Am I the only one who thought: Who still watches over-the-air TV? (yes, I know there are some, but it can't be all that many relative to the streaming market)
Some previous owner of our house put a large TV antenna in the attic and had it wired to all of the coax ports. The signal is outstanding and we get a wide variety of channels.
One of the no-name stations has a Spanish subchannel that broadcasts a bunch of pretty interesting soccer matches from central and South America. I only understand about 30% of what they're saying, but it's a soccer match, I know what's happening on the field, and there is a worldwide standard for referee hand signals. On a different channel, there have been a few US National team matches broadcast OTA in Spanish that aren't available for free in English - weird, isn't it?
If something I am interested in is on ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, PBS, etc and I find out about it, I'll watch that too. But I'm not going to spend money or go out of my way to do this ATSC 3.0 DRM crap. If they switch, I'm done with it.
I watch soccer games on the OTA Spanish stations too. I'm nowhere close to fluent in Spanish, but my high-school Spanish has served me well. The announcers tend to say the same types of things over and over again, so over the years, I've kinda built up a phrase book in my head of all the usual stuff they say.
In addition, I find the announcers in Spanish much more exciting than the ones in English.
Sadly this is no longer always the case with the advent of ATSC 1.0 and sub-channels.
An OTA TV license grants you 20Mbits of bandwidth in your market. The license holder is free to divide this bandwidth amongst however many sub-channels they desire.
In the last 7-8 years, the license holders (including CBS/NBC/et al) have continuously reduced their bitrates on their primary feeds in order to stuff as many sub-channels in their slice as possible.
Some of the majors in NYC (I’m looking at you ABC) resemble a RealVideo stream from 2002 more than a high-definition video from this decade.
> Some of the majors in NYC (I’m looking at you ABC) resemble a RealVideo stream from 2002
I honestly didn't realize that this wasn't true everywhere. Every time I've seen a digital TV broadcast, it's looked like this. Very nearly unwatchable, particularly on a large screen.
> I honestly didn't realize that this wasn't true everywhere. Every time I've seen a digital TV broadcast, it's looked like this. Very nearly unwatchable, particularly on a large screen.
Canadian broadcast networks does dedicate all of that stream into one (or more rarely two) streams per physical channel and it shows up (especially compared to some cable providers which squeeze up bandwidth).
There are some channels on my cable service that seem to be rebroadcasts of these sub-channels. They are unwatchable. Sadly, PBS likes to make use of the sub-channels to offer various educational program streams, but their main channel suffers for it. Fast motion degenerates into blocky artifacts quite often.
I think it was meant as "compared to streaming". My parents still have cable tv and the image quality is still noticeable better than even 4K streaming of the same channels.
In ATSC 1.0 I don't think this was true, at least in my area. The reason is there was a fairly finite amount of bandwidth available (made worse by sub-channels) and they were limited to MPEG-2, so I often observed macro blocking and other artifacts. It was decent, and probably better than streaming was when it launched, but now that 4K streaming is routine (with HEVC) it looks considerably better. I'm sure ATSC 3.0 changes this.
I just watched the MLB All-Star game OTA yesterday. We also watched the Jeopardy Masters Tournament a few weeks ago. And we do tend to pick up the local news in small doses just to see what’s up around town.
We do stream more than we watch OTA, but when I’m using an antenna I bought almost a decade ago and a HDHomeRun that doesn’t have a recurring cost, it still has its uses.
I haven't watched over-the-air OR live TV for more than a decade, except I sometimes watch NBA games live (rarely, though, I like to skip commercials and 1/2 time) on YTTV.
