How will ATSC 3.0 transform TV advertising?
msn.com
msn.com
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.
they might not want this specifically, but there's a whole lot of people out there who want free TV, whatever the easiest way to get it is.
It's not like the choices are ATSC 3 or we cannot figure anything out.
It should be illegal to encrypt OTA news and local interest programming.
Why? These are heavily subsidized by taxpayer money and the broadcasters are already making money off advertising on these events.
> It should be illegal to encrypt OTA news and local interest programming.
It was on hybrid cable systems, (analog and digital channels). Since they went all-digital they lobbied and got the FCC to make it legal to encrypt broadcast stations: https://www.fcc.gov/document/commission-relaxes-cable-encryp...
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.
For me the larger screen provides a social aspect, it's something to do with family or with guests, vs. consuming alone on a phone.
Well, obviously.. there's a lot more than 3 choices for most people now.
> A lot of Americans probably don't even know they can get digital broadcasts with a coax antenna.
The people who watch sports know this, and it is reflected in the Nielsen ratings... this is still a huge market.
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.
Analog degraded gracefully with distance, but digital works until it doesn't.
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.
Meanwhile they spend $10 on a frappuccino with hazelnut syrup.
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.
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.
The enshittening will come for those hobbies too. Want to do woodworking? Sign up for the Dewalt Eversharp(tm) saw blade program!
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.
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.
[1] 47 CFR 73.621(e): https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-73/section-73.621...
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.
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 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 totally understand going back to piracy.
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.
This is the precise reason why I don't use streaming services.
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.
Just a shot in the dark, were you working on MPEG delivery formats?
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.
You'll want to get a Yagi antenna case for the best results though.
They never really caught on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
/s
https://www.harmonicinc.com/insights/blog/understanding-atsc...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
But anyway: 1080p itself is not a new feature of ATSC 3.0. 1080p60 or 1080p120, sure.
([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.)
ATSC 2.0 will be useless, because all OTA signals will be encrypted, so if they want OTA TV at all, they'll need the new device.
I know you're looking for value for the viewer but that's not who this is for.
> “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?
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).
Local advertisers also like the assurance that their ad dollars aren’t being wasted on out-of-market viewers. OTA provides that naturally.
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.
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.
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?
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...
DVDs, Blu-ray, HD-DVDs
Playstation 1,2,3,4,5 games
Nintendo SNES,N64,Wii,GameCube, Switch
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".
Only if all humanity collectively forgets that China exists.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
In addition, I find the announcers in Spanish much more exciting than the ones in English.
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.
We need to teach some modern technical civics in schools. The technological society just being forever more exploited needs push back. Let's get some Ursala Franklin in our schoolbooks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
Why would anyone want this? Why would anyone purchase a television with this ability?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 can't imagine talk shows with ATSC 3.0...
If I wanted to talk to them I would contact them.
Go away.
Thank you for another reason I will never watch TV.
> 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.
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.