UpdateTV
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
UpdateTV is a new system which allows ATSC digital television receivers to download firmware upgrades and software patches sent out via digital television stations. The technology, under development by UpdateLogic since 2004, was completed in 2006, and will be in TV sets by the 2007 model year. Many major manufacturers have licensed the standard, which works within the ATSC A/97 (Software Data Download Service, or SDDS) protocol, and will be datacast by National Datacast on PBS TV stations across the United States. It is also working with cable TV companies to make sure that the datacasts are also passed to their customers.
Updates for various models will be scheduled ahead of time at the request of each manufacturer, and as long as the tuner is plugged-in at the time the UpdateTV software will wake and receive it. There is so far no information on whether it will request the consent of a person to install the software on their TV, or on what happens if the update is missed due to a power outage, being unplugged (such as to prevent lightning damage while a resident is away, or perhaps being in storage), or due to data corruption or data loss caused by interference or weak signal strength in rural areas or mountainous terrain.
The software is distributed to station servers via the Internet.
