder if by adding enough sadism and masochism to the process of trying to watch TV and movies, media companies will eventually succeed in changing the tides and pushing people to find other hobbies. The enshittening hasn't spared a single thing. When will the self-deprecation of having to deal with it overcome the FOMO of not watching the latest thing they shit out?
The 1996 Telecommunications Act was intended to increase intramodal competition between incumbent phone companies and newer competitors on local and long distance phone calls. What actually happened is the landline phone companies moved on to cellphones and broadband. You can get TV service from your phone company, and phone service from your cable TV company.
Kids physical toys sales declined in the face of computerized entertainment. Satellite radio merged saying the market niche wasn't big enough for two companies to survive. Netflix said its biggest competitor is a video game Fortnite not other Internet TV subscriptions, and it even competes with people's sleep hours.
Even broadband was going great under the Telecommunications Act. Dialup, isdn, & dal were quite competitive markets. Being able to get unlimited dialup for $15/mo changed my young life.
But then the courts stepped in & started bullying the FCC & pushing against their attempts to do what Congress has insisted upon. FCC was semi compelled to accept arguments that, oh, fiber to the premise/home is expensive to roll out, and the courts are being unrelenting asshats about any attempt to do what Congress asked us to do, so whatever, we give up: you can have a monopoly.
One of the most crucial judicial/corporate activism projects in American history, totally changed the face of the internet in the states. All these ideas of municipal isps: we shouldn't even be having these arguments. This should be unbundled infrastructure that doesn't need to be rebuilt by any new player. 2003 was a sad sad year. America lost, in the worst fashion, to bad free market ideologists with a stranglehold obstructing governance. Awful bastards, them. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-03-36A1.pdf
The FCC today is still absolutely ruthless on getting the Telecommunications Act. Slow roll out but basically most existing protections for unbundled fiber within a city have gotten repealed almost entirely, with rare exception. 8 beg for some evidence the FCC has put up any resistance whatsoever to letting the world be consumed by massive inefficient incumbents; they seem wholly against the people.
This transition is already happening. The younger generation seems to be spending a lot more time watching “streamers” and “vtubers” when they are in the mood for passive entertainment.
As a gen-x, I have too, but probably for a different reason. YT channels have basically replaced local and network TV for me. The “shows” are interesting, free, and have the feeling of live or current content that streaming services don’t have. I know the schedule of my favorite YT channels like I used to know network TV line ups. On the other hand, there’s something so dead, for lack of a better word, with streaming services and, imho, streaming audio.
I mean, those are effectively the choices, since the major impetus for ATSC 3 is the encryption. I'd honestly be fine with it if it were things like major sports events and other network programming that were going to be encrypted, but individual broadcasters (whether station group owned or not) are probably not likely to set things up where they can selectively encrypt, I expect most channels that broadcast any encrypted content will have the switch flipped to encryption 100% of the time.
It should be illegal to encrypt OTA news and local interest programming.
> It's not like the choices are ATSC 3 or we cannot figure anything out.
Theoretically there are other options, but in practice, the choice is exactly that - ATSC 3 or GTFO - because the people with money and power to push standards through want to subject consumers to datamining and personalized ads, and they know perfectly well there's nothing consumers can realistically do about it. Like increasingly many markets, it's a supplier-driven "take it or leave it" situation.
And don't anchor your hope to current/legacy protocols - if people keep sticking to them to avoid the data mining and personalized ads, those protocols will get deprecated because they "don't support newest industry standard encryption models", or some other plausibly-deniabe bullshit.
My hunch is that over-the-air broadcasts are much less popular in the US than they were 30 years ago. A lot of Americans probably don't even know they can get digital broadcasts with a coax antenna. One group is probably paying for cable or satellite, and another, probably the one with more growth, is mostly watching stuff on phones and tablets.
A whole lot of people (including myself) became incapable of getting OTA television after the digital switchover.
Personally, I don't actually mind. OTA TV had already become a shitshow of advertisements anyway. Once they started overlaying them on top of shows and even embedding them within shows, it all became too much to put up with.
But I also don't use streaming services. If I want to see a TV show or movie, I get it on physical disc. But I mostly don't want to see them -- because I've filled my time with stuff that is much more useful and fulfilling.
This is speculation, but I think that it has to do with the geography of the area. Digital TV is much pickier about line-of-sight, and there are large parts of my city where that doesn't exist to the broadcasting antenna.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more susceptible to multipath interference. Analog multipath leads to ghosting, but in the digital realm it might be too much for the ECC to handle.
Analog degraded gracefully with distance, but digital works until it doesn't.
As I understand it (and I'm not an expert just curious reader), it's part of what ATSC 3 is fixing by moving to OFDM instead of 8-VSB. Multipath in OFDM leads to some (hopefully few) number of subcarriers fading out, which error correction can manage. Conversely, 8-VSB is a regular single carrier (ish) (with 8 different analog signal levels, hence the name), so in order to decide the value of any bits at all the TV needs to identify and delay (line up) many of the ghosts up with the main signal. That's a more challenging signal processing task, especially given the diversity in age of the TV tuners (the ones from the late 2000's didn't have as advanced DSPs).
1) Digital is pickier. You practically either have it or you don't. Too much signal noise and it's stuttering and compression artifacts where otherwise it would have potentially been a fuzzy but still probably understandable signal.
2) a lot of channels were reorganized with a lot of the VHF frequencies moved up into UHF. VHF tended to get a bit better penetration and range than UHF.
I've noticed a decent bit of variance in quality of digital tuners. And as long as I could kinda point in the direction of the towers in the area I could get good signal.
Or they use a device like a Tablo to get free OTA TV with all the advantages of streaming to devices, no subscription needed. I've done this for several years. I can be out working in the yard and pull out my phone to watch couple minutes of a football game on ABC or whatever, as long as I'm in WiFi range.
Old stuff but still there. I used it before I had Internet access. Even ran a leaf node for groups that interested me. It was capable of distributing binary content such as pictures, videos and warez.
Historically, I've been a huge fan of OTA TV, but I just can't watch it anymore, because it's primarily an ad delivery platform. Even newscasts have home shopping segments now. The only exception is Public TV, as they are prohibited from interrupting a program for sponsor underwriting acknowledgement [1].
The major broadcasters (meaning full power commercial licensees with network affiliations only) have the legal ability to charge cable and satellite retransmission fees [2]. That means that they can monetize (1) cable, (2) satellite, and (3) their own OTT services beyond advertising. However, 20 percent still watch free OTA TV, which is a wrench in the spokes of their funding model.
The major broadcasters lose their statutory right to retransmission fees if they drop OTA broadcasts. So they next best thing they can do is switch to ATSC 3.0, and enable encryption, which would effectively kill off that 20%, who they would hope go to cable, satellite, or their own OTT service that they can charge for at their discretion.
It's my opinion that, in cases involving the major broadcasters, ATSC 3.0 has the upside of killing off OTA viewing and that is the reason why the major broadcasters like it.
This just doesn't make sense. If a broadcast is telling a TV to redirect to an internet stream; why not just go straight to the internet stream? That OTA spectrum is valuable...
Also: It seems like whoever's pushing this forgot that people are really, really getting sick of ads. A major part of the rise of online streaming is... Lack of ads.
The whole article looks like one of those "pie in the sky" tech utopia visions that never pans out.
> A major part of the rise of online streaming is... Lack of ads.
Sorry but ads are the new normal when subscribing to most streaming services.
Netflix CEO in 2019: "Netflix will never have ads." Three years later, Netflix is "excited" to launch an ad-supported tier. This came shortly after a price jump on all of its plans, of course.
We pay for Amazon Prime ($140/yr) more for the streaming than the "free" shipping or other perks. But increasingly, more and more content in the Prime library can only be "rented" or "bought", or watched "free with ads." The quality of the content that is available to watch "with Prime" (i.e. without paying even more) is going steadily downhill. The bargain DVD bin at my local grocery store has a better selection.
We also have occasional access to Hulu, Disney, Peacock and whatever else through friends and family and it seems like the shows on all of these have ads on them. (Or at least most of them do?)
I was quite happy to pay a monthly fee to watch stuff ad-free. Now since that is quickly not becoming an option, I may have to pull my wooden leg and eye patch out of storage.
> I was quite happy to pay a monthly fee to watch stuff ad-free. Now since that is quickly not becoming an option, I may have to pull my wooden leg and eye patch out of storage.
I don't know what you're talking about. I don't deal with ads on Amazon, Netflix, Disney+, or YouTube.
The thing is, there is significantly more content that I want to watch than I have time to watch. So, if something requires ads, or another subscription, I just watch something else.
I agree. Broadcast TV that depends on broadband is an awkward hybrid. The surveillance capitalism and interactive features just sound like a worse version of the Internet (WebTV). That's combining the flexibility of broadcast TV with the increased system requirements of having a broadband connection and training the masses how to type their Wi-Fi password into their TV. A lot of TV viewers can barely program their VCR or change inputs.
It would be more technically efficient to have 500-600 MHz 5G as YouTube and similar service are already a la carte and on demand. However the type of crowd that uses an antenna doesn't overlap a lot with the crowd that pays for 5G service.
> A major part of the rise of online streaming is... Lack of ads.
I think you might have missed the latest trend of offering streaming at a discounted rate by including ads.
> The whole article looks like one of those "pie in the sky" tech utopia visions that never pans out.
I can tell you this isn't something going away, and the tech to do this is here. Look into FAST, AVOD, and other OTT types of offerings. I know, because I work on the periphery of this stuff. If you are watching any kind of streaming video with an account number, your viewing habits are being consumed. It's been this way ever since the switch to digital cable. Forcing an account for OTA is the holy grail.
I think you might be seeing the transition of smart TVs and streaming services from the early mainstream to the late mainstream. (I'm currently reading the book Crossing the Chasm.)
Certainly there is a market for someone who will buy a cheap smart TV, enter their Wi-Fi password, and just watch whatever random free ad-supported streaming services are on it. (Edit: Such a consumer won't even bother creating accounts on these services.)
But it's a huge mistake to assume that ads are coming back for everyone. One of the major draws of subscription streaming TV is the lack of ads. It's clear that this is a major difference between the early mainstream consumers of smart TVs with streaming services, and the later consumers who may be a bit more price conscious.
I think it's also a big mistake to assume that cheaper, ad-supported subscriptions, are a long-term trend. It ignores one of the reasons why streaming services became popular to begin with.
I think the industry is trying to answer the problem of "I don't want another subscription," but they are ignoring the other problem of: "There's more content than I can watch." Clearly, trying to convince someone to watch advertisements does not solve that problem.
(Edit: Why? If there is too much for me to watch, you won't convince me to subscribe to your service if it requires me to watch things that I don't want to watch in order to get a lower price.)
Edit2: I personally think the way to solve "I don't want another subscription" isn't cheaper, ad-supported subscriptions. I think it's copyright reform. Why should Disney's entire back catalogue only be available on Disney+? I certainly can understand limited exclusivity for new content; but after a year or two, there should be a statutory licensing fee structure that allows any streaming service to carry any content. We (in the US) have a similar structure for broadcast radio.
The sentence you quoted was the set up for the next sentence. The implication there was meant more for the less obvious cable subscribers. Most subscribers are unaware that they've been tracked ever since they day they switched to a digital stream. I've heard comments like yours while explaining why they keep their cable. Of course streaming services track your viewing habits. That's how they can do "Recommended for you" sections.
Interesting that you think of cable that way. What makes it a streaming service to you? Because it's IP based? Cable started as a way to deliver OTA broadcasts to people that could not receive the broadcast (typically due to terrain issues). That then grew into channels that did not actually have an OTA broadcast. Maybe it's a generational thing?
Not sure if its a generational thing or not. I'm a graybeard, if that matters, and I remember when cable TV was a brand new technology.
I think of it as streaming just because that's what it looks like. I never put any real thought into it. I didn't even realize that I thought of it that way until these comments.
My conception of this might be related to the notion of "streaming" also being a pretty old one to me. I was working on such software years before streaming services were a thing, around 1990.
The tech to do this may be here, but the customers are not. Ad free streaming early adopters where techies. Those people are going to willingly eat this shit sandwich and evangelize it to others.
An idea that just popped into my head is that maybe phones will start including ATSC 3.0 tuners at some point, so the Internet connection is right there, ubiquitous, and everything can be integrated with an app. NBC, CBS, ABC, etc. could offer an app that "streams" in a local TV channel using ATSC instead of cell or wifi.
You'll want to get a Yagi antenna case for the best results though.
In Japan they just finally started dropping TV tuners (local ISDB standard) from their Android phones in the past 2-3 years, before that it was pretty common.
I would be excited about this if I could watch local TV without an OTA antenna. One of my biggest frustrations is that I either have to get a) cable or b) a flaky OTA connection to watch things like local sports. If I could stream local TV and more specifically sports like I would a normal broadcast, that would be amazing.
I imagine ATSC 3.0 tuners will eventually proliferate, but as of now, the situation seems to be most TVs for sale don't have ATSC 3.0 tuners, Best Buy doesn't even include it as a filter. Of course, the installed base doesn't have them either. I haven't seen any external ATSC 3.0 tuner boxes for sale either.
On the enthusiast front, ATSC 3.0 is hard to use, because it includes a new audio codec (AC-4) which is patent encumbered and difficult to use, so while I've got a tuner, I can't use it unless I don't want to hear the programs or I change to a proprietary software stack.
Honestly and unfortunately, I think the end of OTA may happen before ATSC 3.0 has enough adoption to transform anything.
"I imagine ATSC 3.0 tuners will eventually proliferate"
Honest question looking for honest answers: What's the value proposition for a consumer to go get one of these things? Obviously it won't be because of the new and exciting frontier of advertising it enables, what's the actual headline feature?
I ask that for the purpose of evaluating the interesting idea that
"the end of OTA may happen before ATSC 3.0 has enough adoption to transform anything."
Because I think that question comes down to the matter of consumer pull. They can push as hard as they want but without a consumer pull it's a hugely uphill battle. I struggle to think of what useful feature can be added to TV streams that isn't already present. I am reminded of the ever-present "oh we can present alternate angles" argument that has been banging around since the DVD era and which I have seen used precisely zero times, for instance; just because some marketer somewhere tries to come up with some bullet point feature to name it as the reason consumers will be pounding down the doors to buy something doesn't mean it's something anyone will actually care about.
> What's the value proposition for a consumer to go get one of these things? Obviously it won't be because of the new and exciting frontier of advertising it enables, what's the actual headline feature?
Higher video quality. Denser channel encoding gets you more bits, h.265 instead of mpeg-2 gets you better quality per bit, and new standards allow broadcasting 1080p and 2160p. More capable audio codec and more bandwidth for audio too.
I don't think direct consumer demand is going to be that high though. But, eventually manufacturers will put them in some tvs, and then it becomes a checkbox item and everybody needs them. Also, broadcasters don't want to do ATSC 1 and 3 forever (and don't have spectrum for that anyway, cell phones keep taking channels), so if there's adoption, ATSC 1 programming is going to get squeezed into fewer physical channels and quality will get worse.
Higher video quality is and may remain hypothetical: they seem to currently be using the bandwidth for extra channels. I think you can count the number of ATSC 3 UHD broadcasters on zero fingers. You'd think the demand would be there for UHD sports, but sports is a monopoly, so :shrug:.
Like I said upthread, it's not practical for me to use the ATSC 3.0 broadcasts, so I don't have a real opinion on video quality; but hypothetical quality is a selling point. I don't recall the quality being significantly better or worse than ATSC 1, but I was more focused on if audio worked at all, and unfortunately it generally didn't because of codec problems.
From RabbitEars listings [1], it looks like markets currently have 0-2 ATSC 3 broadcasts, and in many market, those broadcasts are the basically .1 subchannels from the major ATSC broadcasts. But I do see a lot of 1080p instead of 1080i, so maybe (but if the source is 1080i and just deinterlaced at the studio instead of the receiver, meh). If they can fit 4-5 subchannels at acceptable quality in one physical channel, that is a significant increase in quality, which is consistent with roughly 2x the bandwidth and the codec upgrade.
There's a lot of chicken and egg here. Can't use more bandwidth for better quality if you only have spectrum to do a demo with all the local broadcasters. Don't want to bother with getting 4k content piped through the broadcast chain if nobody actually receives it, and you have to downconvert it to send over ATSC 1 anyway. Etc.
With ATSC 1, there was a bunch of extra spectrum available for transition, and federal mandates, and subsidized converters. There's none of that for ATSC 3, so it's going to be slow.
Just to be pedantic, 1080p24 (and 1080p30, and the 1000/1001-rate versions) are already allowed by the existing A/53 spec and have been since 1995. The big (1080-line) broadcasters usually transmit their film-style programming as "effectively" 1080p24, in the sense that they're sending 24 or 24000/1001 progressive-scan coded pictures per second, but with flags that ask the decoder to perform a 3:2 pulldown to output 60 fields per second so it fits seamlessly within a 1080i30 sequence. (They could be sending "true" 1080p24, but then it would probably create a glitch when they transition to 60 fps content and back.)
But anyway: 1080p itself is not a new feature of ATSC 3.0. 1080p60 or 1080p120, sure.
A bit of a nitpick: 1080p24 was added in 2008 along with h.264. It was not part of the original spec, so the original HDTV sets could not decode it. Broadcasters sensibly don't send 1080p24 since 1080p60 is "good enough" and works on all TVs.
Not so -- 1080p24 and 1080p30 sequences (and the 1000/1001-rate versions) were part of the original A/53 specification in 1995. This is for H.262 video (MPEG-2 part 2). It's also in the 2007 revision (see A/53:2007 part 4, table 6.1.2 [1]). In practice, what broadcasters really do is send a sequence labeled 1080i30 for everything, but during the 24P content, they send 24 progressive-scan frame pictures per second, with picture flags that instruct the decoder how to perform the 3:2 pulldown to manufacture 60 fields per second at the receiver. This kind of "1080p24" is very common and they've been doing it since the 90s or early 2000s. The same basic technique is used on NTSC DVDs.
([1] https://prdatsc.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/.... Pedantic note: What the FCC adopted is slightly more generous than the ATSC spec; they excluded this table, both pre- and post-2007. So technically speaking, anything "Main Profile @ High Level" is allowed on the U.S. airwaves, but it doesn't matter in practice.)
> I imagine ATSC 3.0 tuners will eventually proliferate
Unlikely. There's not enough bandwidth[1] in traditional TV spectrum to be worth the hassle[2].
At its absolute peak of value, broadcast TV is basically a bandwidth optimization on top of the already-very-acceptable streaming video delivery available to everyone at reasonable prices.
Would you install a roof antenna for a few bucks a month off your Netflix or Disney bill? Me neither.
[1] A quick google says 57Mbps is the maximum per-channel bandwidth in ATSC3, and you only get a dozen or so channels in a metro area without building more giant towers.
[2] Because if there was, mobile telephone operators would have grabbed that spectrum already for their vastly more lucrative industry.
> [2] Because if there was, mobile telephone operators would have grabbed that spectrum already for their vastly more lucrative industry.
Mobile operators can't take it all at once, in part because the TV lobby still exists, in part because it takes years to build out the network to use the spectrum they've already taken. But, at least in the US, this has happened three already: in the 80s, channels 70-83 were reallocated to cell phones; in 2008, channels 52-69 were reallocated to cell phones; in 2016, channels 38-51 were reallocated to cell phones. I'm guessing sometime in the next ten years, 19-36 will be reallocated to cell phones (37 is reserved for radio astronomy). But 2-18 will probably still be used for ATSC 3.0 at that point.
Low VHF isn't viable long term and they have to leave gaps in allocations so neighboring markets don't conflict. I doubt they'll shrink it any more. There's already going to be a crunch when the deadline to cutoff ATSC 1 approaches and everyone is going to have to simulcast both 1 & 3 with some likely delays extending the overlap phase.
I thought ATSC 3 was supposed to make VHF viable again. I guess it depends on how many people got "HD" antennas geared for UHF with maybe marginal coverage for high VHF.
The antenna situation is the problem. I have a pre-HD 4-bay bowtie UHF antenna that works great on high-VHF for my location. I'm not going to bother with the hassle of adding a second antenna for the low end because of unnecessary bureaucratic shuffling. Normies aren't going to bother sorting that out with all the marginal UHF-only antennas that have been dumped onto the market.
Although it leverages existing architecture, many of the ATSC 3.0 standard’s capabilities are new. Unlike past broadcasting technology, the standard not only provides content on-demand but ensures the content is delivered rapidly. Its unique design allows broadcasters to send data to several users concurrently through a single signal. To transmit 1 GB of data to 1 million consumers with ATSC 3.0, broadcasters only need one-millionth of the capacity required by broadband.
Sure, but "content on-demand delivered rapidly" isn't compatible with "transmitting to 1 million consumers", is it? Either you broadcast one show at a time (something you can do right now and no one wants) or you split bandwidth to a bunch of streamers (and compete badly with cable).
And in any case the latter is already in the market! HBO and Comcast, working together, will happily send you the just-released Westeros episode to watch simultaneously with 10M other users for like $15 a month. And it works. ATSC needs to be significantly cheaper than fifteen dollars to even be worth talking about. And let's be honest: it isn't and won't be.
I think it’s better to think of satellite (dish/DIRECTV) more than Comcast. You can imagine you have one satellite broadcasting an encrypted signal to an entire nation but only those who have a subscription are given the keys to decrypt streams of the channels they subscribe to.
So then, by just changing a few parameters with a low speed connection between the box, they can enable different transmissions to come through or more precisely tune to different channels or sub channels, containing different content, like different ads in the same airwaves spectrum
As a technical comparison, sure. But I'm talking about economics and market positioning. The problem ATSC3 purports to solve (on-demand access to real time content for very large numbers of consumers) is already working in the market at reasonable prices, with very high uptake.
That's not an innovative situation. They aren't doing anything new that you can't get already. The only way to win in that kind of market is to do it on price. And streaming is already pretty cheap.
> dynamic ad insertion plus things like overlays and interactive application ads
> “a viewer who gets home at 6:10 pm and wants to watch the entire 6 p.m. local news will be able to ‘start over’ after watching a very short sponsorship message,”
> Display ads will also occur whenever a viewer pauses their video feed under Scripps’ ‘Pause Ads’ feature
Obviously who doesn't want that when watching a dying media?
Gross. Unencrypted OTA TV is one of the last areas you can enjoy a modicum of fair use with respect to personal recordings. DVRs, skipping commercials, transcoding to watch on a different device or in a different place. Too bad this is being closed down.
> “When TV stations broadcast in ATSC 3.0 to ATSC 3.0-enabled TV sets connected to the web, all of this interactivity becomes available over the air for live linear broadcasts.”
So we're going to straddle both OTA and internet streaming.. At what point will OTA content providers give up and just allow users to stream the content over the internet for free? I imagine the vast majority of people have internet at this point, it would likely get your more people watching your ads, it frees up spectrum for other uses, and arguably would be cheaper (since bandwidth is cheap and antennas are expensive).
Right now, even though this spectrum is commercial, it still serves as more-or-less a public service that can be consumed for only the cost of a tuner and a TV. Streaming that same content over the Internet then incurs monthly costs for the connection that previously weren't present.
Beyond the added monthly OPEX to consume that content, chances are good that spectrum would be snatched up by telcos for 8G to resell to you rather than for a similar semi-public benefit.
> Right now, even though this spectrum is commercial, it still serves as more-or-less a public service that can be consumed for only the cost of a tuner and a TV. Streaming that same content over the Internet then incurs monthly costs for the connection that previously weren't present.
Most people already have an internet connection, so the marginal cost is $0 (arguably it might be a negative cost for these customers since they don't need to buy and setup an antenna). And the service is better because the content providers are no longer limited by the amount of spectrum they own.
> Beyond the added monthly OPEX to consume that content, chances are good that spectrum would be snatched up by telcos for 8G to resell to you rather than for a similar semi-public benefit.
Auction it off to the telcos and use this money to reduce taxes. Potentially use part of it to help people upgrade their tvs, much like we did with converter boxes when moving to atsc.
> Most people already have an internet connection,
This needs qualification. Having a smart phone means you have an "internet connection." Are these people truly going to get "better" service than with broadcast?
> And the service is better because the content providers are no longer limited by the amount of spectrum they own.
Sure.. now they're just limited by the amount of bandwidth they need to purchase, in the trade they no longer have any obligation to serve you, your community or to provide relevant news and public access.
> Auction it off to the telcos and use this money to reduce taxes.
This is not how spectrum auctions work. The auction money is used to fund the FCC itself. It's not a type of revenue that can "reduce taxes."
> Potentially use part of it to help people upgrade their tvs
Perhaps we should just let the free market decide what it wants for itself?
In my market, most local TV stations stream through their own app. OTA serves the users that struggle to understand how to get a TV antenna working properly, let alone an app or IPTV device.
Local advertisers also like the assurance that their ad dollars aren’t being wasted on out-of-market viewers. OTA provides that naturally.
Its unique design allows broadcasters to send data to several users concurrently through a single signal. To transmit 1 GB of data to 1 million consumers with ATSC 3.0, broadcasters only need one-millionth of the capacity required by broadband.
NTSC, 1950: "Hey, it looks like we can create a compatible color broadcast standard by modulating the carrier phase relative to an initial subcarrier burst at the beginning of each scanline. Nifty!"
ATSC, 2023: "Hey, it looks like we can sell more crap by force-feeding each viewer a targeted ad break for their specific targeting profile. Kewl beanz!"
And people wonder why I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords...
These lobbyists who drive specifications for OTA TV and CableTV are basically at the point of being a hammer looking for a nail. Cable/OTA TV is a dying medium (especially with newer generations) and with these tone-deaf advertisement solutions the only nails they are hammering are the ones to their coffin.
Yes, because shitty-encryption-where-we-give-you-the-keys-but-dont-at-the-same-time has worked so well for....
DVDs, Blu-ray, HD-DVDs
Playstation 1,2,3,4,5 games
Nintendo SNES,N64,Wii,GameCube, Switch
And plenty others.
Oh wait, Switch is so bad, that an emulator is already superb, and had a 7 day early leak/release of Zelda, with patches that make it better on computer than Switch.
So, I'm not super worried about "shitty encryption".
I worked on the original NTSC to ATSC conversion at three stations.
ATSC 3.0 is dead. There are no market incentives for uptake like the original conversion, no deadlines and zero incentive for broadcasters to produce or pay for compelling content.
The standard is written so broadcasters can compete with big tech, but what are they going to show, local news and M*A*S*H?
OTA TV is for old people, so they're going to show what old people want to watch: Fox Newsian "democrats bad, kids lazy, black people criminals" drivel 24/7
I am an old person and your notions of what we watch are insultingly uninformed. I have played around with OTA on my upstairs TV, where the signal is better, and it's fine for local news, PBS, etc., but I rarely watch much else on it. And I never, ever, watch Fox "News".
I'm at the very tail end of the "boomer" generation, 1964. I laugh at the people who blame everything on boomers and things will be a lot better when they all die off. What that fail to recognize is that in time, their generation will have power and the types of people attracted to power will be the same as with the boomers.
There will still be racists (Nick Fuentes); there will still be greedy corporate overlords who profit off of sick people (Martin Shkreli); there will still be scam peddlers dressed up in sheep's clothing (Sam Bankman-Fried); there will still be political grifters making life worse for everyone (have your pick).
Am I the only one who thought: Who still watches over-the-air TV? (yes, I know there are some, but it can't be all that many relative to the streaming market)
Some previous owner of our house put a large TV antenna in the attic and had it wired to all of the coax ports. The signal is outstanding and we get a wide variety of channels.
One of the no-name stations has a Spanish subchannel that broadcasts a bunch of pretty interesting soccer matches from central and South America. I only understand about 30% of what they're saying, but it's a soccer match, I know what's happening on the field, and there is a worldwide standard for referee hand signals. On a different channel, there have been a few US National team matches broadcast OTA in Spanish that aren't available for free in English - weird, isn't it?
If something I am interested in is on ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, PBS, etc and I find out about it, I'll watch that too. But I'm not going to spend money or go out of my way to do this ATSC 3.0 DRM crap. If they switch, I'm done with it.
I watch soccer games on the OTA Spanish stations too. I'm nowhere close to fluent in Spanish, but my high-school Spanish has served me well. The announcers tend to say the same types of things over and over again, so over the years, I've kinda built up a phrase book in my head of all the usual stuff they say.
In addition, I find the announcers in Spanish much more exciting than the ones in English.
Sadly this is no longer always the case with the advent of ATSC 1.0 and sub-channels.
An OTA TV license grants you 20Mbits of bandwidth in your market. The license holder is free to divide this bandwidth amongst however many sub-channels they desire.
In the last 7-8 years, the license holders (including CBS/NBC/et al) have continuously reduced their bitrates on their primary feeds in order to stuff as many sub-channels in their slice as possible.
Some of the majors in NYC (I’m looking at you ABC) resemble a RealVideo stream from 2002 more than a high-definition video from this decade.
> Some of the majors in NYC (I’m looking at you ABC) resemble a RealVideo stream from 2002
I honestly didn't realize that this wasn't true everywhere. Every time I've seen a digital TV broadcast, it's looked like this. Very nearly unwatchable, particularly on a large screen.
> I honestly didn't realize that this wasn't true everywhere. Every time I've seen a digital TV broadcast, it's looked like this. Very nearly unwatchable, particularly on a large screen.
Canadian broadcast networks does dedicate all of that stream into one (or more rarely two) streams per physical channel and it shows up (especially compared to some cable providers which squeeze up bandwidth).
There are some channels on my cable service that seem to be rebroadcasts of these sub-channels. They are unwatchable. Sadly, PBS likes to make use of the sub-channels to offer various educational program streams, but their main channel suffers for it. Fast motion degenerates into blocky artifacts quite often.
I think it was meant as "compared to streaming". My parents still have cable tv and the image quality is still noticeable better than even 4K streaming of the same channels.
In ATSC 1.0 I don't think this was true, at least in my area. The reason is there was a fairly finite amount of bandwidth available (made worse by sub-channels) and they were limited to MPEG-2, so I often observed macro blocking and other artifacts. It was decent, and probably better than streaming was when it launched, but now that 4K streaming is routine (with HEVC) it looks considerably better. I'm sure ATSC 3.0 changes this.
I just watched the MLB All-Star game OTA yesterday. We also watched the Jeopardy Masters Tournament a few weeks ago. And we do tend to pick up the local news in small doses just to see what’s up around town.
We do stream more than we watch OTA, but when I’m using an antenna I bought almost a decade ago and a HDHomeRun that doesn’t have a recurring cost, it still has its uses.
I haven't watched over-the-air OR live TV for more than a decade, except I sometimes watch NBA games live (rarely, though, I like to skip commercials and 1/2 time) on YTTV.
Wait, how? I assume this is all enabled by having the tuner also connect to the Internet and then switch the viewer off of the actual video stream in favor of specific inserts. Why not just... have an Internet stream?
OTA would die overnight if it had to pay market rate for the spectrum it occupies. I’m sure their lobbyists paint the sad picture of a blaring TV being the only connection to society for lonely seniors, but maybe there are better ways to solve the lonely seniors problem?
This is just combining broadcast with internet-based streaming into some weird convoluted mess for the purpose of "targeted advertisement". Which as a concept just needs to go away.
I would be more ok with this if copyright was still in the realm of reason (they probably got it right with the original 14 year term). This just seems like yet another abuse of government mandated monopoly to milk yet more unjust profit out of everyone at the expense of the public good.
What a sickening betrayal of the idea of broadcasting. This morphs a pure & simple public thing into a closed infernal machine, another demented tool of control. Prescriptivism & control all the way down. For shame.
It's so sad to see infinite endless stories of humanity being overrun by select groups of scum, who will use technology to hold us all hostage forever. This is not the way.
> The arrival of ATSC 3.0/NextGen TV—and its ability to combine broadcast with IP—has the potential to transform TV commercials from one-way mass-market blasts to two-way personalized interactive experiences.
Why would anyone want this? Why would anyone purchase a television with this ability?
I see a lot of impressions on this post that antenna tv is a dying, but I think there's potential for antenna tv usage to go up.
As a value proposition, you have an initial cost of $50-$300 (depending on what kind of reception you get and what features you want, like DVR), but if you consider basic cable these days being $20/mo it's a nice way to save money on the one thing you can't get fully yet - live news and sports. Also, if we are allowed by the broadcast overlords, you can DVR movies and tv shows and keep a library for yourself without another subscription.
I have an antenna at home but I don't use it primarily because I get poor reception. ATSC 3.0 has been proven to fix this in many cases, so I'm hopeful this could be a great way for many people to save money.
It was already hard enough to kill off NTSC. Now, with ATSC 3.0 they want anyone that's still watching OTA to also need to provide internet access to their receiver so it can give them advertisements?
Have you watched the ads for OTA content? They are all geared towards geriatrics. That's because almost nobody under 60 is watching OTA (except maybe exceptions like you and I that don't mind older TV shows and are willing to DVR it).
So, for a media format primarily consumed by geriatric people the new standard proposes they now need a functional internet connection hooked up just to watch M*A*S*H. The previous standards just needed a coax cable hooked up to an antenna.
I love that ATSC 3.0 uses better codecs. But, it's really dumb that they added the internet backend requirement. The entire point of OTA is you don't want to stream stuff over the internet.
>the one thing you can't get fully yet - live news and sports.
i'm not sure how many people really care much about the live news side of it. sports are definitely a big one right now, but that's only a licencing and rights problem, not a technology problem. as TV dies, those rights will get bought up by people who want to put sports online. Your $300 investment is only saving you money for as long as those sports are actually available on broadcast TV
> but that's only a licencing and rights problem, not a technology problem
A lot of good points here, but I would still prefer antenna TV to internet live sports because of the buffering. I feel like when I have to resort to using an internet live stream I'm not getting it truly live.
> As a value proposition, you have an initial cost of $50-$300
You can get a cheap antenna off Amazon for $10-$20, and even my budget-oriented TCL Roku TV has a built-in tuner. In cities, this works pretty well! I don’t think many young people realize this is just available to everyone basically for free.
Anything that calls itself a "TV" has to have a tuner.
I bought my current Vizio in the period where they were omitting them and selling as "displays" but they've since switched back to just being TVs again and including the tuners.
Not in my city. You have to be lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where the signal actually reaches. My decidedly not scientific observation is that's about 75% of the city.
Live TV has already been transformed to no longer exist for me.
I haven't seen any point in subscribing to a channel package for that ad-ridden slush they provide. I get my news from the internet and I stream or download my entertainment. There's nothing left on live TV to even tune in for.
I know some of my friends keep it to watch sports which I have zero interest in. I guess that's a bit harder to replace TV services for if you're into that.
In fact because I block ads (+sponsorblock) on the internet without exception, use almost no social media, don't watch live TV and download everything else, my life is pretty much ad-free which is really relaxing <3
I've had an HD Homerun with ATSC3 for a couple years now, but I haven't yet seen an ATSC3 TV in person.
This sounds complicated to implement compared to "ordinary" digital broadcasts, what is the incentive for TV manufacturers to implement it? It seems like every tv maker has their own plans for streaming and ad tracking, I would think they would view implementing ATSC3 as helping the competition.
I tried watching some American talk shows. On some talk shows, every minute is an advertisement. In addition to the normal commercials, the interviewee is usually selling something. And the host (Jimmy Fallon is the worst) is always trying to be funny, sympathetic to the excruciating point, being kind of a AD himself. It's unwatchable.
What are the current statistics for how many people still 1) have broadcast/cable live TV, and 2) actually watch live TV? Hopefully those numbers will continue to go down over time.
This isn't cable TV. This is the free Over-The-Air (OTA) TV. You know, tune to ABC, channel 3 on the dial. The stuff floating around your head right now on VHF/UHF radio waves.
I'm aware, but was using "cable" somewhat informal/colloquially. I've edited my comment for clarity; the point was really "how many people are still watching live TV".
ATSC 3.0 is not purely broadcast, it supports apps being delivered over broadcast, internet connectivity, and return channel. Did you read the article?
I watch broadcast TV a few times a year. (But, if I didn't work, I wouldn't miss it.)
I put an antenna (and HDHomerun) in my house so I wouldn't have to pay for cable; but one major motivating factor was for emergency broadcasts. In the five years I've been in my house, I used live TV to know how long to hide in my basement during a tornado warning.
That number just seems high. My (obviously very anecdotal) evidence from everyone I know sits at 0%. Even the ones who don't have cable aren't using OTA.
IIRC OTA use is climbing. I believe a lot of the market is lower income and/or rural. New user so not sure if I can post a link but a 2022 Nielsen report:
> Nielsen divides OTA home into three segments, those with no streaming subscription VOD services (and maybe no broadband); those with SVOD, but without a virtual multichannel video programming distributor, such as Hulu Plus Live TV, YouTube TV or Sling TV; and those with SVOD and vMVPDs.
> The largest group uses OTA and SVOD at 9.3% of the country, up from 7.2% in 2018. The OTA homes with vMVPDs rose to 1.9% from 1.2%, while the OTA only home fell to 4.1% from 5.9%.
> People in homes that go over-the-air but don’t stream have an average age of 61, only 13% of them have children and their median income is $22,800.
> People in homes that combine over-the-air viewing with at least one streaming service have an average age of 45, 40% of them have kids and the median income is $49,000. In the homes that have OTA and a vMVPD, the average age is 49, 35% have children and the median household income is $77,000.
Same story. Even my mother, 50 is watching turkish soap opera online and learning turkish language, because she dont want to wait for official releases or subtitles. This ATSC standard arrived 20 years too late.
Nobody EXCEPT the parasitic data miners/advertisement class want this. I'm certainly never going to entertain hooking up a internet connection for continual adverts and data mining to a TV tuner. Fuck that, no way.
Torrents, Usenet, and DVDs have everything I could ever want. And that list is also decreasing.