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LG halts production of ATSC 3.0-compatible TVs over patent concerns
- raverbashing 3y ago> is an IP-based signaling platform capable of supporting enhancements and advancements such as 4K video, advanced advertising and immersive audio. US broadcasters are deploying ATSC 3.0 across dozens of markets. Sounds like nothing of value was lost At this day and age, few people care about it. And ATSC "legacy" will continue to work so you can still watch your local news (or Days of Our Lives I guess)
- toast0 3y ago> At this day and age, few people care about it. And ATSC "legacy" will continue to work so you can still watch your local news (or Days of Our Lives I guess) It will it until it doesn't. My market currently has two physical channels for ATSC 3.0, and the rest are ATSC 1.0. If there's adoption (or a mandate), I can imagine the ratio flipping. If you like you programming at low bitrates, you'll be fine as they compress everything down, but there's a lot of potential for better video on ATSC 3, if users and broadcasters switch. Otoh, using a poorly supported, non-free audio codec makes things unusable for me.
- AdamJacobMuller 3y ago> 4K video, advanced advertising and immersive audio Yeah, I mean, 2/3rds of this sounds great. Obviously both can be done without the DRM parts (some discussion on codecs and patents is warranted though).
- mnd999 3y agoDoubt anyone is going to miss advanced advertising.
- dylan604 3y ago>(or Days of Our Lives I guess) has any streamer taken the challenge of making the "soaps" available from their beginning? i can imagine this would appeal to a Peggy Bundy type eating bonbons marathoning her soaps.
- mleo 3y agoNot sure the service could afford it. 250 episodes/year times 60 years is 15_000 episodes to license.
- dylan604 3y agopretty much all of the networks that produced soaps have their own streaming platform now.
- Uvix 3y agoMost soaps are missing their early episodes; keeping all of them wasn't standard practice until the late 70s.
- sbierwagen 3y ago4K for sports would be nice. I upgraded to a larger TV recently, and 18mbit 1080i MPEG-2 does not look great on it.
- supertrope 3y ago4K won’t happen for a very long time. Broadcasters get the majority of their revenue from retransmission fees from cable companies. Their OTA broadcasts are a secondary concern. Their business model rewards adding more sub channels and therefore more ad slots, not cancelling the subchannels to allow the main channel to occupy the entire 6 MHz. Many viewer don’t own a 4K TV and on the content end the cameras on the fields don’t support 4K yet.
- vel0city 3y agoEven the cheap TVs these days are 4K and have been like that for several years. Within a few years I imagine most households will own at least one 4K TV.
- kcb 3y agoOne thing I've noticed is that the low bitrate sports content looks way better on my old Plasma than a new Oled.
- jzl 3y agoTons of great videos on YouTube about ATSC 3.0 by “The Antenna Man”. Worth checking out if you want to get the real scoop on it.
- knaik94 3y agoI am glad, I won't miss this feature. This will also mean there is less adoption of the new stanard and so the old standard will be kept around for longer. ATSC 3 was guaranteed to fail the moment it intoduced DRM into the standard. This is the situation with HD Radio all over again. The DRM and patents effectively destroyed the value and purpose of having an open standard, for consumers. It's what gave spotify and google music room to kill radio and now online streaming will do the same to broadcast TV. Even with live events and sports, Amazon has started live streaming thursday night football on Twitch, you only need prime to watch. Youtube and Twitch are also creating a new way to consume the content, adding interactability. A charity recent soccer match that included major content creators had 1.3m average live viewers, 2.5m+ peak on Youtube. This was eventually going to happen, but these decisions accelerate it. The concept of being limited by tv "channels" has already started to feel foreign to me.
- zitterbewegung 3y agoTwo wrongs making a right here sort of weird. The local channels around me have started becoming available on online streaming services. Once that really occurs the lines between streaming / cable / terrestrial video are going to keep on blurring. Streaming services that have transformed streaming into more like a cable model don't seem to be sustainable though so it begs the question what will be the future.
- knaik94 3y agoSimilar to how most people have shifted to permanent shuffle for the song selection queue, online streaming caused the same shift in how people decide what to watch. Familiary with existing media is what keeps people tied to services, and at some point viewers will move on. The recommendation system around broadcast media seems immature and doesn't feel personal, the cable model makes it worse. People don't subscribe to every service every month, like they did for cable, people cycle through them. Keeping a viewer will always be cheaper than trying to regain a lost one. Youtube and Twitch has gained social signficiance and some content is on par with traditional media. Kids who only watch YT, Twitch, and TikTok do not feel left out socially. Memes and social media fill in any gaps. I've noticed that the younger generations are more surprised when a peer doesn't know the Mr Beast YT channel than when they don't know a specific TV channel/show. I think the future of live events and sports will look like Twitch, with a heavy emphasis on interactability. I think branding for shows/channels will get more focused on the characters/actors and creators. And larger categorization will be based on genre. Basically the same way it works with movies.
- bastard_op 3y agoYou really can't blame them when they have already lost to a patent troll already in the weird little world known as "West Texas" and their highly patent-unfriendly courts. Perhaps if technology corporations in this boat did more to dismantle the weird world of patent litigation around West Texas as a whole, the world and innovation everywhere would be better off for it.
- rstat1 3y agoI mean that's not really gonna do anything. They'll just find another favorable court and continue. The real solution is to make patent trolling impossible. Make it so if you own a patent you actually have to use it to make something. Not just use it to steal money from people who are actually making things.
- Quekid5 3y agoYeah, I think some form of "use it or lose it" will be necessary. Either that or just making patents have to 'pay for themselves' via exponentially increasing cost (or some such) to maintain after the initial period of protection (which must be MUCH shorter). That has it's own problems and complications, of course. I get the sense that many of these ideas of e.g. patents and copyright, etc. are based on good faith actors, while we're currently seeing extreme optimization towards 'just how close to the legal/illegal line can I get'.
- brookst 3y agoI don’t think that’s a good idea; it would hurt investment in promising startups. Today, “company failed, but produced valuable IP” is a fallback outcome for investors. Declaring that the IP of failed companies (and individuals who hope to but never bring a product to market) is public domain just makes the problem worse. Is a patent valid if I sell one single product? If that one sale comes after an infringing product? Years after? Patents are a mess and need reform, but IMO we are better served by reform that emphasizes truly novel inventions and not small improvements / variations that are essentially obvious.
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- dylan604 3y agoat some point, someone that is okay with whatever licensing terms will create an ATSC3.0 tuner box that will connect to your non-3.0 compatible screen.
- userbinator 3y agoThat's called China, and such things probably already exist if you know where to look.
- bsder 3y agoNobody really cares as everybody else is using DVB-T. Only the US and Canada bothered with the abomination that is ATSC.
- dylan604 3y agoyeah, that's a whole lot of nobody.
- simfree 3y agoFrance is using AC4 from Dolby for OTA audio transmission as part of their new standard...
- ksec 3y agoWell technically there are four standards, ASTC for North America and South Korea, ISDB for Japan and South America ( and part of Africa ), DTMB for China, small parts of SEA and DVB-T for the rest of the world.
- Osiris 3y agoMaybe this explains why my Hisense TV, which has an ATSC 3 tuner, stopped working with ATSC 3 channels after the last update.
- ksec 3y agoMay be they should put an Update Screen saying, a Patent Company "$Name" is charging us $7 for this feature.
- drmpeg 3y agoOn the technical side, the patent is for Non-Uniform Constellations or NUCs. It's a modification of the modulation constellation points to match the error coding. Traditional 64QAM: https://www.w6rz.net/64qamrect.png https://www.w6rz.net/64qamrect.png ATSC 3.0 64QAM for 9/15 code rate: https://www.w6rz.net/64qamnuc.png https://www.w6rz.net/64qamnuc.png You can explore this with my open source ATSC 3.0 transmitter. https://github.com/drmpeg/gr-atsc3 https://github.com/drmpeg/gr-atsc3 Demo clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmIGM0I3NE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmIGM0I3NE0
- hatsunearu 3y agoI was always surprised why QAM uses a rectangular I/Q coordinate rather than a radial one like how 8PSK does it. It would seem like a radial pattern maintains better ISI margin just from inspection.
- drmpeg 3y agoWith less error coding (13/15 code rate), the constellation is more rectangular. https://www.w6rz.net/64qamnuc1315.png https://www.w6rz.net/64qamnuc1315.png With really heavy error coding (2/15 code rate), the constellation becomes almost unrecognizable with points very close to each other. https://www.w6rz.net/64qamnuc215.png https://www.w6rz.net/64qamnuc215.png
- abnry 3y agoWow. There must be some interesting coupling between the coding and the constellation/modulation.
- anordal 3y agoPatents against standards: It's a failure of our society when it's near impossible to write a standard without stepping on someone's patent. When an open standard is patented, it is ruined.
- phh 3y agoBased on your comment, it seems you're assuming the people writing the standard don't intent to step on patents, but that's wrong. Patents on standards is largely how standards are financed, by company who will then recoup their research spent on that via those patents. I think that RAND patents and with the list of patents published alongside the standard are an acceptable compromise. In France for the equivalent on ATSC 3.0, we standardized on Dolby audio (AC4), which is NOT available as RAND at all (and is stupid for many other reasons). So well, we've put ourselves in a worst situation.
- toast0 3y agoIn my market, ATSC 3 broadcasters are also using AC4, so same deal here. Of course, AC3 in ATSC 1 was a licensing coup too.
- SenAnder 3y ago> Patents on standards is largely how standards are financed, by company who will then recoup their research spent on that via those patents. Thankfully those companies have a sense of fair play, and wouldn't dream of charging more than they spent on research, or of using patented standard to stifle competition for anyone not in their industry group.
- pentagrama 3y agoI didn't know that, eg the W3C patents the HTML standards that they create?
- anordal 3y agoWhether you seek royalties or not, you only want to step on your own patents (or the participating parties, who can agree on licensing), not a patent troll (non-participating entity) whose biggest motivation is to sit on the fence until a deep-pocket company comes along.
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- cosmotic 3y ago"NextGenTV"... what's the following generation called?