FCC approves ATSC 3.0, a TV technology with better pictures but less privacy | Hacker News Reader

FCC approves ATSC 3.0, a TV technology with better pictures but less privacy

reuters.com

59 pointsskbohra12371 comments

The whole notion of owning a TV is becoming ridiculous. The cost of ownership is simply not worth it. Fist, you have the cost of the screen itself. You buy a TV, spend lots of money on it, and then it simply spies on you. We've seen this already on Vizio and Samsung TVs already. This is another feather in the cap for this trend.

Then there is the cost of cable, which is absurdly expensive. To get all the channels you want, you end up spending a couple of hundred dollars per month.

Want to do the cord cutting route? Well that is trending to be even more expensive as each service charges about 10 dollars per month. That doesn't even account for live sports.

The TVs themselves seem to be going obsolete every two years. First it was HDTV, then 3DTV, then HDTV 4K. On the tech side it was LED, LCD, ULED, now OLED. Remember when your CRT TV lasted 10+ years?

Edit: Also they don't get updates after six months. Apps stop working as people have mentioned. But more importantly, they don't get security updates. So your Smart TV morphs into a Creep TV where hackers have their way with it to do their bidding.

Overall, it is easier to just not do the whole TV thing. You will save a ton of money and be much happier at the same time.

You forget to mention that after a few years, if not earlier, your TV doesn't get any updates anymore and apps disappear or stop functioning and gets 50% useless (the "smart" part).

I cannot speak for the American market but mostly in the Netherlands a TV is essentially used as a big computer display, because most people have a settopbox that has COAX/Ethernet in -> HDMI out.

My Samsung TV got an update that added adverts into it UI. There's no option to disable it and Samsung's support team insist that the ads come from apps that I've installed, but they come from preinstalled apps I can't remove or disable.

I wrote a guide on blocking it. TL;DR DNS blacklist ads.samsung.com

https://gist.github.com/peteryates/b44b70d19ccd52f62d66cdd4b...

The real question is why on earth would installing an application on your TV give it permissions to display ads outside of itself?

That's one of those corporate excuses that sounds good in the moment but really just makes the whole situation way worse.

This is exactly the problem. Samsung make the OS, they sell the space, they make the money. They just flatly deny they can do anything about it.

I was recently looking for a 4K TV to use as a monitor and was reading good things about Samsung when one of the reviews mentioned this advertising stuff in a single sentence somewhere near the bottom. I googled it, but most "reviews" don't mention it. It seems you can't trust the devices or the online reviews any more. Nobody wants to make a product for me, it's all about them.

The problem is, most reviews happen just before or just after launch. My TV was fine for approximately half a year before an update added them without warning or an opportunity to downgrade.

I have been banned from Samsung TV's Instagram for warning potential buyers.

Don't buy a smart tv, hook a chrome cast to it, don't buy a new one just because there are better ones out there.

As for streaming, choose one service and switch to another to binge a new season, then cancel when it is over.

All TVs are smart now.

But there is absolutely no reason for you to hook it up to your home wifi. At least, until they are 'cloud'-enabled, and they require an internet connection to verify DRM before it plays ANY content... I shouldn't give them ideas.

My current one that I bought back in 2014 (or 13?) won't start up unless it thinks it has a network connection. I've actually setup my router to just block all traffic from it, but let it on the network so it'll actually work as a panel. Otherwise it has an unskippable menu demanding to be given the wifi password (or hooked up over ethernet).

What brand and model?

Samsung UN60F6400 60-Inch

I would have returned that crap back to the store so fast it would make the sales person's head spin.

Just do not connect them to the WiFi and suddenly they all are dumb

Just hope your neighbours don't have an unlocked wifi connection and that the tv doesn't 'helpfully' auto connect

All TVs are smart now. Fortunately, you can now buy TV-sized monitors. They're usually sold as a "commercial monitor" or a "digital signage display".

I want a 50-55" curved monitor. Does that exist and is it way more expensive than a TV? I can get a TV for $800 or less.

A relative just bought a new TV this month, and asked me whether they should choose the "smart" TV or the normal one (I recommended the normal one, which they bought). So this is false, one can still find normal TVs.

I purchased my Samsung 46" 1080p LCD TV in 2007 for $3000 AUD. It's still going strong now. The only single thing I miss from it is a lack of HDMI-CEC support.

You don’t WANT HDMI-CEC; it almost never works properly.

HDMI-CEC is great and works flawlessly if the equipment you have supports it, at least in my personal experience. On some older equipment, not all of the functions worked though. For example, my old TV could uses CEC for volume and power on but not power off. New TV does it all perfectly.

We have a similar plasma model, which we got for free because the owners were upgrading to a new one. I love how it doesn't do anything except display signals; we pair it with a Chromecast for most things. Of course, the electricity cost of a plasma TV adds up over the years...

You’re not obligated to upgrade, obviously. An LCD TV still works perfectly fine. You can also still get non-smart TVs, though it has become increasingly difficult. Most people probably don’t want _all_ of the on-demand things. And terrestrial TV is still a thing.

And since they went LED-backlit, they last practically forever (the old CFL ones did often eventually die).

I agree with most of your points but a couple of hundred dollars a month sounds like a ton of packages. I think I have hulu live with no ads, HBO, and Netflix for well under a hundred. You could divide the $99 bucks I spent on Amazon Prime by 10 and add that too if you wanted although I can't tell you the last time I used that service. It's still a bunch of money though.

The best deal here in NYC is a 50 dollar (or cheaper but the best ones are about 50 I believe) antenna which picks up maybe fifty or sixty channels in a variety of languages (which I think is neat although don't particularly use). That's a one time cost and you get Fox, CBS, ABC, etc, etc.

Seems like trying to be on the cutting edge would be a total waste, I don't have a 4K TV or some super huge screen and that's fine by me.

One of the components (not yet finalized) of ATSC 3.0 is an entire web browser that runs as an overlay in front of the video [1]. Which itself supports LocalStorage, XHR, and all the goodies you've come to expect - and EME DRM, of course.

[1] http://www.atsc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/A344S34-230r1...

> Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc last month called the new standard “the Holy Grail” for the advertiser because it tells them who is watching and where.

This doesn't tell us much about the "how". I assume how this works is that the TV set connects to your home network and phones home with information about what you're watching right now. If your TV set were to skip the part where it phones home, is it still possible to watch the show? Or do you have to divulge your location in order to get a key to decrypt the show? Will there be DRM preventing you from recording?

>This doesn't tell us much about the "how".

That was a key piece of info left out. I kept skimming back through the article thinking I glossed over it.

> connects to your home network

SoC hardware with LTE/CDMA/etc already exists. As soon as some "IoT" device manufacturer negotiates some sort of off-peak batch upload deal with the major wireless carriers, your TV will simply bypass your home network.

> do you have to divulge your location

In the late 90s[1], there was a brief attempt to enforce region locks with GPS.

[1] I'm not to sure about this date.

> The new standard would also let broadcasters activate a TV set that is turned off to send emergency alerts.

Uggh. I'd be very annoyed if, say, the TV turned itself on and woke my toddler from his daily nap because of something like an amber alert.

Honestly, stuff like this is part of why I'm still using an ancient CRT-style TV and haven't bothered replacing it yet. I think I prefer my TV "dumb."

Even the smartest tv gets obsolete really fast. I found chromecast to be wonderful. It's a dumb device, your phone is the smart one.

Exactly. In my case it's the wi-fi enabled blu-ray player plugged into the TV. And this TV has outlived the DVD player that came before that.

It's a low-res dinosaur but it does its job without fuss.

It is possible today to buy displays used for business and advertising that are essentially just panels with HDMI input.

This is exactly what I want a TV to be.

I can choose what I plug in, likely just a Chromecast but perhaps a NUC, and know that the panel isn't really doing anything else.

The only downside to this approach is that these panels tend not to come with speakers built in so you must handle the audio yourself. But this is OK, the in-built audio is typically terrible anyway.

Look for accessories, the speakers are often just sold separately and attach to the sides.

>It's a dumb device, your phone is the smart one.

No it's not, in the context of this article. It's just different owners. Instead of your TV and/or cable company, google gets the data. It's cheap and convenient, but no different privacy-wise.

Agreed.

I'm seeing a lot of outrage, especially on left leaning sites, at the direction the FCC is headed under the current administration.

But to me, it really just looks like a lot of the power that SV has amassed over the past 15 years is being returned to the more traditional media cartels and access providers.

To the little guy, it makes no difference - all our info belongs to some big corp.

Presumably many TVs would have an option for ignoring the signal.

Android and iOS both make amber alerts optional.

I fail to see the use case for street by street emergency or weather broadcasts. The weather forecast is unreliable enough at city level, let alone street level. And what emergencies would be so serious as to warrant turning on TVs on just my street or in my area? Seems like a thin veil for giving broadcasters more control over end user devices.

Probably a byproduct to sell the idea to regulators. From another comment:

>Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc last month called the new standard “the Holy Grail” for the advertiser because it tells them who is watching and where.

The National Weather Service offers localized weather down to the neighborhood level. My experience has been that it's pretty reliable as I live miles away from the weather station that gathers the official data for my city.

And what emergencies would be so serious as to warrant turning on TVs on just my street or in my area?

I live very close to the evacuation zone for the recent Napa-Sonoma fires, close enough that we were on an evacuation alert: we didn't have to leave, but we had to be ready in case the situation worsened.

What the article skipped over is that your TV will require an internet connection to watch broadcast channels. This proposal is terrible for freedom, consumer cost and privacy.

Also, it's a stupid reason to get every American to throw out their TV AGAIN (digital tv transition being first) to give the consumer electronics industry a revenue boost.

The industry has run out of features consumers will pay for (3-D tv, screen size, 4K, HDR) during a significant market maturity price erosion - taking 65" TVs from $2,500 down to $1,000 well equiped in only a few years. To reset the pricing scheme, they get the FCC to create a new mandatory feature so they can reset the pricing and sell millions of devices needlessly.

This is not true. An Internet connection will not be required.

it's a stupid reason

Free, over-the-air HDR 4K TV sounds like a great reason. And where is it documented that an internet connection is required?

What's your alternative? As it stands now, if one wants 4K television, one has to get a cable or satellite connection, with all the user tracking that entails. If ATSC 3.0 really makes OTA UHD possible, then it's worth the cost of a converter box to implement it--no need to throw out TVs, come on.

> U.S. regulators on Thursday approved the use of new technology that will improve picture quality on mobile phones, tablets and television, but also raises significant privacy concerns by giving advertisers dramatically more data about viewing habits.

I don't understand. The article talks about a new TV broadcast standard, ATSC 3.0. Most mobile phones and tablets do not include a TV tuner, so how is this going to improve quality on mobile phones and tablets?

It won't. No telco in their right mind is going to put ATSC 3.0 capability in their phones. The current ATSC 1.0 has a mobile standard and it went absolutely nowhere because of this same reason.

Some of the other digital TV standards support mobile device use, meaning that it is practical to implement it on a device that is changing locations during reception. ATSC is not, and is difficult enough to receive from a stationary receiver.

I don't see the new standard being very relevant anyway. The main use case for plain old ATSC is terrestrial broadcast. And now we're going to be pushing 4K over the air? I don't see that working out to well in practice.

The cable providers really want you to use their own box, and encrypt everything going over the wire, to make piracy harder. And at some point, it is going to be easier to just go pure data, rather than cram a bunch of 4K channels down the wire.

So who is really going to use ATSC 3.0 in the USA?

And now we're going to be pushing 4K over the air? I don't see that working out to well in practice.

ATSC 3.0 is rolling out as we speak in South Korea, in advance of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. I haven't seen any reports of how well it's working; as an enthusiastic antenna user, I'm dying to see how well it works over the air.

This article makes no sense

In fairness, that's the same data that Netflix, Youtube, and others have access to when we watch online. The broadcast system is just transitioning to more of a network model as well.

Not that I agree with this decision, but it's not a huge change in the state of affairs really.

But Netflix doesn’t use their demographic data to shove ads down my throat. And, while they have the account holder address, they don’t have precise location data on all the devices I use to watch - TVs are pretty static so will generally only be connecting from the account address.

Netflix can derive your location with network performance analysis and correlation with all of their network data.

So many of the questions in this thread are "but how??" Folks, this is a Reuters article. It's not technical. If you want to know how it works read the standards:

https://www.atsc.org/standards/atsc-3-0-standards/

Perhaps the standards themselves are worthy of a HN post, so folks can ask deeper questions on that thread.

Compare me to Don Quixote if you like, but this kind of crap is what makes clicking on that little magnet icon so damn satisfying.

---

The system uses precision broadcasting and targets emergency or weather alerts on a street-by-street basis. The system could allow broadcasters to wake up a receiver to broadcast emergency alerts. The alerts could include maps, storm tracks and evacuation routes.

The new standard would also let broadcasters activate a TV set that is turned off to send emergency alerts.

Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc last month called the new standard “the Holy Grail” for the advertiser because it tells them who is watching and where.

---

Another nail in the coffin of traditional broadcasting.

I find it amusing that these (evil) corporations are so brazen that they are not even coating their glee at these 1984-esque surveillance in the usual rosy corporate speak.

I do not know who FCC works for, but it's certainly not for the American people.

This article just made me more confused instead of explaining what the technology is and how it works.

> would allow for more precise geolocating of television signals, ultra-high definition picture quality and more interactive programming, like new educational content for children and multiple angles of live sporting events

What?? What does multiple camera angels have anything to do with the signal quality? What type of educational content is possible that's not possible with current TVs? Don't current TVs already support 4k? So what type of picture quality is it talking about? What type of interactive programming is it capable of that's not possible with current TVs?

Someone please explain!

This strikes me as an attempt by the broadcasting industry to get into that cool internet stuff the kids are all talking about. I doubt it really means anything. Most of this stuff will be ignored.

The ultimate problem for advertising supported broadcast media is and has been for some time the DVR/PVR. There is nothing preventing people from recording ATSC 3 to a hard disk so this ultimately changes nothing important for the industry.

That's really cool. So you can detect if someone hasn't seen an advert for a couple of hours then remotely turn their TV on the next time their TV sees them and play the advert at max volume. Awesome.

I detect some sarcasm in your tone. But essentially I think you are right. We have seen similar development when W3C started mandating DRM for web content. Ad blockers can be quite effective when all the content is available to them. This probably won't be true for too long.

I guess the limitations of advertisement technology were seen as enough of a blocker that serious effort (and money) was spent on removing some of them.

There are, of course, some winners due to these changes. I wonder if this can be a net win for the society, though. Instinctively I would say that it won't be, but I'm not sure why I'd think so. Perhaps the historical examples from mass surveillance societies in the previous century give raise to some negative feelings.

> I wonder if this can be a net win for the society.

You don't have to be so coy about it. It's obviously not a win for anyone but the small set of people profiting from it.

Something left out in the article is ATSC 3.0 supports digital watermarking of the audio signal and video signal...

The watermark can encode the targeted geolocation, so that recordings can be traced back to an address?

Yup

Could Netflix also watermark video with the account watching on one of their cache boxes? If this idea becomes popular networks might request it.

What does a standard mean ? Other than connecting an antenna, does any signal directly reach a TV ? Isn't it all dominated by set top boxes anyway, which can do whatever they please ? Some TVs don't even have tuners any more.

> The new standard would also let broadcasters activate a TV set that is turned off to send emergency alerts.

Just what the world needs: the resurrection of Max Headroom.

How does this play into cord cutting though? I haven't had "cable" television since 2005, and I haven't owned a TV ...well since then. I tried OTA with a Mac Mini for a bit, but it was just awful in general. So no TV.

Have you tried DirecTV Now? It's actually quite nice. My "cable box" is a Fire Stick. I can watch all the channels I subscribed to on my TV this way, on my laptop or phone. I pay $35 and they include HBO.

I haven't. Would I need a dish?

Nope. Pure streaming over the internet. Works on fire sticks, roku etc

All of those systems are already deployed for cord cutters, including full analytics, ability to turn on TV on demand and strong DRM lockdown to prevent "piracy" and adblockers.

Cut the cord works

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