I am continuing my journey into over the air ATSC 3 television now that I have a functional antenna up on my roof. In my latest video I explore streaming ATSC content outside my home!
Unlike the older ATSC 1.0 broadcasts that are encoded in a high bitrate MPEG 2 format, ATSC 3.0 uses a modern HEVC codec. This is very similar to the video encoding used by Netflix and other popular streaming services, making these ATSC 3.0 broadcasts much friendlier for remote streaming. ATSC 3.0 also runs at about half the bitrate of ATSC 1 broadcasts for HD content.
As before we used my HDHomerun Flex 4k to tune the signals which was provided free of charge by Silicondust to review a little while back. These devices are primarily designed to work on a local network only, but because HDHomeruns have an open architecture there are third party software options that provide more flexibility.
That’s where the Channels App for HDHomerun comes in. The app can connect to an HDhomerun remotely providing a channel guide and even pause and rewind capabilities. In my use case I set up a local VPN on my router to access my home network from the outside securely. In my testing it worked just as well outside the home as it did inside the house!
For iPhone and iPad users the Channels App for HDHomerun is free to use. On android and TV boxes (including the AppleTV) the app costs $25 one time with no subscription fees. Channels also offers a self-hosted DVR service that we’ve covered in the past for an $8 monthly subscription fee.
But there is a big asterisk on this which involves ATSC 3.0’s dark side – the option for broadcasters to enable a DRM flag. This is already taking place in some markets and it’s unlikely that the Channels App will be able to tune those DRM’ed channels in the future. The AntennaMan has a great analysis of the situation on his YouTube channel.
But for now this works great for me. We’ll likely see more players support this in the future once the AC4 audio codec can be decoded using open source tools like FFMPEG.
Disclosure: Silicondust, the makers of the HDHomerun along with the Channels App are past sponsors here on the channel. They did not sponsor this video.