It's sports. Local games are often shown on broadcast TV while packages to view them in other regions are expensive. There's a huge network of sports streamers with ATSC tuners, most of whom who charge (a lot less than the package).
It'll maybe shut down the sports streamers for a year or two, at the cost of social good. Doesn't seem worth it to me!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...
[2}: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...
You can easily bypass any HDCP signal with $25 worth of stuff off Amazon and record it to your local PC with FOSS like OBS or even the built-in camera softwares.
All this does is make people have to spend more money to get less service. It disproportionately negatively affects the poor for no social good.
These people, and their customers, have a very different use case and this won't block them at all.
They can just use an HDCP stripper and an HDMI capture card and then re-encode it.
Failing that, they can just point a camera at a TV.
Sports viewers care a lot less about quality.
I'm not saying you're wrong that they are doing this because of sports, but, it won't do anything to curtail that.
Like any other drm, this will get worked around quickly at the cost of a worse experience for those following the rules.
>> It's sports.
That's silly. Sports are way more valuable to the consumer when watched in real time. There is very very little value in saving a copy.
> There's a huge network of sports streamers with ATSC tuners, most of whom who charge (a lot less than the package).
IMO this encryption can be interpretated as "you are supposed pay to view this channel". They could have foregone encryption with just a flag except that it would be trivial for any Aliexpress atsc hdmi dongle to simply forget that about that flag.
That being said yeah they probably require hdcp which.. Well you can find HDMI splitter (that goes from 4k to 4k on hdmi1 and 1080p on hdmi2) that "simply forget" about hdcp 1&2. (no idea whether that's on purpose but that's not the reason I bought it in the first place)
Growing up, I didn't have cable and only had OTA networks. This was before FOX was a network at all, so VHF was only the Big 3. During the day, they only aired soaps, so it was the UHF bands that offered anything different. One of those was TBN, and I would tune in for laughs. One day, Paul Crouch said that if you were watching his program "right now" and did not send him money, you were stealing from him. So your "you are supposed to pay for this channel" is not too far off from the beliefs of some of the broadcasters.
Encryption turns every dataloss into something catastrophic. Now, instead of 1 byte lost, you are talking about 1 mb lost (or whatever the size of the encryption chunks are).
That becomes especially bad as codecs get more bandwidth friendly. That 1mb can represent a lot of data, which ultimately gets corrupted until the next keyframe flows through.
You can sort of think of it in terms of a bitmap vs jpeg. If you corrupt 40 bytes in a 1mb bitmap, no problem, it will still mostly look like the original image. However, if you turn that bitmap into a 30kb jpeg and corrupt 40 bytes, now that's a much more significant amount of the information changed.
Encrypted pay tv exists (in the form of satellite transmissions) but there, interference is minimized by having a geosynchronous satellite high in the air directly beaming a signal. Only bad weather interferes. Further, because it's being beamed from a single source (rather than multiple towers around an area). you can point your dish directly at the satellite to get a relatively perfect directional connection. Other signals, the sun, power lines, etc don't generally interfere because you are concentrating a focused signal.
That math all changes when talking about receiving multiple terrestrial signals with a non-directional antenna.
If you've watched satellite tv, you know that whenever a storm rolls through it becomes unwatchable. There's not really any sort of graceful degradation, it's either a perfect signal or a blank screen with "no signal". SOMETIMES you might see giant swaths of green blocks or whatever if the corruption is just right, but generally speaking it's all or nothing.
Meanwhile, I get relatively weak signals from a couple of weak OTA stations. For the most part, the images are perfectly passable.
Broadcasters have given some bogeyman reason of deepfake edits of broadcasts being possible. But I’m sure that will still be possible after encryption.
The last time this came up it this anti-feature was called the “broadcast flag” bit that would instruct hardware to refuse the viewer’s command to record.
Some cable TV operators let you DVR most channels except for premium channels or PPV events. Others block recording on every single channel just because they can. In either case any recordings are lost when the box breaks or is otherwise swapped.
Literally everyone even remotely interested in TV content?