A Santa Barbara-based television station owned by News Press & Gazette Company (NPG) has transitioned its ATSC 3.0 broadcast signal to use SiliconDust’s certificate authority, the companies announced this week.
The low-power station, KSBB-CD (Channel 17), is now using ATSC3CA signal signing certificates to authenticate its NextGen TV broadcasts and meet ATSC 3.0 signing security requirements, the companies said in a statement. Signal signing is part of the security framework used to verify that a broadcast transmission has not been altered before reaching compatible television receivers.
KSBB-CD is one of several local TV stations owned by NPG in the market; its other station, KEYT (Channel 3), serves as the community’s local ABC and CBS affiliates, and the company also owns the market’s local Fox, CW Network and Telemundo-affiliated stations.
SiliconDust provided ATSC 3.0 signal signing certificates backed by ATSC3CA Online Certificate Status Protocol cloud infrastructure. The company said its OCSP system uses cloud edge node responders across more than 30 U.S. data centers, along with emergency fallback to conventional servers maintained across redundant data centers.
The system is intended to help broadcasters remain compliant during emergency or network failure scenarios that could otherwise result in receivers rejecting television channels.
“It was our pleasure to work with the KEYT engineering team,” SiliconDust President Nick Kelsey said in a statement. “After analyzing their needs, it was determined that our ATSC3CA OCSP solution met their technology requirements.”
Kelsey said broadcasters need an ATSC 3.0 security system that can operate reliably during emergencies and said selecting the right certificate authority and OCSP solution is critical.
James Crawford, the Director of Technical Operations at News-Press & Gazette Co., said the station worked with SiliconDust to test ATSC3CA when it came time to renew signing certificates.
“The certificates performed well throughout our testing, and the process gave us confidence that ATSC3CA was the right choice for KSBB-CD,” Crawford said.
SiliconDust became an ATSC 3.0 Certificate Authority last November, which allows it to issue FullTrust and AskTrust certificates for NextGen TV channels and applications. Last month, a TV station in Cleveland tapped SiliconDust’s signing technology for its NextGen TV signals.
Curiously, SiliconDust’s consumer device, the HDHomeRun, isn’t capable of pulling in encrypted TV channels because the ATSC 3.0 authority that certifies devices to receive those secure feeds hasn’t given its blessing to those devices due to certain concerns about its hardware components — concerns that SiliconDust says is overblown.
