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What's even the point of this? It's a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist. Who is even pirating OTA content anyway? And if you have the tuner if

What's even the point of this? It's a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist. Who is even pirating OTA content anyway? And if you have the tuner if it doesn't have HDCP then can't the content be captured anyways? Even if it has HDCP, HDCP is broken already.

parl_match 3y ago
> Who is even pirating OTA content anyway? 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!
- xur17 3y ago
  Don't the sports streamers just rebroadcast the mlb.tv (or equivalent) transmission? I highly doubt it will stop them at all. Like any other drm, this will get worked around quickly at the cost of a worse experience for those following the rules.
- phkahler 3y ago
  >> > Who is even pirating OTA content anyway? >> 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.
  - AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
    They aren't saving copies. They are doing real time streaming.
    - alfalfasprout 3y ago
      Right... so all they have to do is plug in one of these boxes into an HDCP stripper and they can keep on streaming.
  - flerchin 3y ago
    You can pay for NFL sunday ticket at $200/m, or you can pay $0-$1 to a dodgy streamer who's rebroadcasting the OTA feed from in-region.
    - fomine3 3y ago
      Or pay for an antenna once?
      - flerchin 3y ago
        Right, but if you're out of region, someone has to retransmit the OTA.
    - phkahler 3y ago
      Along with commercials. I don't understand why the industry is against things like that, or having a TV showing a game in a public place.
  - parl_match 3y ago
    You're silly: > There's a huge network of sports streamers with ATSC tuners, most of whom who charge (a lot less than the package).
- enzanki_ars 3y ago
  It would only stop pirates for a whopping 24 hours at best. If there is a will, there is a way to bypass video DRM. It has to be decrypted at some point to appear on a display, and that's the place where it's possible to bypass any DRM without much issue. HDCP is useless [1][2][3], and unless Roku is failing to implement it right, my basic HDMI splitter from Micro Center is more than enough to strip it and feed info HDMI signal into a raspberry pi for ambient light effects. And in order for people to actually use ATSC 3.0 encrypted streams with an overwhelming majority of TVs on the market in use, folks will have to have some form of HDMI box that does the decryption anyway... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection#Master_key_release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content... [2}: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection#HDCP_v2.2,_v2.1_and_v2.0_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection#Problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    Cheap HDMI splitters often have the HDCP circuit only on the incoming side and send decrypted signal out of the receiving end. 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.
- AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
  It won't shut down the sports streamers at all. 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.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    I fail to see how encrypting the stream helps them stop this. If a sports re-streamer is just capturing OTA and distributing it verbatim, can't any random TV that could have received the OTA also receive said stream?
    - drjasonharrison 3y ago
      I believe that none of the consumer TVs have decryption for ATSC 3.0. It's another box to be connected, and possibly connected to the internet to get updated keys.
      - semiquaver 3y ago
        This is the real WTF. How many times are they going to break compatibility with OTA TV? A TV purchased in 1955 could receive broadcasts for 50+ years until the digital cutover. Now I’m hearing that tvs purchased just a year or two ago can’t receive a signal without an upgrade box? It’s absurd.
  - bobdvb 3y ago
    You're both not wrong but that doesn't stop the lawyers wanting these measures. The practicalities of them are irrelevant to the legal team.
phh 3y ago
> HDCP is broken already. 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)
- dylan604 3y ago
  > IMO this encryption can be interpretated as "you are supposed pay to view this channel" 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.
Dalewyn 3y ago
>Who is even pirating OTA content anyway? Literally everyone even remotely interested in TV content?
ww520 3y ago
The point is to build a cable-like company without spending money to build the cable infrastructure, by using public spectrum.
dylan604 3y ago
Not sure about who is pirating, but OTA signals are typically higher bitrate than a cable subscription. So the image is typically better as long has you have good reception.
- cogman10 3y ago
  ATSC 3 uses HVEC (instead of MPEG2 like ATSC 1) so the quality will shoot way up assuming encryption doesn't spoil it for everyone.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I don't see how encryption would affect the image quality. Obviously not being able to decode the stream makes things difficult, but that has nothing to do with the codec used to compress the video.
    - cogman10 3y ago
      Most video streams degrade gracefully when data is corrupted. Losing a byte or two is (generally) not that big of a deal. 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.
      - bobdvb 3y ago
        The block cipher used on broadcast doesn't have a big impact. People have been doing encryption on pay TV broadcasting for decades. There's also plenty of error correction, often 25% of the broadcast feed data is ECC.
supertrope 3y ago
To gain more control over the customer. To block recording so they can monetize live viewing and DVR/on demand/DVD sales viewing separately. To prevent pirate streams. To ensure commercials can’t be skipped. To enable paywalls. They want to get this rolled out and to set the expectation of DRM before ATSC 3.0 is popularly adopted. 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.

parl_match 3y ago

> Who is even pirating OTA content anyway? 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!

xur17 3y ago
Don't the sports streamers just rebroadcast the mlb.tv (or equivalent) transmission? I highly doubt it will stop them at all. Like any other drm, this will get worked around quickly at the cost of a worse experience for those following the rules.
phkahler 3y ago
>> > Who is even pirating OTA content anyway? >> 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.
- AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
  They aren't saving copies. They are doing real time streaming.
  - alfalfasprout 3y ago
    Right... so all they have to do is plug in one of these boxes into an HDCP stripper and they can keep on streaming.
- flerchin 3y ago
  You can pay for NFL sunday ticket at $200/m, or you can pay $0-$1 to a dodgy streamer who's rebroadcasting the OTA feed from in-region.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    Or pay for an antenna once?
    - flerchin 3y ago
      Right, but if you're out of region, someone has to retransmit the OTA.
  - phkahler 3y ago
    Along with commercials. I don't understand why the industry is against things like that, or having a TV showing a game in a public place.
- parl_match 3y ago
  You're silly: > There's a huge network of sports streamers with ATSC tuners, most of whom who charge (a lot less than the package).
enzanki_ars 3y ago
It would only stop pirates for a whopping 24 hours at best. If there is a will, there is a way to bypass video DRM. It has to be decrypted at some point to appear on a display, and that's the place where it's possible to bypass any DRM without much issue. HDCP is useless [1][2][3], and unless Roku is failing to implement it right, my basic HDMI splitter from Micro Center is more than enough to strip it and feed info HDMI signal into a raspberry pi for ambient light effects. And in order for people to actually use ATSC 3.0 encrypted streams with an overwhelming majority of TVs on the market in use, folks will have to have some form of HDMI box that does the decryption anyway... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection#Master_key_release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content... [2}: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection#HDCP_v2.2,_v2.1_and_v2.0_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection#Problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  Cheap HDMI splitters often have the HDCP circuit only on the incoming side and send decrypted signal out of the receiving end. 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.
AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
It won't shut down the sports streamers at all. 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.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  I fail to see how encrypting the stream helps them stop this. If a sports re-streamer is just capturing OTA and distributing it verbatim, can't any random TV that could have received the OTA also receive said stream?
  - drjasonharrison 3y ago
    I believe that none of the consumer TVs have decryption for ATSC 3.0. It's another box to be connected, and possibly connected to the internet to get updated keys.
    - semiquaver 3y ago
      This is the real WTF. How many times are they going to break compatibility with OTA TV? A TV purchased in 1955 could receive broadcasts for 50+ years until the digital cutover. Now I’m hearing that tvs purchased just a year or two ago can’t receive a signal without an upgrade box? It’s absurd.
- bobdvb 3y ago
  You're both not wrong but that doesn't stop the lawyers wanting these measures. The practicalities of them are irrelevant to the legal team.

phh 3y ago

> HDCP is broken already. 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)

dylan604 3y ago
> IMO this encryption can be interpretated as "you are supposed pay to view this channel" 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.

Dalewyn 3y ago

>Who is even pirating OTA content anyway? Literally everyone even remotely interested in TV content?

ww520 3y ago

The point is to build a cable-like company without spending money to build the cable infrastructure, by using public spectrum.

dylan604 3y ago

Not sure about who is pirating, but OTA signals are typically higher bitrate than a cable subscription. So the image is typically better as long has you have good reception.

cogman10 3y ago
ATSC 3 uses HVEC (instead of MPEG2 like ATSC 1) so the quality will shoot way up assuming encryption doesn't spoil it for everyone.
- dylan604 3y ago
  I don't see how encryption would affect the image quality. Obviously not being able to decode the stream makes things difficult, but that has nothing to do with the codec used to compress the video.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    Most video streams degrade gracefully when data is corrupted. Losing a byte or two is (generally) not that big of a deal. 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.
    - bobdvb 3y ago
      The block cipher used on broadcast doesn't have a big impact. People have been doing encryption on pay TV broadcasting for decades. There's also plenty of error correction, often 25% of the broadcast feed data is ECC.

supertrope 3y ago

To gain more control over the customer. To block recording so they can monetize live viewing and DVR/on demand/DVD sales viewing separately. To prevent pirate streams. To ensure commercials can’t be skipped. To enable paywalls. They want to get this rolled out and to set the expectation of DRM before ATSC 3.0 is popularly adopted. 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.