The Appy Roadmap - Jul 7, 2026

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An ATSC gateway should support the following: 

  1. Both ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 
  2. DRM on the gateway and all clients 
  3. Apps for third party hardware 

      We launched ZapperBox in July 2022 and will move past the first two milestones once we ship v4.0. The next big deliverables are apps for third party devices. We just released off-grid apps for Windows and macOS. The matrix below shows next steps for third party apps. The eye icon indicates our next goal, which may change. The red 'X' indicated features that are not possible. The TV platforms are listed in a rough order of priority that may also change.

      This matrix is handy to track our progress. Our goal is to eventually check off each box on the grid. Some boxes will get marked with a red 'X' due to technical or hardware limitations. Some apps and features will take more time than others.

      We call our app zApp. You can download it from the "Downloads" tab under "Support". Note the three categories of apps:

      1. Off Grid - These are v1.x apps that allow you to copy ATSC 1.0 recordings to a USB drive or a microSD card and play them back in off grid situations without access to Internet. Imagine taking your recordings on a trip.
      2. Local Network - These will be v2.x apps that allow you to copy and play back recordings and Live TV over the home network. This will also allow remote playback over a VPN.
      3. Remote Access - Playback over the Internet. If you travel with your Zapper Mini, this will also work for encrypted recordings. Details are still being worked out. Other platforms will follow for encrypted recordings as the popularity of ATSC 3.0 grows.

            We hope that you will select a ZapperBox quad tuner, dual tuner or single tuner whole-home DVR as your ATSC gateway and allow us to protect your investment during this transition from ATSC 1.0 to ATSC 3.0. ZapperBox is the only true ATSC 3.0 gateway that is shipping today. However, ATSC 1.0 incumbents have been around much longer. The following table provides a useful comparison of capabilities. We are much further ahead in the areas of ATSC 3.0 support and HDMI output. We are playing catchup in the area of OS platforms supported for apps.

            *HDHomeRun Flex 4K supports ATSC 3.0 clear broadcasts but does not support encrypted broadcasts. We estimate that about 75% of ATSC 3.0 broadcasts are currently encrypted.

            A Review: 

            Since its launch ZapperBox has accomplished the following:

            Disclaimer:

            No dates or features are guaranteed unless we publish them on our release notes page here.

            Whataboutism:

            No matter how impressive a track record we can point to from our launch in 2022 until now, there will always be naysayers who say that ATSC 1.0 is much better and an ATSC 3.0 gateway will NEVER be able to do a what an ATSC 1.0 gateway can do. Or that DRM blocks emergency alerts (it does not if offline DRM is implemented). Most naysayers fail to recall that the NTSC to ATSC 1.0 transition started in 1996 and completed in 2009. The DVRs considered today's ATSC 1.0 "gold standard" only started appearing in 2006 when most of the hard work had already been completed. The TiVo Series3 HD came out on Sep 12, 2006, four years after the digital tuner mandate. Many others followed.

            Let's recall some history. Our team started implementing the ATSC 1.0 software stack in 1996. Our first customer was Zenith Electronics whose HDTV set-top box was called the gold standard by Joel Brinkley who reviewed it for the New York Times in 1998. Things REALLY sucked until around 2005. A tier-1 brand TV that we tested at Zenith would take 30 seconds to tune to ATSC 1.0 channels and would blue screen whenever an airplane flew by. Everyone complained that no one will switch to digital TV because analog TV had an 80-millisecond channel change time compared to 2 seconds for the best (Zenith) HDTV. We still have a collection of about 250 DVDs somewhere with illegal ATSC 1.0 streams from markets across the country. Eventually our ATSC 1.0 stack shipped in over 30 million TV receivers from brands like Sony, Panasonic, RCA, JVC, Sharp, and many more.

            We are in year 9 of the current transition to ATSC 3.0. Our expectation is that everything including DRM will work flawlessly by the end of 2026. The LA Olympics start in 2028 and ZapperBox will be ready. You will start seeing the first ZapperBox apps for popular smart TV platforms during 2026. The best is yet to come.

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