Since canceling Fios TV and the Verizon DVR I had downstairs, I cling tenaciously to broadcast TV and the TiVo DVR on the porch. Anyone who has used a $30 Roku or Fire TV stick on a good broadband Internet service knows why cable television is doomed. The end of free broadcast TV may come sooner than that.
The first wave of cord-cutters thought of antenna TV as complementing Internet streaming. ATSC 3.0, aka NextGen TV, was supposed to ensure local network affiliates and independent stations would carry on as the primary outlets for news and sports programming.
An important technical feature of ATSC 3.0 is improved signal quality, thanks to OFDM modulation. 8VSB modulation in ATSC 1.0 is susceptible to reception interference, especially on the UHF band, which is favored over VHF frequencies for digital broadcasting.
NextGen TV offers more than improved signal quality. Broadcasters see it as a way to be exactly like streaming stations, except carried over the medium of the free public airwaves. Channels can be encrypted and, therefore, no longer be free.
The transition from ATSC 1.0 to 3.0 has been bungled by the FCC to such an extent, I won’t be surprised if some stations resort to turning off their transmitters to become broadband streaming services. That would open up over-the-air frequencies for the cellular networks to exploit. Lon offers more details about this than you probably want to know.
When will ATSC 1.0 broadcasting end? It’s a question that takes me to the actual point of this post. TiVo is out of the DVR hardware business.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/times-up-for-a-timeshifting-trailblazer-tivo-discontinues-its-standalone
I’d been hoping TiVo was waiting for the ATSC 3.0 confusion to be cleared up before announcing a new OTA DVR. Now I’m wondering if my TiVo OTA Roamio will stop getting programming guide updates before the hardware dies, or before the end of ATSC 1.0.
Also such a shame that multicasting never really caught on for mainstream live video streaming.