Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss Amazon open sourcing its Go stores technology, Hinge’s text from home, pregnancy planning apps problems, NASCAR making medical equipment, the Quibi roll out, and more.

Petro in Atlanta, Georgia listens to the podcast and asked: “I’m hearing that there’s gonna be a new television standard in the United States – the new OTA antenna system. They’re calling this ATSC 3.0. What do you know about it?”

Petro, you’re probably going to see it branded as NextGenTV, which ironically seems like a name that would’ve sounded modern 15 years ago, but just sounds kind of corny now.

ATSC 3.0 is mostly just an update to get TV back in line with modern technology. There are tens of standards involved, but for example ATSC 3.0 includes upgrades to allow TV signals to deliver 4K HDR content, better audio quality and more on-screen data.

That’s all positive, the negative side is that it’s assumed that a more data-centric, more modern TV standard will probably lead to targeted advertising which means that those annoying ads that follow you will probably follow you into your TV too.

The truth is that that’s already a thing with SmartTVs, so you may not notice the change, but it’s a less than great feature that will probably come with the new standard.

Don’t expect to be forced to transition right away, the FCC is forcing broadcast stations to deliver comparable ATSC 1.0 content for the first 5 years even if they switch to ATSC 3.0, and they have to get authorization before they can shut down the ATSC 1.0 broadcasts.

Still, get ready for someone to try to sell you a NextGenTV set relatively soon. Whether there will be interest in them or not is yet to be seen, since some companies are already selling TVs without tuners for people who just stream and don’t bother with cable or broadcast TV.

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