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!
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!