Just curious because I don’t see people talk about it a lot.
The transition from analog to digital really hurt my desire to watch OTA TV (you caught me! I’m not under 25).
With analog broadcast, any weak signal or interference produced a little bit of static, but you could still see and hear what was being said. With digital, any weak signal means dropped frames and silence or weird glitches. You completely lose what’s happening. Even with a powered antenna, I have frequent issues with weak signal. I could probably try to get a rooftop antenna installed, but there’s no guarantee it would be any better. It’s just easier to find other entertainment at this point.
You can also just pirate
Whatever, all free broadcasts are on YouTube anyways. But on demand and adblock exists
Living in tornado alley, having a TV antenna and a weather radio is almost a requirement. If the Internet gets knocked out, OTA still works. Also, my Internet is shit so I wouldn’t rely on it if a tornado is bearing down on my location, but I do also love watching 9½ hours of nonstop tornado coverage when nasty storms might come my way.
Outside of that, I know to tune in at about :15 past the hour during newscasts to catch the weather report, which gets uploaded to their website later anyway. If the football game is on, I might catch that if I care to watch. I don’t really watch OTA otherwise.
But I’m 32 lol
I love my rabbit ears. Watch local news and the super bowl if I care that year.
I don’t care about cable TV. In Hungary nearly all news broadcasts over here are just propaganda machines and spitting out literal garbage content. Also the ads.
UbO + Internet + torrent goes br
23 year old here btw
This (applies everywhere). Besides it’s all aimed at boomers and not at all engaging. People who are internet savvy can easily find better free content.
Im really glad I moved to germany, aside from all my bad experiences there, the whole place was a shithole from the beginning. I just want to See that place burn
Yes.
https://fmhy.net/videopiracyguide#live-tv-sports
Although I don’t tune in to live sports, I just share resources to find free livestreams/media with others :P
IPTV is also pretty great
The ads on over the air programming are so so terrible. And even with a great antenna the many channels aren’t exactly the highest quality content even if they didn’t have ads.
YouTube has taken the place of over the air TV and for good reason.
It has taken the place in people’s behaviour but it has not taken the place functionally. No doubt, you use technology to filter ads out of YouTube viewing, and one could do the same with OTA broadcasts.
The cost to move to America is quite steep, though, and there are significant drawbacks.
Dunno where you are but most countries I’ve visited in Europe have hundreds of free TV channels broadcast over the air. Minimal ads because a lot of the channels are tax subsidised, or like the UK, a loicense innit
Where I am, you get a TV streaming box from your ISP for a few euros, and streaming is free for about 200 channels; ad breaks are around one minute long every 30 minutes
Heck, here in the UK, we have a TV licence and the OG ad-free service, the BBC.
Yeah, the BBC has had its fair share of controversies over the years, but I’m still glad it’s there and still ad-free.
People who say the TV licence is a ripoff should be made to watch US cable TV. I nearly gouged my fucking eyes out with a rusty spoon.
The BBC produces the best quality TV programming on the planet
An awful lot of shite as well
That’s interesting! So it’s like free cable TV?
Not free, tax subsidised. It’s about €120 per year paid through local taxes. If it had the number of ads that cable has, nobody would watch it lol
I pay that much per month and get more commercials :(
(Assuming you mean DVB-T). In some place OTA is just the standard. Where I’m from cable TV is simply unheard of and all terrestrial digital channels are free with varying degree of ads.
Another great example of how things work so different in different parts of the world
I am aware. I am also aware that I haven’t used cable tv over a decade and I do not regret ditching that garbage
Yeah but instead of $60/mo, it’s free.
Free garbage is still garbage
So to answer the original question, have you tried it and are you under 25?
Ads, ads everywhere.
Besides there, there is also a 4k OTA standard, ATSC 3.0. Most TVs don’t support it yet, but some do. Worth googling before you buy. You can also get something like an silcondust 4k standalone tuner and plug that into your home network instead. You then load its app to watch over the air TV in 4k.
If you do buy the silicondust tuner, you can go further and get a DVR going. Plenty of free projects that will help you setup and record TV like jellyfin, and many of them will auto-skip the ads too with an application called comskip.
Atsc 3.0 requires an internet connection for it’s bullshit DRM
That seems entirely pointless then, why not just stream the content.
Bandwidth is cheaper from the tower since the signal is the “same” for each client and it can then be distributed over a wide area. You send the “DRM” (Just a fancy encryption key) over the network since it’s relatively small and likely unique to each device (probably fingerprinting the device ids to the content invisibily in case of piracy).
Woww, over the air broadcasts with copy protection? 🤮
why would I use that when I have a *arr setup?
You mean OTA TV? I don’t even watch sports, the rest has 10 minute advertisements. And considering it’s digital, I don’t find it interesting at all. Yes, a weird reason, but anyway.
For like $150, you can get a Tablo DVR or similar that records what you want to watch, auto skips the ads, and streams it over WiFi to your phone or laptop. Just leave it on for a year and boom: entire season of whatever show is now yours forever for free.
Just pirate it at that point.
Eh. There’s also the serendipity of it. There’s a half dozen shows that we regularly watch that we only know about because they were randomly on TV.
How do you skip live ads unless you’ve pre-buffered at least 1hr in advance
Or you could just use https://bitsearch.to/and save yourself buying a TV
What’s the password for the “UHF” wifi?
SPATULA CITY!
Password is WeirdAl.
We’ve got it all on UHF!
SUPPLIES!
