Things are about to get messy for free, over-the-air TV.

This week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed a notice of proposed rulemaking that’s designed to allow broadcast TV stations to adopt the emerging ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard more quickly. If the FCC enacts these rule changes, broadcasters will no longer need to support the ATSC 1.0 standard that works with most TVs and tuners. Instead, they’ll be able to scale back their ATSC 1.0 coverage and even switch over to the new standard entirely.

Broadcasters say they have no incentive to abandon ATSC 1.0 anytime soon, and that the rule changes would just give them more flexibility to support the new standard. Viewers, however, stand to lose clarity on how long their existing TVs will keep working with an antenna, and whet

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