Users Reporting ATSC 3.0 Channels Are No Longer Working on NextGen TV Boxes
#ATSC30
Nexstar & Sinclair Ask The FCC to Shut Down Free OTA TV ABC, CBS, FOX, & NBC Unless People Upgrade Their TVs to ATSC 3.0
Pearl TV is Introducing an Affordable NextGen TV Converter Box This Month
The FCC Approves Letting ABC, CBS, FOX, & NBC Station Owners Shut Down ATSC 1.0 OTA TV & Fully Switch to ATSC 3.0
ATSC 3.0 NEXTGEN TV Enhances Fall Sports Viewing with New Advanced Broadcast Technology
MeTV & MeTV Toons Voices Concerns Over OTA ATSC 3.0 Transition in FCC Meeting
Cable TV Companies Opposes Mandatory OTA ATSC 3.0 Transition, Citing High Costs and Low Consumer Demand
Due to the non-magic of my filing two longer pieces earlier and then having two stories break hours apart in the same morning, Wednesday saw more than 3,200 words appear under my byline at two different sites.
Patreon readers got one extra post this week, my recap of what I learned at VidCon from YouTubers, streamers and other content creators without boldface names about making a living and making their way through that industry.
6/26/2024: 1Password CEO on why good online security doesn’t have to be complicated, Fast Company
Jeff Shiner has somehow become the tech CEO I interview at least once a year–for PCMag in 2022, onstage at Web Summit Rio in 2023, and now for Fast Company after a conversation we had at Collision in Toronto.
6/26/2024: Your TV Probably Has a ‘NextGen’ Perk You’ve Never Heard Of, PCMag
The conference at which I did most of this reporting happened two weeks ago, but then being out of town the week after got in the way of my writing it even as I realized I needed a few more details to fill out the story.
6/26/2024: Cheap Netflix? Verizon Adds Streaming Bundles to Home Broadband Plans, PCMag
I had figured that somebody on staff would cover this news, but instead one of my editors asked if I could field it. With some work on our house to be paid off, I quickly said yes, then I realized I could bring another angle to the story by covering a recent stealth rate hike on Fios plans such as my own.
6/26/2024: Supreme Court: The Feds Can Tell Social Media Platforms to Enforce Their Rules, PCMag
The piece that I wrote for The New Republic last summer, in which multiple First Amendment issues critiqued the profound unseriousness of the ruling that kicked off this case, held up very well.
6/28/2024: Could 5G carriers ink a spectrum deal with TV broadcasters?, Light Reading
The other piece that I wrote from the NextGen conference took almost as long to write, with my last interview for it happening the day I got home from Toronto and the last e-mailed response coming Monday..
6/29/2024: Twitter Influencers: The Money Is Terrible, But We’re Not Going Anywhere, PCMag
Looking over the VidCon schedule in advance, this panel seemed the most likely one to yield a story. It did not disappoint, even I was a little disappointed to see that none of the panelists showed any interest in exploring alternatives to Twitter (none of them called it “X” onstage) for their short-form social output.
6/29/2024: White House Social Team Is Fighting the Algorithms Just Like the Rest of Us, PCMag
The journalist who sat next to me at a press breakfast Panasonic hosted Wednesday suggested I check out this panel, and she was not wrong.
#1Password #Anaheim #ATSC30 #BidenSocialMedia #Collision #contentModeration #incentiveAuction #JeffShiner #MurthyVMissouri #NetflixDeal #NextGenTV #SCOTUS #SupremeCourt #TwitterInfluencers #VerizonMyHome #VidCon #WhiteHouse
NBCUniversal Launches Personalized NextGen TV Broadcasts On Four NBC And Telemundo Stations
#News #ATSC30 #NBCUniversal #NBCUniversalLocal #NextGenerationTV #Telemundo
Spent the morning trying to figure out how to get access to the #superbowl on my TV now that #cbs has transitioned to #atsc30 with #drm, which doesn't work with my #plex #otatv setup. Ended up subscribing to a free #youtubetv trial, but I'll have to work out something else long term ($72.99/month is way too much for how little TV we watch)
I filed my last copy for this week at 10 p.m. Friday, and then it was a delight to have Saturday be my first legit work-free day since… um, Jan. 1.
1/16/2024: Don’t Engage: ‘Pig Butchering’ Scams Start With a Text, End in Financial Ruin, PCMag
One reason I couldn’t unplug from work last Sunday: I had to watch my friend Sean Gallagher’s very good walkthrough of pig-butchering scams at the ShmooCon information-security conference in D.C. I did, however, opt to watch the livestream of his talk that morning instead of heading over to the Washington Hilton for the third day in a row.
1/17/2024: NextGen TV Airwave Upgrade Flies Under the Radar at CES, PCMag
This CES recap ran several days after the show ended because I needed to verify some Consumer Technology Association forecasts of sales of NextGen-equipped TV sets. And because I needed some uninterrupted time to finish writing the thing.
1/19/2024: Biden Admin OKs $150 Million in Grants to Fix Broken Public EV Chargers, PCMag
I spent Thursday afternoon at the Washington Auto Show’s public-policy day and came away with this update on the Biden administration’s latest efforts to ease electric-car adoption, in which I also noted how the White House’s plan to underwrite a nationwide network of fast chargers on highways has yet to yield much usable hardware. I ended the post by calling out ignorant remarks by two Republican congressmen on a panel that afternoon in which they characterized EVs as some sort of big-government plot.
1/19/2024: Ep 96 SmartTechCheck Podcast CES 2024 Recap, Mark Vena
I joined my industry-analyst friend’s podcast to compare notes about CES with Mark and my fellow tech scribe Stewart Wolpin–who drew on his deep knowledge of the business with a recap of the slow and halting adoption of color TV when our host asked about bumps in the road to EV adoption.
#ATSC30 #batteryElectricVehicle #broadcastTV #ces #consumerElectronicsShow #electricCarCharging #EVCharging #MarkVena #NextGenTV #overTheAirTV #pigButchering #Shmoocon #WashingtonAutoShow
By the way, @lonseidman, who is using this exact “Save free TV” slogan in the modern day for an #ATSC30 campaign, makes a cameo in this.
https://tedium.co/2023/11/03/california-save-free-tv-ballot-initiative-history/
I have to say that #ATSC30 is amazingly complicated for a service to deliver video.
They also didn't learn from ATSC 1.0 that the additional features (like web page delivery) was completely ignored by most all devices.
Interestingly, both aac and ac3 in mp4 appear to sync audio on the PS5, though didn't look that closely.
Annoyingly, you have to put the video files in a directory for the PS5 to detect them. It ignores them in the root.
Also, HEVC appears to play fine on the PS5 (unsurprisingly), so looks like if 4k ever does come to broadcast in the bay area, I will be able to watch it.
Still need to test the PS3 (and PS4).
It's a little disturbing to think that w/ an IPTV box, I could mirror the IP stream onto my network and the IPTV box would be able to receive/decode them. Though just realized that AC-4 might be an issue.
The cool part is that currently, 4 major broadcasters are on a single RF channel, so a single tuner would get most of the local channels.
Visited their forums and I found this:
https://forum.silicondust.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=74254
So, they do support exporting the raw frames:
j288: ALP frames carried by TS frames using J288 encoding (full mux).
alp-pcap: Pcap packet capture of ALP frames (full mux).
ipv4-pcap: Pcap packet capture of IPv4 frames (full mux).
dash-tar: TAR archive containing DASH segments (selected virtual channel).
The TL;DR:
better (all of a minute watching) video quality (4Mbps atsc3 vs 7Mbps atsc1), but same resolution as base channel, better snq (but different rf channel, 7), audio is AC-4 which none of the OSS tools currently support (neither ffmpeg nor VLC) out of the box, though there are patches for ffmpeg.
Oh, I did forget to say that all the resolutions match their original station. That is KGO is still 720p. No 4k video yet.
Also, they don't list a bps on the channel, so can't figure out how much is used by the channels:
ch=atsc3:177000000:0 lock=atsc3 ss=97 snq=96 seq=100 bps=0 pps=452
The snq is SIGNIFICANTLY better than ATSC1 channels (though different analog channel, and ATSC3 is on analog 7 which is a good channel).
Stream #0:3[0x39](eng): Data: bin_data (STPP / 0x50505453)
Unsupported codec with id 98314 for input stream 1
Unsupported codec with id 98314 for input stream 2
Unsupported codec with id 98314 for input stream 3
So, looks like audio is the AC-4 streams and the STPP is the subtitles.
And that AC-4 is still a work in progress in ffmpeg:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/8349
Guess I'll have to take a look at compiling the AC-4 version of ffmpeg.
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