ATSC 3.0 Update: Broadcasters Submit More Nonsense to the FCC..

Hey everybody, it's Lon Cybin. Broadcasters have been trying to encrypt the public airwaves for a couple of years now. We have been fighting it for a couple of years and right now the decision on whether to allow encryption or not is in the FCC's hands. They are currently considering what to do about this. And I've got an update for you. Not a big one, but still something to keep an eye on because like before, the broadcast industry is pushing out more nonsense about why they need to encrypt the public airwaves. and they've found a new reference document that they say makes the case, but once again it doesn't. Let's get to it.

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channel. So, the latest salvo from the broadcasters comes via this exparte letter from the broadcasters attorneys to the FCC on this docket that we've been following regarding the transition to the new ATSC3 television standard that includes the encryption. And in that letter, the broadcasters refer to the 2025 review of notorious markets for counterfeiting and piracy report. This comes from the US Trade Representative. I guess this is like an annual report that they issue and this year's theme of the report involves live sports and how broadcasters around the world are losing billions of dollars due to piracy. And I found that report which we'll dig through here in a second. Now

broadcasters are latching on to a new report here because their attempts so far have not been able to prove that anyone is actually pirating overthe-air television signals. In their big final argument that they sent to the FCC, they pointed the commissioners at an article in the rap. com to make their entire case and the article ended up being about streaming sites and not about broadcast. And so they are now looking to this live sports report because the FCC has taken an interest in live sports. There's a whole comment period now that you might want to participate in uh that talks about live sports broadcasting, its impact on consumers, and of course the escalating costs and complexities involved in trying to follow your favorite team. And the FCC is also curious if local broadcasters are still meeting their local obligations to bring sports content, at least for local teams, to their markets. And uh we'll talk more about that in a future video.

So, why don't we dive into this report and see if there's any evidence that we need to encrypt overthe-air television. The first thing that you'll see in the introduction doesn't help their argument at all. It refers to the big NFL deal that we talked about a few weeks ago that is running through 2033. And the networks involved include CBS, Fox, and NBC. And the NFL signed that deal without any assurance that their signals were going to be encrypted at any point in the future. And that has a lot to say about whether or not piracy is a problem for free overthe-air broadcast. Clearly, the NFL doesn't think so. And that was something we pointed out in our uh response to the FCC as we were closing out our arguments. And they only provide three examples of piracy in this entire report. Uh one involves the FIFA World Cup. They said there were 613,700 people illegally watching the Brazil match against Switzerland. Although a lot of those broadcasts were likely from direct satellite from Europe, which is encrypted by the way. And then they go on to offer some additional examples again involving European football leagues. Nothing about American sports here. And the final thing is an American sporting event which was the 2017 fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor which had 239 illegal streams totaling 3 million illicit views during the event. But that fight was not broadcast over unencrypted signals. It was an encrypted pay-per-view event. Now

the evidence that the government is citing in their report comes from media sources. One article here from the Sports Business Journal cites some data that came from a European company named Erdito. And that company helps satellite and streaming providers over there encrypt and protect their signals. So, I dug through the Erdito site looking for any examples of over-the-air unencrypted broadcasts being stolen because that was the basis for the government's argument here. And guess what? There's not a single mention of overthe-air unencrypted signals getting stolen. But there's a lot of ways that uh they are stealing encrypted signals. Uh they have an article here about session tokens getting stolen. So, you don't even need somebody's password. You can just grab a session token uh by snooping around on an internal network and you can get yourself a full stream here without a username or password. But if you got a few bucks as a pirate, you can go out to the dark web and buy yourself a username and password collection and just steal your encrypted signals that way for your illicit IP TV service. They also talk about a new thing here called CDN leeching, which they say is the next generation of online video piracy. You can see how sophisticated things are getting. And for the pirates, it's easier to do this stuff than it is to put an antenna up and grab the signals that way because it's a lot more difficult. You got to have people living in the places that uh you're stealing signals from. And if your location gets burned, then you got to find somebody else to put up an antenna. It's a lot easier to leech a CDN or steal a password or a session cookie than it is to do anything else. But I was curious what CDN leeching is all about. I never heard of it before. So they have a whole white paper on it. And apparently it's uh reverse engineering video applications. Many times web browsers looking at how the browser is decrypting the content and where that content is coming from and then coding up something to make the CDN that they're connected to think it's a web browser. and then they can just grab the entire stream and rebroadcast it out. And apparently pirates are also exploiting the CDNs themselves to distribute the pirated video content as well. So there is a lot of sophistication here and none of it involves grabbing that signal from the antenna to begin with. Now the data

people here also talk about DRM and making it convenient for people because you don't want to encourage piracy and they talk about here about how effective a multi DRM system is to have a frictionless viewing experience and they specifically talk about supporting fair play ready and widevine simultaneously and this is something the broadcasters are not doing with overtheair encryption right now the standard only supports widevine which is a Google technology and that means the only devices that can decode overthe-air encrypted TV right now are Google Android devices and we've seen the very poor level of quality of devices that have been put out to support that decryption. So right now the Apple TV doesn't work, Windows and Mac computers don't work, Xboxes don't work, uh the Roku doesn't work either. And the uh folks here from Erda who have some experience trying to help people protect signals and make them accessible says you've got to make it convenient for everybody. And clearly that is not happening. They do talk a lot about forensic watermarking and content detection because even they who are experts in DRM recognize that DRM doesn't do much to stop people who really want to pirate a signal. And therefore they recommend watermarking your content so you can figure out where the source of that content came from. And then when they do their takedowns, they can try to figure out who's stealing it and where they got it from. So there's a pretty good recognition in this report that DRM is not the end all beall for protecting content. And again

we get to the end of another report and we say, where's the proof? Who is actually stealing overthe-air unencrypted television? I have yet to see a single case where someone was stealing overthe-air television and rebroadcasting it out versus going to a cable provider or a CDN uh hijack or even just grabbing somebody's account credentials and rereaming what their services are able to provide for them. There's just no evidence that people are using over-the-air signals for piracy. And it's likely because the complexity of stealing an over-the-air signal is such that it doesn't make sense to do it from a pirates's perspective and it really isn't necessary. So why are they pushing this encryption? Well, we've talked about this quite a bit. They're trying to protect their broadcast retransmission fees. Right now in my home state of Connecticut, cable subscribers pay about $4830 a month just to get their local channels on their cable system. And as people keep cutting the cord, they just keep raising the price. It just doesn't make sense from an economic standpoint. And this is why they want to protect this stuff. They want to make it as inconvenient as possible for you to tune over the air television. They don't want you using the devices that you already own. They want to make you buy something new and inconvenient so that you just stick to those subscription fees that you're paying versus trying to do something yourself and save some money.

And now I've got a few news items that popped up. And once again, we're seeing a lot of arrogance from the industry here. The first quote comes from this TV tech article that I saw the other day previewing the upcoming NAB show. We'll likely see some news related to encryption devices at that show, unfortunately. And in here there's a gray television executive who says his name is Robert Follard uh that they've done now some focus groups on this lowcost tuner box that they're working on and some have told him they would pay that price. That's a bargain. And therefore they feel they've addressed the DRM concerns completely. They have not been addressed. I still can't tune into my encrypted channels the way I've been tuning into them for the last 20some years. And I don't think forcing people to buy another device for $60, that's what they're asking for here, is any kind of solution, especially when what they have right now works just fine. So until I'm able to watch TV the way I want to with the devices that I want to watch on, uh, this is not a solved problem by any stretch. But this is what they're saying. going to tell the FCC. Problem solved. We're all set to go. Meanwhile, $60 is a lot to pay for a TV tuner when the current TV tuners can be had for less than $25, as you can uh see in some of my prior videos. The other quote comes from NAB's Allison Martin, who once again pushes out this nonsense about the encrypted encoding rules that the A3SA put out. And direct quote here, A3SA put out encoding rules that explicitly allow for time shifting and that sort of thing. She said there is no intention to limit what people can do as far as play, time shifting, things of that nature. However, once again, we have to point out that these encoding rules only apply to content that is currently simoccast with ATSC 1. 0. That is the big asterisk on these rules because after the Simocast requirement is gone, broadcasters will be able to decide what you can and can't record. And even now with these supposed rules, they're the ones making them, not the FCC or any other kind of regulatory authority. And this is why a private entity like this should not be allowed to have this much control over the public airwaves. Now, there will be, of course, the NAB show coming up in midappril. There'll be a lot to report from there. I am not going, but I will keep an eye on things and will uh report back with any big news that comes out of the show. I will expect to see that lowerc cost TV tuning box that they're talking about. However, that box is not going to support DVR capabilities. It certainly won't work as a gateway. It is strictly going to be a tuner and that is how they're trying to get the price down on these things. But the cost of meeting all the encryption requirements, all the certifications, the private ones that you have to make. It's just impossible to make something inexpensive the way they've engineered all this stuff. And unfortunately, we're not going to see much movement in consumer adoption as a

result. And finally, if you wanted to respond to that sports docket and raise your concerns about encryption, I would suggest you definitely do that. Uh the comment period ends in about a week or so, so try to get those in as soon as you can. If you go to law. tv/fcc, it'll bring you to the express filing form. It's a web form. You can fill it out in one shot and get it done. The standard filing option allows you to submit documentation. If you go in on the proceeding side, this time you have to type in 26-45 like you see on screen right here to select the sports broadcasting practices and marketplace developments docket because this is a different docket than the ATSC3 encryption docket. But I do think they need to hear on that docket about the implications of encryption and what that can mean for watching local sports if broadcasters are allowed to lock down their signals. We'll have a little bit more on that as the week progresses here, but I wanted to bring that to your attention right now. So, definitely do that filing. And that will do it for this news update. I expect we'll have some more to talk about when we get to the NAB show period, which is again about a month from now. So, there is plenty more to come and I'm sure we'll start seeing some inklings as to where the FCC will be going with all of this as we get closer to the summer. That will do it for this one. Until next time, this is Lan Cybin. Thanks for watching.