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The TV antenna is making a comeback

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Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#171
post #103
post #25

What I'd like is an easy, cheap DVR solution for OTA. Mostly I'd just like to be able to pause and rewind live TV. After cutting the cord, it's like living in the 80s again shouting at family members to be quiet when you need to hear something.

Not exactly easy or cheap, but a data point for you: My OTA DVR for the last 8 years setup has been a PC with Windows Media Center. Apart from the setup, there is no monthly cost for the guide data, as with Tivo etc. Right now this runs on a NUC, with a SiliconDust HD Homerun (HDTC-2US) living in my attic, which transcodes the OTA MPEG-2 to H.264, saving tons of disk space. A nice side effect is that I can archive sh…

How do you get WMC to transcode?

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#172
post #168

I'm 24 and I have never had cable in my life. Frankly, I'm surprised it's not more common. You get a LOT of TV for free. I grew up watching PBS and Simpsons and etc. I remember at superbowl some of my friends were amazed that I was able to watch the football game without cable. I was floored. They didn't even know that channels came in over the air. I showed them the antenna, where it installs in the TV, how cheap th…

How on earth does this situation come about? Hypereffective advertising by the cable companies?

I'm legitimately surprised that technically savvy people literally wouldn't know they could get network channels OTA (given reception in their area).

However, I suspect the general state arose because there was a period when much less was available over the Internet, a lot of talked about shows were on cable (premium or otherwise), and you might very well get a better picture with cable/satellite (which is still true for many). So people just got into the habit of thinking in terms of needing cable to get the TV they wanted.

Personally, I can't get anything OTA. If I could, I'd drop cable TV (still need it for Internet and phone) in a heartbeat. As it is today, it's a more difficult decision.

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#173

With Chromecast (or something similar to connect your computer to TV), and a decent Antenna, you do not really need anything else. Plus, most of the things that we watch are on-demand anyway - we don't have patience to sit through commercials for 1 hour to watch 20 minutes of a Sci-Fi episode.

> With Chromecast (or something similar to connect your computer to TV), and a decent Antenna, you do not really need anything else.

Unless you want to watch a lot of sports.

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#174
post #168

I'm 24 and I have never had cable in my life. Frankly, I'm surprised it's not more common. You get a LOT of TV for free. I grew up watching PBS and Simpsons and etc. I remember at superbowl some of my friends were amazed that I was able to watch the football game without cable. I was floored. They didn't even know that channels came in over the air. I showed them the antenna, where it installs in the TV, how cheap th…

How on earth does this situation come about? Hypereffective advertising by the cable companies?

The dual to it: there is absolutely no advertising or public-awareness effort for local OTA programming (whether radio or television.) The OTA broadcast stations for a given place aren't given as part of "considering moving to [city]" guides, "local free resources" lists, etc. Ask the average city-dweller and they'll likely have never seen a digital antenna, and won't be able to tell you whether there is any local OTA content to pick up.

With OTA television especially, if the relevant stations also exist over cable/satellite/telco-fiber/etc. then those stations don't bother to announce the fact that they broadcast OTA.

For example, here in Canada, you can get CBC (i.e. government-sponsored) television programming OTA pretty much anywhere, but there's nothing to even suggest that possibility; I just found out because I went and bought a DTV antenna on a whim. Meanwhile, the CBC emphasizes the multi-channel accessibility of its radio programming (OTA, web streaming, podcasts, etc.) at every opportunity, doing heavy cross-channel advertising. It truly feels like "CBC Radio" is a public service they're trying to bring to as many people as possible, but "CBC Television" is, for all intents and purposes, just some cable channel.

A lot of the problem comes down to low-level discoverability, though. OTA DTV is broken for discoverability purposes, in that a degraded signal may as well not exist. With analogue OTA TV, you could buy a TV and turn it on without any wires connected to it, and it would still scan for channels and display a few fuzzy pictures peaking out of the static, and it'd maybe occur to you that with the help of an antenna those could be cleaned up. With a digital television, you just get a "No signal" infobox.

The "fix" would be to make televisions somehow able to "see" the weak DTV signals around them again with no wires plugged in. We'd have to re-think OTA digital broadcasting completely to enable this: either to attach to each digital channel a sister "wideband, low-data-rate, fountain-encoded" channel (to let the TV pull a 240p signal out of noisy 1080p-equivalent bandwidth, with the implication that an antenna would "upgrade" the picture); or to do away with live-format OTA broadcasting altogether, in favor of heavily-redundant packet-based transmission, such that a 30min program could be buffered in advance over several hours, and then "scheduled" at the client-side onto the channel.

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#175
post #168

I'm 24 and I have never had cable in my life. Frankly, I'm surprised it's not more common. You get a LOT of TV for free. I grew up watching PBS and Simpsons and etc. I remember at superbowl some of my friends were amazed that I was able to watch the football game without cable. I was floored. They didn't even know that channels came in over the air. I showed them the antenna, where it installs in the TV, how cheap th…

How on earth does this situation come about? Hypereffective advertising by the cable companies?

The funny thing is that the DTV transition wasn't that long ago either, and I think they did advertise clearer pictures and sound.

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#176

As much as I like the idea of free broadcast TV and not being dependent on cable/satellite companies ... 1) Is over-the-air broadcast TV widely used anywhere? Very few even know about it where I live, but maybe there are places where it's more common. 2) Is it essential to any group of people? 3) Could we get more beneift from that spectrum by repurposing it for something else?

>2) Is it essential to any group of people?

Over the air TV is used by the Emergency Broadcast System to alert residents of natural disaters and inclement weather. For low-income families, this is essential. The town I'm from was hit by a tornado in 2005. The NOAA weather radio transmitter did not work properly, leaving only OTA broadcasts to alert residents of dangerous areas like mobile homes.

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#177

With Chromecast (or something similar to connect your computer to TV), and a decent Antenna, you do not really need anything else. Plus, most of the things that we watch are on-demand anyway - we don't have patience to sit through commercials for 1 hour to watch 20 minutes of a Sci-Fi episode.

> With Chromecast (or something similar to connect your computer to TV), and a decent Antenna, you do not really need anything else. Unless you want to watch a lot of sports.

You can get a lot of NFL and college football from the antenna. I use my parent's cable login to cover the rest (WatchESPN) but of course that's not a real solution available to everyone.

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#178

With Chromecast (or something similar to connect your computer to TV), and a decent Antenna, you do not really need anything else. Plus, most of the things that we watch are on-demand anyway - we don't have patience to sit through commercials for 1 hour to watch 20 minutes of a Sci-Fi episode.

> With Chromecast (or something similar to connect your computer to TV), and a decent Antenna, you do not really need anything else. Unless you want to watch a lot of sports.

Pretty much all of the MLB stuff (except for playoffs) is cable only. NFL will at least of the either Monday or Thursday game along with your local on Sunday.

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#179

I'm 24 and I have never had cable in my life. Frankly, I'm surprised it's not more common. You get a LOT of TV for free. I grew up watching PBS and Simpsons and etc. I remember at superbowl some of my friends were amazed that I was able to watch the football game without cable. I was floored. They didn't even know that channels came in over the air. I showed them the antenna, where it installs in the TV, how cheap th…

I've had the same experience. In my experience the quality is much better than legitimate online streaming services or even cable. That might be in my head but the quality is seriously good.

Nobody believes me when I tell them I get it for free with a $20 antenna. There's over 50 channels in my area (though to be honest only ~40 of them never air anything worth watching).

Re: The TV antenna is making a comeback

#180

Get internet service from cable provider with basic cable plus HBO for less than the advertised price of the internet service alone. Have to call back every year to get the promotional price back, which sucks. But we almost never watch the cable channels. Local channels in HD with a couple low-end antennas in the attic. And tend to watch HBO GO on a Roku, where we also have Netflix, Prime, etc. Doing Sling during foo…

I heard Sling is laggy and unreliable. Have you had good experiences with it?
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