ATSC Approves New Standard to Update DTV Receivers

[Gregg Lengling]

ATSC has approved a new standard, A/97, which allows DTV receiver makers to dynamically upgrade products in the field.


The standard is geared towards terrestrial television broadcast systems and receivers and may be applied to cable or satellite, according to ATSC.


With the new standard, consumer devices such as DTV receivers can get updates of firmware, OS software, device driver software, middleware and other types of software.


"A/97 specifies the mechanisms for announcement, signaling and encapsulation for the delivery of a download data service in the ATSC transport, while allowing the specific details of the software download payload to be defined by each manufacturer," said Michael Dolan, chair of the ATSC specialist group on data broadcasting.


To download or read more about the standard go to ATSC's Web site.

[kjnorman]

This sounds both good and scary to me.  Good in that manufacturers could down load bug fixes and spec improvements.  Bad is that, they could down load undesired functionality such as copy protection schemes, DRM, etc.

Only time will tell...