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ATSC 3.0: DRM and Encryption

A bit more than a year ago I headed over to a former client’s headquarters to discuss a potential ATSC 3.0 project. The moment I stepped into the office I was swarmed by a group of engineers and managers with one primary question : are 3.0 broadcasts really going to be encrypted, and if so what DRM is going to be employed?

There’s been a lot of chatter about encryption of ATSC 3.0 broadcasts and what it means for free over-the-air TV. A lot of that discussion conflates encryption, content protection, and content rights management. This post will hopefully help in untangling things a bit while providing some context, and also some discussion around the unintended consequences that encryption may have on innovation in the consumer electronics space. Continue reading “ATSC 3.0: DRM and Encryption”

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On the Road to ATSC 3.0

Yes, we’re still alive!

Since CES we’ve been on the road to ATSC 3.0, heading out to Phoenix to sample the Pearl model market, Las Vegas for NAB, and made several diversions to Santa Barbara to work with NPG’s broadcast.

Depending on who you ask, ATSC 3.0 will be the greatest revolution in television since digital television (i.e. ATSC 1.0), or – being incompatible with the current ATSC 1.0 broadcast standard and embracing web and streaming technologies perhaps a little too much – its  greatest boondoggle.

ATSC 3.0 has a great many features for broadcasters, such as the opportunity for targeted advertising and content protection.  But what does it have for the average consumer? Continue reading “On the Road to ATSC 3.0”

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ATSC 3.0: CES 2019 & The Catching Waves Trip

Another CES has come and gone with its usual fill of dazzling tech, good dining, and blistered feet. And while I’m sure there was a 500″ 5G-connected 16k smart OLED TV with AI-imbued visual enhancements and a deep learning content recommendation engine, ATSC 3.0 was notably absent from the show floor. This isn’t too much of a surprise as the standard was completed just a year ago and it takes a bit of time for products to arrive and broadcasters (and their vendors) to gear up. While no products were on the show floor there was still plenty of activity going on in the background. As in previous years, Sinclair had its ATSC 3.0 test broadcast running from Black Mountain. CES 2020 will no doubt be an exciting show for 3.0.

In the meantime, the annual pilgrimage to M&M’s World trip to CES in Las Vegas provided an excuse to peruse the ATSC 3.0 airwaves and capture some bitstreams. I’d been working with 3.0 from a specification standpoint for much of 2018 with an eye to retrofitting Project Entangle. And with an Airwavz TV RedZone Receiver in hand it was time to start tearing into real broadcasts.

Continue reading “ATSC 3.0: CES 2019 & The Catching Waves Trip”

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Revisiting SSDs in DVRs

Previous posts at in-koherence have been rather skeptical of using SSDs as recording storage in DVRs. SSDs have a lifespan that is largely dictated by the amount of data written to them. This may not be much of a problem if you record one or two shows a day. However many users set up recordings for series which they might watch (but for some reason never find the time to…or maybe they decided it wasn’t such a great series after all, but who has time to cancel the subscription to the series?) This is amplified if multiple members of the household set up recordings on the DVR. The next thing you know it your four-tuner DVR is recording 20 hours of shows a day. For all its faults, the good old mechanical hard drive is superior in having a write limit that’s so high that it’s generally not considered.

But with rapidly falling prices, larger capacities (with correspondingly higher endurance ratings), and the increasing difficulty of finding non-SMR 2.5″ hard drives, the time has come to give SSDs a harder look. So we took a mid-grade SSD and ran the first SSD-based Project Entangle through its paces.

Continue reading “Revisiting SSDs in DVRs”

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Behind the scenes at SFBayATSC

I was recently reminded that summer’s come and gone with nary a peep out of in-koherence. So just what’s been going on? Well in addition to various feature enhancements to Project Entangle, the in-koherent project SFBayATSC was rolled out in May.

SFBayATSC is actually a follow-on to a similar OTA ATSC monitoring site which was run by AVSForum member toast0. Earlier in the year toast0 gave notice that he’d be moving and that his monitoring system would be shutting down in May. The signal reception data he collected was quite useful to both viewers and broadcasters in the Bay Area, so that got us thinking…just maybe Project Entangle could fill the gap. So the signal analysis, already a part of Entangle, was beefed up, a cloud infrastructure was built, and SFBayATSC was born.

Continue reading “Behind the scenes at SFBayATSC”