SiliconDust, the makers of a popular line of network-enabled broadcast television tuners, have issued a public call for hundreds of volunteers to help it monitor a national test of the Emergency Alert System scheduled to take place next week.
In an email reviewed by The Desk, SiliconDust said it needed at least 1,000 users of its NextGen TV-capable HDHomeRun tuner to download a program that captures ATSC 3.0-encoded channels, including those encrypted with digital rights management (DRM) technology.
Volunteers will download a program on their Windows or Linux computer, which connects to their tuners and make short captures once ever six hours. On Tuesday, the program will make a longer capture of one ATSC 3.0 channel to see how the HDHomeRun tuner performs before, during and after the Emergency Alert System (EAS) test. Once the test is over, volunteers will be told to uninstall the program.
HDHomeRun tuners are among the few devices certified to receive NextGen TV signals that are unencrypted, but the device has never gained approval to decode and present NextGen TV channels that are DRM encrypted, meaning users of the device can’t watch them. Supporters of the broadcast standard repeatedly point to SiliconDust’s own “design choices” as the core reason for its lack of certification, with some also claiming that the company’s use of processing chips manufactured by China-based Huawei raises national security concerns.
In filings with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over the past few weeks, SiliconDust said it urged TV broadcasters to drop their use of DRM encryption during the national test, so all viewers of NextGen TV channels can receive those messages. But broadcasters say removing DRM from their channels defeats the purpose of the test in the first place, which is intended to gauge how older and newer transmission standards on broadcast TV and telecom platforms help or hinder the delivery of those alerts.
The FCC has not weighed in on the matter either way. Comments from SiliconDust and the broadcasters were made as part of a broader discussion of a proposal to move the entire country away from the current TV transmission standard to NextGen TV on a full-time basis within the next few years.
