Broadcasters bungled free antenna TV. Now they want a bailout?

For a case study in how a once-promising technology turned toxic, look no further than ATSC 3.0.

Also known as NextGen TV, the new broadcast standard promised to revolutionize free over-the-air TV with features like 4K HDR video, time-shifting, on-demand viewing, and interactive programming. For cord-cutters who get free local channels with an antenna, this was a genuinely exciting technology when it began rolling out way back in 2019.

Six years later, that excitement has evaporated thanks to restrictive digital rights management (DRM) and high adoption costs. While the broadcast TV industry has failed to make ATSC 3.0 stick, they’ve succeeded in getting tech enthusiasts, consumer advocates, and even some individual broadcasters to fear and despise it.

Now, broadcasters are hoping for a bailout from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which announced this week that it will consider their wishes to wind down the existing ATSC 1.0 standard and mandate ATSC 3.0 adoption. If that happens, most antenna users will need a new TV or tuner box by 2030 at the latest. Having failed in the marketplace, broadcasters now want the government to help foist ATSC 3.0 upon people instead.

Sadly, it didn’t have to be this way.

What’s happening with ATSC 3.0?

NextGen TV broadcasts are available in more than 90 U.S. markets, covering 70 percent of the population, but accessing these broadcasts requires an ATSC 3.0 tuner, and most TVs don’t have one.

If the FCC disappears ATSC 1.0, over-the-air TV viewers will need to upgrade their tuners even if they don’t need a new TV or care about ATSC 3.0’s new features.

Low-cost TV makers tend to exclude ATSC 3.0 from their sets, and some bigger brands–including Samsung and LG–have either pulled back or stopped supporting the standard entirely. External ATSC 3.0 tuner boxes can bring support to existing TVs but they’re expensive at $90 and up.

As such, broadcasters estimate that only 14 million compatible TVs and 300,000 external tuner boxes have been sold in the United States through the end of 2024. That means only about 11 percent of U.S. households can tune into ATSC 3.0 channels today.

Broadcasters argue that by winding down ATSC 1.0, they’ll have more bandwidth for features like 4K resolution (which remains largely unavailable in today’s actual ATSC 3.0 broadcasts), additional channels, or improved reception. They believe this will finally stimulate demand for NextGen TV and get more hardware makers on board.

That’s one way to look at it. The other way is that if the FCC lets ATSC 1.0 support disappear, viewers will need to upgrade even if they don’t need a new TV or care about new features. Meanwhile, broadcasters would be free to repurpose additional spectrum away from free TV over public airwaves.

Either way, broadcasters are hoping the FCC will force the issue. This week, the commission released a notice of proposed rulemaking that seeks public comment on what broadcasters want. That includes the ability to sunset ATSC 1.0 broadcasts for the 55 largest U.S. markets in 2028 (and every market in 2030), along with a potential mandate to force every TV maker to include a ATSC 3.0 tuner in their sets. After the public comment period, the FCC will come up with proposed rules to adopt and eventually vote on them.

Doing early adopters dirty

Broadcasters could have stimulated demand for ATSC 3.0 in a more organic way. Instead, they’ve stymied the groups most likely to advocate for its success.

SiliconDust is a case in point: It was the first manufacturer to sell a consumer-grade ATSC 3.0 tuner in the U.S. Its HDHomeRun tuner lets you set up an antenna in one room, and then access live TV across multiple networked televisions via its streaming apps. Users can also set up DVR servers to record over-the-air channels, using either HDHomeRun’s software or third-party solutions such as Plex and Channels DVR.

Nick Kelsey, SiliconDust’s CTO and founder, told me in 2020 that the company wanted to spur the market for ATSC 3.0 with a bleeding-edge product. But since then, broadcasters have punished both SiliconDust and its customers for their early enthusiasm. As broadcasters have started encrypting their ATSC 3.0 channels with DRM, HDHomeRun users have been unable to access that content because their boxes can’t decrypt the programming.

While HDHomeRun tuners are “NextGen TV-certified” and licensed to decrypt copy-protected content, a private group of broadcasters called the ATSC 3.0 Security Authority (A3SA) has separately been certifying devices to receive encrypted channels. The group refuses to do that for HDHomeRun tuners, citing SiliconDust’s use of a chip by a subsidiary of the Chinese company Huawei as a security concern.

It’s unclear why the A3SA waited five years to point out this potentially disqualifying hardware issue. It’s also a little fishy, given that SiliconDust has cited numerous other roadblocks along the way.

Either way, the upshot is that not a single whole-home DVR with encrypted ATSC 3.0 channel support exists on the market today. Tablo indefinitely delayed its plans for an ATSC 3.0 product in 2022, citing DRM concerns. ZapperBox is working on a whole-home solution but it doesn’t expect full functionality for another year.

Broadcasters understandably want to protect their content from piracy, but balancing that goal with all the existing use cases for over-the-air TV should have been a priority. Instead, broadcasters alienated their most enthusiastic audience and mutated ATSC 3.0 from a promising technology into a poisonous one.

DRM alienated everyone

The downsides of DRM extend beyond just whole-home DVRs. Some NextGen TV tuner boxes won’t decrypt channels without an internet connection, and the YouTube creator Tyler “Antenna Man” Kleinle has reported that some TVs can fail to decode encrypted channels for no apparent reason. Lon Seidman has found that decryption certificates on ATSC 3.0 products will eventually expire, rendering them unable to receive encrypted channels at all. (Both creators have been encouraging viewers to complain to the FCC.)

Even broadcasters that have no plans to encrypt their channels could run into problems. Weigel Broadcasting Company, which operates MeTV and several other popular digital subchannels, has told the FCC that televisions may eventually block or hinder users from viewing stations that haven’t purchased an encryption certificate. That effectively could turn the A3SA, a private entity, into a gatekeeper for the public airwaves.

Meanwhile, no permission is needed to innovate on the unencrypted side of the fence.

Channels DVR, for instance, just released a breakthrough multiview feature that integrates with HDHomeRun tuners, making it the first solution for split-screen viewing of free over-the-air channels. Weigel just launched a new Western-themed channel to join its stable of rerun-centric over-the-air offerings. Tablo’s $100 whole-home DVR continues to get better with a newly-launched offline mode and integration with more streaming channels.

Had broadcasters not alienated these kinds of torchbearers, they might’ve fared better at convincing the public that ATSC 3.0 is essential. Now their only hope is to cry to the government about it.

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