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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

I hope it will still be possible to receive a BPS timing signal privately and anonymously with ATSC 3 like one can with GPS. ATSC 3 has the Dedicated Return Channel because marketers “““need””” to spy on every-fucking-thing we do: https://www.atsc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/A323-2024-04...

“Conventional linear TV services alone (albeit ultra-high-definition) may not be sufficient to sustain the terrestrial broadcasting business which requires a large amount of highly coveted spectrum resources. Intelligent media delivery and flexible service models that maximize the network Return on Investment (ROI) is of paramount importance to the broadcasting industry in the new era.”

That's a lot of fancy words to say ‘we're doing this because it makes us more money’ lol

“Recent studies have shown that interactivity between media customers and service providers and between users themselves will be one of the most important features in the next-generation media service. In this document, this unique opportunity is addressed by defining a Dedicated Return Channel (DRC) system for the next-generation broadcasting system.”

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Yeah... and that's one of the most innocuous new "features" in ATSC 3.0.

Almost everything I've seen (besides BPS, and maybe HDR if you're one of the few who has a really good home theater setup) is a benefit for broadcasters and advertisers, and a bit worse for consumers (especially requiring new hardware/decoders... and sometimes persistent Internet connections!).

Same feeling here. ATSC 3.0 with DRM and persistent Internet requirements tells me this is going to be the downfall of OTA television. I can see ATSC 4.0 being a discounted ISP subscription paired with some OTA location checks via BPS.

So atsc 3 won't work unless you have some continuous "i'm user xyz watching this channel at time x.y.z" going back to the broadcaster?

Why would anyone use atsc 3? It's not free over the air, you can't spoof it?

It's not like anyone's gonna ask them. Networks will just label this as ${network name}'s HYPER NEXT GEN 10G TV EXPERIENCE (HNG TV), market the shit out of it, and offer free ESPN on it, tack on some Paramount HBO Supermax Plus for $0.99/year and throw in a half-decent Smart TV as a sign-on bonus, and adoption will skyrocket.

TV networks in the US are a living proof that, with enough marketing spend and a pinch of confusion in the offer structure, you can sell people on anything. Half the time you can just offer sportsball access and people will switch.

It's how previous versions of broadcaster overreach happened, and why Smart TVs succeed despite their shortcomings.

I came to the same conclusion when I saw a whole armada of new TVs from every manufacturer in the eve of any World Cup. Plus TVs tailored for football has a special mode called "sports" which make football arguably look/feel better.

That kind of pumping makes me sad and sick.

Or, the manufacturers will lose patience with slow adoption, the mess that is widevine DRM (what? Your TV isn’t based on Android? No, you can’t have DRM!), and customers really not caring because basically none of the broadcasts make the visual picture substantially better right now, so there is no incentive to move.

That’s what happened to LG [0]. They dropped ATSC 3.0 tuners. I’m sure this cost them precisely 0 sales as the industry incompetence destroys the broadcast industry.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/30/23897460/lg-drops-atsc-3-...

> TV networks in the US are a living proof that, with enough marketing spend and a pinch of confusion in the offer structure, you can sell people on anything. Half the time you can just offer sportsball access and people will switch.

The cratering market values say otherwise. Few people under 40 even care about “TV”, and live sports distribution contracts (and the associated gambling) are the only thing holding it up.

False, the majority of under 40 are still watching "TV" but just through intertube streaming. netflix, apple TV, amazon, and so on, all except apple have ads too.

The post I responded to mentioned TV networks, not TV. In a thread discussing over the air TV, I took that to mean linear programming sold by CBS (soon to be Skydance), NBC (Comcast), ABC (Disney), and Fox (also Disney, I think), and the CW (Nexstar).

The crux of the matter being that even if OTA channels didn’t track people’s location, it wouldn’t matter since OTA itself going the way of the dodo.

Fox TV stations are now Fox Corp, aka "New Fox", the more direct successor to News Corp. Disney bought most (but not all) of News Corp's TV studio and film studio but knew it couldn't get past the FCC if it bought the TV stations (especially the sports stations).

That's not really "TV", though (at least unless you'd also consider people buying a film or show on VHS or DVD "television").

Some of it is still linear like broadcast, if that's your personal distinction. Pluto, for instance, has a surprisingly large audience. The return of linear TV is also a big buzzword in streaming today with a lot of the majors experimenting with or already reintegrating linear TV options (partly because services like Pluto proved it out, partly because some of the streamers realized linear again is the ultimate endgame of Netflix-like binge watching and YouTube-like autoplay and want to skip the intermediate steps and return to the original thing).

Yes, there definitely is linear programming over the Internet, both free and paid.

We've finally come full circle: Linear broadcast TV -> TiVo (finally, no more missed episodes!) -> VOD, i.e. Netflix, Max, Hulu etc. (why linear broadcast everything to everyone if we can just OTT stream everything individually?) -> FAST, i.e. Pluto TV etc.

I too used to think TV is dead and no one is paying for cable anymore, but every now and then I keep hearing it's still alive and well, and that's always in association with some big sportsball events; I can believe that their customers nowadays are almost entirely sports fans, but then the pull they have with that segment is still strong. In my mind, the term "ESPN" registers as "something to dangle in front of US customers to get them to buy some TV plan".

It's being marketed as "NEXTGEN TV" so not far off.

Remember during the switch to digital TV, when marketers convinced half the population that they needed to buy a new "digital antenna" to keep viewing the same channels?

There is 1 provider for ATSC3 DRM (which is already rolling out in major markets): Google Widevine.

There is 1 operating system for ATSC3 DRM: Android.

There are several SoCs that can be used for "Level 1 Widevine".

When a SoC is compromised and the key is leaked from the TEE, all models of that device with the key are now untrusted for Level 1.

I think people should just be aware of the state of play.

At NAB someone asked one of the ATSC folks what would happen if the key is compromised and someone didn't connect a receiver to the Internet. The answer was "the receivers have many built in public keys. They should last the lifetime of the device."

Concerning because they could have a situation like with some 4K blu ray discs, your hardware becomes obsolete because DRM requires that cat and mouse game...

Also with some manufacturers believing the lifetime of a device should be less than 5 years and ideally less than 3 years, and are treating software/firmware support in those lifetimes, there's a lot of perverse incentives hidden behind anyone suggesting "for the lifetime of the device". As bad as some of the old cable monopolies were, they were at least sometimes held to Ma Bell's "the lifetime of a device is supposed to be 60 years" standards (which Ma Bell didn't always follow either, but that's another matter). I realize the ATSC exists primarily to sell new standards, but maybe we need ways to get back to longer planning horizons than 3-5 years.

Wow, and all that to encrypt hours of ads with a few minutes of the 20th rerun of some show in between...

When you can't innovate, financialize.

But what even is the business case here? I get the idea of encrypting pay TV, but isn't the entire point of free broadcast TV that it's... free?

It would be a different story if the DRM were available ubiquitously, e.g. in the way that arguably Widevine is for online streaming (but certainly not broadcast TV). Are rightholders that afraid of unauthorized out-of-market rebroadcasts that they'd rather obliterate their reachable market with stunts like that?

Yeah, if I squint and think back to the reasoning from previous generations of tech like this it’s that they don’t want people to be able to make bit-perfect recordings to save and share. By putting DRM on the broadcast stream they’re trying to make sure that it’s only usable as a one-time broadcast.

Free as in beer. See what happened to Aereo.

> But what even is the business case here? I get the idea of encrypting pay TV, but isn't the entire point of free broadcast TV that it's... free?

This should be a big clue that the spying is the point, and all the DRMs of the world are justification for spying instead of the other way around. Total Information Awareness is the path to completing the Great Work.

>When a SoC is compromised and the key is leaked from the TEE, all models of that device with the key are now untrusted for Level 1.

Has this actually happened? Especially for "appliances" like set-top boxes or blu-ray players, as opposed to something like a tablet which are presumably easier to hack.

Yes, it happens all the time, especially as the devices age.

L1 devices remotely downgrade to become L3 devices. This has different effects depending on content provided from "totally unavailable" to "lower resolution".

It's both DRM and planned-obsolescence in one.

The qualifier: https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/security-...

The list: https://android.googleapis.com/attestation/status

The dev docs: https://github.com/doridori/Android-Security-Reference/blob/...

I'm not sure if it's confirmed, but it's believed Level 1 video output contains a watermarking scheme that ties the key to the media, so if it's leaked they can disable the key that leaked the content.

You can search around and find tons of angry consumers shouting into the void about widevine errors on older consumer devices.

This is so user-hostile that I don't believe there will be any adoption. It will have to be shoved down the throat of those who use broadcast, which are overwhelmingly older and more remote.

ATSC first generation will probably outlive this DRM-driven abomination.

You're not wrong, but don't forget about the upgraded modulation and coding schemes. That might actually help consumers on the edge of coverage receive broadcasts and will definitely be an improvement over creaky 8vsb

I live in an area that is on the edge of coverage and has lots of hills. On ATSC 1.0, CBS is hard to pick up. Frequently unwatchable - which means unreliable for sports. I picked up an HDHomerun Flex 4K a few years ago. Basically the same week that ATSC 3.0 went live.

For a few weeks it was glorious. I had no problem picking up CBS (it was broadcast from the same antenna as ATSC 1.0 - so it was the modulation that was helping out). And then, after a little over a month. Whack! No more CBS. They turned on DRM. They are still the only network that in my area with DRM. Ughh.

Under the previous administration I filled a few issues about this from a public safety perspective - I live in with the FCC an area with unreliable power. During severe weather, we often lose Internet and power (which knocks out cable TV too). Requiring working internet to watch TV to monitor the progress of a tornado in your area seems stupid and dangerous. Unfortunately, nothing happened then regarding the issue and given the way that Brendan Carr is taking the FCC, I don’t think there will be any progress on this.

>During severe weather, we often lose Internet and power (which knocks out cable TV too). Requiring working internet to watch TV to monitor the progress of a tornado in your area seems stupid and dangerous.

Just listen to radio?

Deaf?

Radio can work, but again, I’m on the edge of reception areas and the hills make picking up FM and AM inconsistent.

In the event of a truly severe weather event (the ones where they hit the alert to make every cell phone go off), the visuals provided by television are hugely helpful.

I have an older HDHomerun - it's great! Most of the 3.0 stations in my area are already encrypted so I haven't bothered to upgrade

I’ve had a couple of the original, the prime, extend, and now the Flex 4K. They’ve all been terrific devices. The extend was a little wonky because transcoding goes wonky on bad signals, but generally great.

They’re all a huge improvement over older cards like the pcHDTV or the really old Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 that I fought with for Freevo and MythTV so long ago. The switch to Channels was a huge quality of life improvement too.

> "That's a lot of fancy words to say ‘we're doing this because it makes us more money’ lol"

You say that as if they're using lots of words to obfuscate that fact, but the quote you pasted has them saying entirely directly "maximize the network Return on Investment", which is just normal business terminology (and only one word more than your "it makes us more money"!)

Obviously this has no impact on whether that's a good or bad thing, I'm just pointing out that they weren't using a lot of words to hide that fact.

The utilization of an expanded lexicon, replete with polysyllabic and sesquipedalian terminology, engenders an ostensibly enhanced verisimilitude and an amplified capacity for rhetorical suasion in the articulation of one's propositional assertions.

Shorter, Milchick!

"Return on investment" isn't using uncommon words to try to be hard to interpret, it's a standard business term in English-speaking countries.

The fact that it seemed like its intention was to obfuscate is just a sign that you're not familiar with basic business terminology, nothing more.

(And there's no shame in that, nobody knows the common phrases in every area of society, if you've never taken any business classes nor been involved in running a business there's no reason you should know it - but that doesn't mean people who use those words are trying to hide what they mean.)

Edit: and unsurprisingly it's therefore also frequently seen on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=return+on+investment

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ROI

In case you're only accidentally missing the point and not just being an asshole: I would expect most people to have heard the term ROI before. I would not expect most people to understand the ways in which a bi-directional data path can turn into money. I definitely wouldn't expect most people to understand that it will involve compromising their privacy to spy on their viewing habits in a way that the last 100 years of broadcast television has no precedent for.

My apologies for failing to guess that when you complained they used too many fancy words to hide that the reason is to make more money, you actually weren't objecting to their use of a simple phrase acknowledging their goal of making more money and you were actually thinking about everything else they said rather than that.

RADIO ON INTERNET

For anyone who wants to know about ATSC 3.0 the Antenna Man channel covers over the air (OTA) stuff in the US:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw3W7MoafR4

* https://www.youtube.com/@AntennaMan/videos

ATSC 3.0 allows for DRM/encryption as the parent comment mentions.

I just realized the BPS is there to augment the return channel. Not only can the advertiser figure out what you are watching, but also where you are located.

Wi-Fi geolocation has been around for a while now and is very accurate too, so if TV/receiver manufacturers choose to reveal your location to advertisers (whether out of their own greed or because it's required to receive ATSC 3.0 DRM keys), they can already do so without any problem.

Thanks to the beamforming that's central to modern Wi-Fi and 5G cellular standards they can even see through your walls using the backscattered energy of the steered beam, like an airport security scanner for the entire planet:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.00250.pdf

https://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/papers/wivi-paper.pdf

> Recent studies have shown that interactivity between media customers and service providers and between users themselves will be one of the most important features in the next-generation media service. In this document, this unique opportunity is addressed by defining a Dedicated Return Channel (DRC) system for the next-generation broadcasting system.

Wow, that's one of the best uses of corporate-speak euphemism I've seen. Everybody who reads it knows what it really means, but if you just don't say it, it's fine. Recent studies indeed!

Wait, to be clear, this 'dedicated return channel' is just for TVs to broadcast back to the station that they're watching the adverts? I thought ATSC 3.0 was going to rely on IP backhaul for that. Actually broadcasting back seems... impractical at best.

I mean, let's keep in mind, even ATSC 1.0 had really awful reception issues; compared to analog NTSC where there was enough redundancy that you could just tune into a garbage station from way too far away and see something. Now imagine trying to make that already unreliable channel bidirectional. I just really hope all the return channel stuff is optional, because it sure as hell isn't going to work without way more stations broadcasting on more channels, and OOPS you've reinvented LTE.

Ironically there's no redundancy in NTSC. There are layers of information and they degrade downward until you have just a black and white picture with no sound.

In ATSC there is two types of forward error correction on the digital bitstream. The problem it faces is it sits in the same channel allocations as NTSC while having to deliver significantly more information than NTSC. That and the actual digital modulation used is not as ideal for receivers to capture.

You can digitize and lossily compress an NTSC signal significantly without losing much detail; that's why I call it redundant. Compression removes redundancy.

In ATSC the tradeoff between compression and error correction is such that a noisy channel is far more likely to cut out or otherwise be unusable than it would have been in NTSC.

Back in the late 90s when Ireland was starting to think about digital terrestrial TV a system called DVB-RCT was considered. Basically your receiver could also transmit back to the television transmitter. The system could handle thousands of concurrent connections, albeit each one had very low bandwidth - around 1Kbp/s in peak time.That was considered good enough for very basic interactivity and for authorising PPV purchases etc.In quieter hours or in areas were there were fewer receivers that bandwidth would be much higher, but in reality that would be rare.

In the end the company that the governement selected to start the rollout of DTT went bust and I don't think the system was used anywhere else. The developer of the technology abandoned it in 2006 as other connection methods (broadband/mobile data) were preferred.

I would think that the expectation is for the common option to be IP backhaul based on embedded LTE/5G modems. Having a separate communication scheme is probably more of a hedge for super rural areas that don't have LTE/5G or other IP coverage, especially as that is where broadcast TV will have more staying power.

This is my understanding as well. You can see the usage-reporting scheme and data structure here: https://www.atsc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/A333-2024-04...

“The fundamental record that captures consumption information is called a Consumption Data Unit (CDU). For a streaming A/V channel, each CDU identifies a reporting interval during which a service is accessed. Such a CDU includes the service identifier, the time the service access started and the time the service access ended. If any Applications are active during the report interval, it also records when the Applications are active (whether on a primary device or a “second screen”, companion device), including the Application Identifier, the time the Application started being active, and the time it stopped being active.”

“For services, events logged into a CDU shall correspond to all usage intervals of no less than 10 seconds and may correspond to shorter usage intervals. For Application activity, events logged into a CDU shall correspond to all usage intervals of no less than 5 seconds and may correspond to shorter usage intervals. The precision and accuracy of start times and end times in the CDUs should be within 1 second.”

The payload schema is a 4651-byte JSON structure, so I would imagine that a response-payload fitting this schema would be same-order-of-magnitude size. With 10-second granularity that works out to roughly a half-kilobyte-per-second data rate, and according to the DRC spec the maximum payload size of one DRC message is 2048 bytes.

It will also report when you play something back from a DVR:

“Component.SourceDeliveryPath – Delivery path used for or the source of the content component indicated by the parent Component element.

SourceDeliveryPath.type –

0 – Broadcast delivery (content component is delivered by broadcast)

1 – Broadband delivery (content component is delivered directly by broadband by broadcaster)

2 – Time-shift-buffer source (content source is local time shift buffer)

3 – Hard-drive source (content source is local hard drive)

4 – Delivery via direct connection (HDMI)

5 – Alternate IP delivery (content component is delivered via intermediary)”

> 5 – Alternate IP delivery (content component is delivered via intermediary)

Ok, this is entirely paranoid conspiracy theory rumblings at this point, but why does this sound like a way to catch unlicensed rebroadcasters?

Honestly that sounds pretty congruent with thinking about the spec from the position of the authors. Like what is the difference between "local time shift buffer" and "local hard drive" if it isn't some contractual authorization aspect they're pushing? Especially when you think that this standard is going to be deployed on TVs that will likely be displaying video from other sources than just broadcast.

Just like 5G, which provides unexpected connectivity for IoT devices.

Search for "miot" or "mmtc"

There is zero relation there.

OP is falling about the spec incorporating usage monitoring.

5G was designed with a very public and explicit goal for IoT of allowing many more devices to connect than 4G could, and more conveniently. Nothing unexpected or user-harming, and nothing new as 4G was already used for IoT.

When EE launched 5G in the UK, they took out a full page ad with a massive headline saying simply "A real crowd pleaser"

One of the best adverts for a long time - if you knew about the technical advantages of 5G, it had a real double meaning.

If you knew 90s British dance music, it had a further humourous double meaning promoting the telco (an oblique reference to The Shamen's Ebenezer Goode)

NEVER underestimate the layered entendre game in the UK.

> an oblique reference to The Shamen's Ebenezer Goode

That didn’t even cross my mind and Rich West (Mr. C) is a friend of mine and I know the song well. I, of course, get the reference now it has been pointed out, but you’re right that it’s pretty damn oblique!

I never knew 'Eezer, but do pass on my thanks to Rich for some brilliant tunes from my younger years!

Yeah at my work we still get a lot of the old 5G propaganda. "It's groundbreaking for IoT". Beh screw that it's just the successor to 4G. A bit faster and more flexible. The rest is just stupid marketing. There's nothing it can do that 4G couldn't, only slightly less efficiently.

The one thing that was really new was support for super high density environments with mmWave. That would have been ideal for stadiums etc. With regular tech the networks get overwhelmed. mmWave offers more cells in a tiny area. But here in Europe that's been given up for good. Phones don't even come with mmWave antennas anymore.

> Nothing unexpected or user-harming, and nothing new as 4G was already used for IoT.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90314058/5g-means-youll-have-to-...

This is a clickbait article. More towers mean that existing triangulation somewhat more accurate, and "anyone with access" is the cellular service provider.

5G does not always result in more towers, it just supports closer towers for better performance.

"Anyone with access" to Google or Apple data also knows exactly where you are. "Anyone with access" to <social media app of choice> knows exactly where you are. "Anyone with access" to police databases know exactly where you drove. "Anyone with access" to VISA/Mastercard data knows exactly where you've shopped. "Anyone with access" to Find my data will know exactly where your phones, headphones, and other trackable items are at any point in time.

This isn't a complaint about 5G, but about cellular anonymity which has never existed.

We should create technology that deliberately feeds trash data to marketers, in mind-boggling volumes. Drowning the signal in a biblical flooding of noise.

We should make things so useless and annoying for them, as they did for us.

I might have missed it just skimming, but what's the physical method they are planning to use for return channel?

Apparently there are two options: An existing Internet connection, or actually receivers transmitting back to the broadcast tower – which sounds crazy, but the specification [1] says it can work over up to 100 kilometers with line-of-sight...?

Then again, thanks to modern modulation techniques, digital steering etc., battery-powered smartphones can talk to satellites 36 thousand kilometers away these days as well, so maybe this is just a thing now? The spec also does mention receive repeaters for complicated non-line-of-sight propagation scenarios.

[1] https://www.atsc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/A323-2024-04...

I just used bullshit remover : “Conventional TV ain't enough. Need new tech to make more money. Gotta maximize that ROI, yo.”

So you got that right.

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