It’s far from the most elegant thing I’ve ever written, but I think it gets my main points across reasonably well.  The due date for public comment is coming up on May 7!  If you want to leave a public comment:

While I sympathize with content providers’ desire to mitigate copyright infringement, I strongly disagree with their behavior thusfar when it comes to DRM-encrypted ATSC 3.0 broadcasts. The A3SA and NAB appear to be taking advantage of this crossroads in technology to reverse the status quo which has been in place since the advent of the VCR and the decision in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984), and in the process they’re reducing the utility of broadcast television as a public service over the public airwaves.

As it stands today, despite many channels in the San Francisco Bay Area broadcasting from the ATSC 3.0 “lighthouse” on ATSC channel 7, I cannot tune most of these channels at all– DRM has been taken to its logical conclusion and the content cannot be received, despite my receiver being ATSC 3.0 capable. The reason? I, like countless other consumers, use a home-networked tuner, and the A3SA has failed to work with manufacturers of network tuners to ensure that they can receive their DRM-protected content.

So not only can I not record broadcasts for time-shifted viewing, like I’ve been able to do since the 1980’s, I can’t even watch them live via the more-reliable ATSC 3.0 signal.

The courts have already ruled that time shifting for one’s personal viewing qualifies as “fair use” and now the NAB & A3SA are trying to use new technologies to eliminate fair use for their own benefit with no regard for the viewing public, who own the airwaves.

Many claims have been made about the necessity of DRM-protecting these signals, and yet, the recording of live television, both on analog and digital media, has been a common practice for more than 40 years. What’s changed is an opportunity arising for content providers to wrestle back control from the viewing public. But in placing so many restrictions on protected content, they’ve rendered their own broadcasts unviewable by a large percentage of the public.

I have additional concerns about their plans to disseminate encryption keys over the Internet. There are many reasonable privacy concerns for why consumers may not wish to have their televisions or tuners connected to the Internet 24×7 or even temporarily to retrieve an encryption key (which reveals the intent of the requester to watch a particular stream); moreover, in the face of an Internet outage, this could render it impossible for consumers to watch television at all. In an emergency situation, where broadcast television might be the only way for the public to be informed, for example in the face of a natural disaster, terrorist attack, or regional power disruption, losing the ability to decrypt an encrypted signal could expose consumers to unnecessary risk of harm or loss of life.

Lastly, on a technical note, the methodology for streaming ATSC 3.0 video causes it to take several seconds to either tune a channel or to recover in the event of transient interference. The strange choice of ISOBMFF fMP4, a reliable delivery and storage format, over MPEG-TS, an unreliable delivery streaming format, means that synchronization can take several seconds in the event of even transient interference and upon every channel change, leading to a very poor user experience, especially for those living in areas of challenging reception conditions (as we do, living less than 5 miles from a major airport).

These decisions taken in aggregate give the impression that A3SA and NAB are entirely concerned about protecting their own interests and not at all concerned about serving the public over the public airwaves. To sunset ATSC 1.0 without addressing issues which affect the viewing public in ways unseen before in broadcast history would do them a great disservice.