FCC Asking Broadcasters About ATSC 3.0 DRM

Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle told us DRM is necessary to keep valuable content such as live sports safe and protect against piracy. Broadcasting should always have had such protection but just didn’t previously have the capacity, she said. “It’s no different than when you’re streaming something.”

Broadcasters seeking to use DRM “keep forgetting they have a broadcast license to serve the public interest,” said YouTube content creator Tyler “The Antenna Man” Kleinle, who has led online campaigns against 3.0 encryption. “If they want DRM to keep this valuable content, nothing is stopping them from starting a streaming service,” he told us.

FCC Media Bureau staff asked Pearl and Tolka Vice President of Business Development Alex Day about DRM and ATSC 3.0 device certification at an ex parte meeting Tuesday, Day said in an interview. A blizzard of recent ex parte traffic from NAB (see 2507250043), Pearl (see 2508260051), broadcasters such as Sinclair (see 2508210048) and DRM opponents like Klienle (see 2508180062) appears to indicate that the issue of DRM has become important in the agency’s consideration of NAB’s 3.0 transition proposal. “I think they are being very thoughtful, as they would with any transition, and trying to understand,” Schelle said. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr issued a release signaling support for 3.0 last week (see 2509020074).

In the meeting with FCC officials, Pearl said setting a certain date for the 3.0 transition would jump-start manufacturing of ATSC 3.0 devices and thus address concerns about competition among 3.0 device manufacturers. Day told us that has already proven true in Brazil, which has widely adopted ATSC 3.0 technology.

Consumers and TV gateway device maker SiliconDust have said that the ATSC 3.0 Security Authority (A3SA) certification process required because of DRM encryption is being used to block some manufacturers from making 3.0 devices and greatly increasing the costs to independent manufacturers (see 2507180047. The A3SA includes Pearl, the top four networks and Univision.

Day said the cost increases from the A3SA are minimal as long as a device maker is making enough units. “If you’re selling like 100,000 [devices], it’s like pennies. It’s all about scale, whether that cost is excessive.” Kleinle, who sells a digital converter box for 1.0 TVs, said A3SA certification is cost-prohibitive for his relatively small operation to produce a 3.0 product. “My unit will not be feasible to make because the cost of certification that I was given from the manufacturer, just to start, is more than the inventory I bought of 3,000 units,” he said. “It's literally more than the manufacturing costs.”

SiliconDust President Nick Kelsey said A3SA DRM doesn’t allow gateway devices like his to work on Microsoft, Apple, Roku or LG products. “Why is it that television networks now get to say what features a receiver is allowed to have?” he asked in an email. “In a healthy market, if a television network went to a receiver vendor and asked them to make their product worse by removing features the vendor would respond with a polite (or impolite) no,” Kelsey argued. “DRM is the technical mechanism by which receiver vendors cannot say no.”

Pearl has said that A3SA is working toward certifying gateway devices and that SiliconDust’s device, the HDHomeRun, has had trouble getting certified because it uses chips manufactured by a Huawei subsidiary.

“Startups, open-source projects, and academic developers lack the resources to navigate the A3SA certification process, and many will simply be locked out of the ATSC 3.0 ecosystem,” Public Knowledge said last week in a joint filing with the Consumer Technology Association. “The A3SA certification model operates without meaningful external oversight, with licensing terms that are confidential and decision-making processes that are opaque.”

Technology similar to DRM is used for authentication online every day, Schelle noted. “With any premium content, especially live sports, every contract requires security,” Day said. Without encryption, broadcast signals could be pirated, depriving broadcasters of ad and retransmission consent revenue, he added. Broadcasters have been involved in lengthy court battles with entities such as Aereo and Locast, which used the internet to transmit broadcaster content. Without DRM, “their business just kind of goes away,” Day said.