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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
Why would anyone use atsc 3? It's not free over the air, you can't spoof it?
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
That kind of pumping makes me sad and sick.
ATSC first generation will probably outlive this DRM-driven abomination.