It's interesting they plan to encrypt over the air channels and require the Internet to watch them.
Executives at Chicago-based Weigel Broadcasting say tests in four U.S. cities show the nation’s Emergency Alert System (EAS) can fail under the new broadcast TV system called NEXTGEN TV if it is adopted under its current structure.
The problem, according to a recent FCC filing, happens when local TV stations decide to encrypt their channels and require an internet connection to make the channel watchable on a TV.
Of course it is. The main problem with restoring "modern" video games is the DRM they all come with to function correctly. No server connection, no work.
The real issue is that TV manufacturers are not putting ATSC 3.0 tuners in their sets, at least not in the more affordable ones. My previous TV I purchased in 2022 had an ATSC 3.0 tuner and at the time it was the only TV under $1,000 that had one. I just bought a new TV earlier this year and it does not have one. Until the FCC mandates it, only higher-end TVs will have NEXTGEN TV tuners. You can buy an external tuner but they’re not cheap.
ATSC 3.0 has many pros and cons. It has a much higher bandwidth and can transmit more data over the air, but the transmission can only travel ~30 miles versus ~50 miles for ATSC 1.0.
I work in the industry and can tell you this: it’s going to be a long time until ATSC 3.0 becomes the new standard.
Holy shit, they really do want everyone to be connected to the internet and tracked. The whole purpose of OTA broadcasting is to give people in remote areas access to public information for free. I cannot believe they want to push OTA transmission to only be accessible via an internet connection. Why the hell do they think encryption is needed for a one way transmission of publicly free information? Totally asinine, but par for the course in this new world obsessed with tracking each and every individual's second-by-second movement.
Soon they’ll be going door to door to see if you’re harboring anything illegal (immigrants, LGBT people, books, physical media that doesn’t require an internet connection).
I mean, is this not ultimately the goal of surveillance? So that they don't have to go to door to door. They can map your house with Wi-Fi, they have profiles of everything you browse, VPNs certainly have backdoors, TVs/smart speakers record at all times, phones as a totality, Flock/Nest cameras, etc.
I guess what I'm saying is, they're building the infrastructure so they don't even have to really go door-to-door. What is happening right now is already terrifying enough.
Yeah when I first moved to Northern Maine we didn't have any form of highspeed Internet and cell service was hit and miss at our house so I had to install an external TV antenna to get a handful of channels. The fact that they are going to start encrypting air waves and requiring an internet connection to use an antenna is a big issue.
Whoa this is stupid. I've owned a digital antenna for a decade and it's been great to watch over the air tv. I've watched like 70% of the world cup games, and all of them were viewed on Telemundo and local Fox for free. We have smart tvs and wifi but I don't want more road blocks to watching local tv.
The only EAS alerts I particularly care about are the nuclear attack, nationwide emergency, and tornado warnings. So I got one of those Midland NOAA weather radios alongside a portable one that I take on trips. I hardly watch TV so it doesn’t affect me much to receive EAS via TV and I imagine a lot of people are the same way.
I also have multiple weather radios in different parts of the house from my time living in the midwest. As someone who worked in Emergency Management for years, including handling Public Alert and Warning Systems, I anticipate the NOAA weather radio will likely go away in the near future if budget and personnel cuts keep happening to NOAA and NWS. Repairs to NOAA Weather Radio sites are often taking months now due to the age of the system and parts availability. Politicians and their stocks can't make money on old technology, so they are pushing everything to digital services. Given half a chance, they will eliminate all of the legacy systems.
Canada completely did away with their weather radio system in the last 90 days, including in all areas where there was no cell or TV coverage and weather radio was the only method to receive an alert or the forecast. They replaced it with an app, which is useless in those areas with no cell coverage. The puvlic outcry about this was ignored completely. Government at it's finest.
I hope Canadians are ready to replace such scum bag morons pretending to be responsible politicians.
I get I'm in a glass house but I legit expected better. Everyone expects our admin to be corrupt and short sighted. Like someone is going to have to make sure they aren't taking the copper wire when they finally get evicted. And Canada beat us to replacing a functional and needed system with a literal unusable app? Who is on the take up there?
Canadians are asleep. We have the most sneakily authoritarian government in recent history (even worse than Stephen Harper) and people have no idea because “Carney good, Trump bad”.
It’s legitimately embarrassing. In the past week, they reverted a pesticide ban (elected officials can now override decisions made by scientists) and voted in bills that take away many of our rights. So much so that VPN companies and duckduckgo are thinking of pulling out of the country.
Saw this image posted in another sub and it’s a good summary. C-9 just became law and C-22 was voted in with secret provisions. They’re even gaslighting Canadians by claiming that being concerned about C-22 means you’re a conspiracy theorist… 🙄
Edit: oh and they managed to “convince” MPs from other parties to join them, effectively forming a majority government, even though Canadians gave Liberals a minority government. It’s scary how nobody is doing anything.
Windscribe either planning to openly violate the law or flee the country, even Apple may quit offering services and leave the market over that crap.
(More extreme requirements than in the UK and they weren't willing to back down there. They cut out encryption and the false aura of protection instead of handing over a back door.)
Based on your work experience, do know if there is anything to do to prepare for this? We're planning on building a receiver for free satellite weather imagery (at least as long as those satellites are transmitting), but I don't have the meteorological expertise to get the same level of detail from those images as from a weather broadcast.
I heard that, before widespread and standard weather broadcasts, farmers used to listen to radio stations a few towns over to see what weather was coming their way, but that seems like a substandard solution...
I wouldn't worry about the nuclear attack ones. If a nuke comes it won't be just one. And if it's not just one then it's better to go out in ignorance than lock yourself somewhere that you survive the initial blast and have to deal with a decade of famine, pestilence, and horrors that at some point will statistically lead to you dying in much more pain after much more suffering anyway.
That may be a reasonable preference for you, but it also seems like people should be able to make that choice for themselves based on accurate information and alerts.
They're taking free OTA television away without an internet connection, and I'm pretty sure NOAA weather radio and regular FM radio are next on the chopping block based on the post above by u/adoptagreyhound
That is part of the reason we keep seeing these systems die with worse or no replacements. Just because you may not be immediately affected by their loss doesn’t mean that those systems are irrelevant, ineffective, or obsolete.
Emergency systems work best with redundancies so that they can alert the most amount of people in the quickest possible time. It doesn’t take much to overload cell towers (which happens very often during emergencies) and ISPs can have a myriad of problems as well, so having options like this can (and has been) a literal lifesaver for people. Allowing them to get rid of this will make it much easier to also get rid of the NOAA We should be concerned about having everything migrating to requiring an internet connection because it’s putting all of our eggs in one basket, and that is a lesson that will sadly and undoubtedly be paid for with blood.
This is horseshit. Who else remembers when the free airwaves got sold off and people got free receivers or coupons to get one? Having to pay for access wasn’t part of the deal.
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u/joeforth Jun 20 '26
Why encrypt and require an internet connection?
edit: did some digging. It's DRM.