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I looked into this recently when I moved houses and was without cable for a few weeks. I thought about purchasing an ATSC 3 box to try it out instead of just using an antenna with my TVs internal ATSC 1 decoder.

I will never adopt ATSC 3 because they have built targeted advertising and viewer tracking into the spec. See for example https://rampedup.us/atsc-3-0-marketing-opportunity/. It’s really too bad but to me this is the final nail in the coffin for ota programming in my opinion.

Well that is extremely disappointing.

Sinclair as a media company is also shady as fuck so I am not surprised they are the ones going in on this.

Maybe this will create a black market for ATSC 3 boxes that have been hacked to remove / block all tracking features - sounds like a fun project for someone here :-D

ATSC 3 supports an application model based on a single page application that gets notified of events coming down the radio channel by websockets

https://muygs2x2vhb2pjk6g160f1s8-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...

there is a radio back channel

https://muygs2x2vhb2pjk6g160f1s8-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...

but the TV is expected to have a real internet connection as well as the radio link. Such a system is capable of anything a web application is, including tracking.

It would be interesting to see if targeting meant that I occasionally get to see an ad for something I could buy with my own money as opposed to the injection of the month (used to be pill of the month but now it seems to be all biologicals) or something seniors can get for free with medicare.

So just do not hook the tuner up to the internet then? Interesting. Unless of course they do something shady like throw a 4G chip inside the box

If your TV set can't talk to the internet, you can't be tracked. All you lose is the silly 'interactive' features that no one uses.

Yup, ATSC 3 is really unfortunately problematic in the amount of garbage that's been put into it. The fact it requires an internet connection is atrocious.

Hell, the fact that ATSC supports PAID OTA transmissions is likewise garbage. It'll just encourage a race to the bottom with OTA bandwidth that will (likely) end up killing it off all together. Who is going to pay for 4 channels from a broadcaster vs streaming? Yet there will be enough incentive that you can almost bet the market for free OTA broadcasts will go away.

I like that OTA is still even a thing but I cannot help but think that this is going to fail - who the hell is even using OTA let alone tech saavy enough to be UPGRADING their boxes for 4k?

I'm still using one of the last Plasma TV's ever made (bought it used for cheap) which does have a built in tuner but is obviously 1080P only. At my last apartment I was line of site and only a few miles from where everything is transmitted from so I had great reception. Now it is the opposite and I would need to run a cable up the side of my apartment building to get an antenna working.

Is ATSC 3 really not backwards compatible? It seems like it would be crazy to upgrade to a system that then will not work on all older TV's considering that most new TV's sold these days do not have a tuner built in at all!

> who the hell is even using OTA

It's pretty common with cord cutters.

OTA is underrated IMO. I really only watch the local PBS affiliate, Chromecast takes care of everything else. And best of all, I can watch it on my PC with my Hauppauge tuner (though it doesn't do ATSC 3, I don't have any 3 stations in my area).

> Is ATSC 3 really not backwards compatible?

It would be pretty difficult to make it backwards compatible. Same as the NTSC to ATSC(1) transition, same radio channels, same channel width, different radio encoding, different properties.

ATSC1 is a mpeg transport stream, and you could stuff something more efficient than mpeg2 in there, but apparently that will crash some receivers, and anyway they wouldn't be able to decode it, so might as well switch to a new radio encoding as well as a new video (and audio, joy) encoding to both get more bits on the same channel and more video quality per bit. The transition may be a little easier this time though: you can multiplex multiple logical channels on a single radio channel on both systems, so, if broadcasters cooperate, they can (and do, in many markets) setup shared channels for old and new, so one radio channel moves to ATSC3 and broadcasts multiple logical channels for the different broadcasters, and that channel's programs will also be broadcast on another broadcaster's ATSC1 channel. (There's not many spare channels for dual broadcasting like in NTSC -> ATSC, a lot of channels have been taken for cell phones)

I'm guessing there won't be free decoder boxes this time though.

> You either need to get a new TV set or an ATSC 3 decoder to watch tune it in. [...] until they start turning off ATSC 1 transmitters

How did things get this bad? In the 90s and early 00s, you could watch virtually any OTA television channel with a television made half a lifetime earlier in the 1950s. New technology like color television was introduced, but remained compatible with old TVs.

In the 50s through 90s virtually nobody gave a damn about e-waste. Today everybody plays lip service to the idea, yet we're obsoleting recently purchased technology faster than ever before, and for what? So you can see individual pores on some ball-kicker's nose?

There was a try at an ATSC 2 that kept the same transport but added interactive features. They gave up on it and went to ATSC 3.

The greatest tragegy in modern television is cable boxes. To this day a cable box takes 80W to do what a phone does in 0.8W and you are always waiting for it to do it.

There was this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CableCARD

but a standardized digital signal early on would have gone a long way. As it was cable companies struggled mightily with proprietary systems until Comcast developed a decent system circa 2015.

Stations wanting to do ATSC 3.0 broadcast are required to broadcast the same content (within bounds of the technology) as ATSC 1.0 in that market. There's no required sunset for ATSC 1.0 broadcast like there was for NTSC.

ATSC 3.0 isn't backwards compatible because it's signaling is different than ATSC 1.0. It ends up being more efficient getting a higher data rate in the 6MHz channel. The video codec is also more efficient (h.265 vs h.262) allowing more program streams per RF channel.

It will be quite a while before ATSC 1.0 is mandated to roll over to an updated ATSC standard. Even then there's no reason you can't just buy a tuner for the new standard instead of a new TV.

In old days, there are no competitions vs TV. Now TV is attacked by streaming services.

I wish they had made audio more robust in ATSC, even if it would mean making video less robust. For probably most programs a video dropout without an audio dropout is much less disruptive than an audio dropout without a video dropout.

Isn't the vast majority of 4k content delivered online anyway?

Probably. You can get 4k Blu Rays but I don't know how big that market is compared to streaming.

What antenna do you recommend?

Depends on your case. You should look up your location here:

https://tvfool.com/

If you have many stations close by (you live in L.A.) a set of rabbit ears can tune in almost as many channels as cable. If you live 40 miles away from the transmitter you want an outdoor directional antenna. The further away you are from the transmitter and the weaker the transmitter, the bigger an antenna you need.

There are two cities about 150 degrees apart that have transmitters near me, I am thinking of putting up a second antenna that points at the secondary city, maybe that way I'll be able to get ABC reliably.