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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

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 they are. I got HD video without having to pay anything.

These weren't dumb people either. They worked for tech companies. They legitimately did not know it was an option.

A lot of people cut their cables after that party.

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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).

No it's not in your head at all. Cable and satellite providers will compress, often very badly, the same feeds that you get via OTA antenna before transmitting those feeds to their customers.

Which is pretty funny when you think about why cable was created in the first place.

I've had my Mohu Leaf for 3 years. In general, it's as good or better than cable or streaming. Had one apartment where I had to spend some time figuring out how to mount it to keep it reliable, and it didn't work in every room, but that apartment had infinite problems with anything wireless, from phones to internet.

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.

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.

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

Most of the US market had shifted to cable TV by the introduction of digital TV, and simply wasn't aware that it existed.

I think there's a bit of a generational divide: older people think of the cable companies as the institution that brought us 500 channels. Younger people either can't imagine a world without cable TV, or loathe the cable companies for high prices and poor service. I'm the latter, and have been eager to find any way to reduce any connection to the big telecom companies. Right now, rabbit ears + Netflix/Hulu + cable internet is just one element short of perfect.

Related: Replacing incandescent light bulbs with LEDs - nowadays LEDs have about 95-99% of the warmness profile of an incandescent and are relatively cheap (can result in <1y ROI), but people still keep buying incandescents.

Another related: NiMH slow-discharge batteries (Eneloop) are very good, last as long in a remote control, and have more consistent charge levels than an alkaline. Yet people (even enviro-conscious relatives) keep buying alkalines. Why?

but people still keep buying incandescents

I think this is a change that's crept up on people, whereas broadcast TV was always there. Apparently the US is phasing out availability of incandescent bulbs?

For low-discharge applications like remote controls, the battery lasts years so it hardly matters. High-discharge devices increasingly come with their own lithium rechargeable batteries.

I haven't had much experience with LED bulbs, the early ones I saw weren't omnidirectional, cost a bunch, and needed good ventilation for a reasonable lifespan. I earnestly tried CF for awhile. Maybe due to early technology or cheap bulbs I had to replace them way more than incandescent (I suspected inconsistent power affected lifespan). In addition to that, the extra price and bad color temperatures or flickering bothering me made be go back to grabbing incandescent bulbs when I've had to replace lights. I do plan on doing research and switching to LEDs--I've noticed some LEDs have flickering that annoy me I hope I find something I like after some research.

A year or so ago I bought a recharge pack (Microsoft branded) for my 360 controllers. After only a few charges they wouldn't hold a charge anymore so I went back to alkalines. Either it was a poor quality battery, poor charger, or poor charging habits.

Taking time to research and paying more for a quality solution can be too much for most people. Prematurely releasing technology or poor implementations can also turn people off.

I bought some incandescent light bulbs because I needed the highest possible Color Rendering Index for photography. Otherwise, I'm pretty ok with LED.

I get about 50 free over-the-air channels ... most are HD.

Are you in NYC as well? I love the antenna, and even though I haven't quite kept up on my promise to myself to learn Spanish the inclusion of multiple Spanish language channels (plus Korean, Chinese, and I believe a few other languages) is a super neat bonus.

I'm in Florida, English and Spanish are the only 2 languages and most are English but there is probably 10 to 15 Spanish channels. But to tell you the truth I only watch a few of those, just like I did when I had cable.

Makes you wonder what other good tech the group is ignoring.

Ethernet cables. My friends constantly complain about the quality of wireless, and I try to get them to take a step back in technology and try a wired network.

I'm lucky that I own my own house and can put Ethernet wherever I want (barring a few ill placed concrete blocks / walls). My friends who use and complain about wireless are all in rentals.

I've had good luck running cables along the base of walls, or under carpets when absolutely necessary. It's possible to hide the cables while not damaging anything, if one is careful.

Power line ethernet?

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