The Buried Treasure in Your TV Dial | Hacker News Reader

The Buried Treasure in Your TV Dial

nytimes.com

11 pointsMikeCapone9 comments

Second, over-the-air broadcasts are becoming a nearly obsolete technology. Already, 91 percent of American households get their television via cable or satellite. So we are using all of this beachfront property to serve a small and shrinking segment of the population.

I doubt it's shrinking anymore. Over-the-air HDTV is superior to (compressed) cable and satellite feeds. Plenty of people who never considered broadcast TV when it was analog are now buying antennas replace or supplement their pay-TV.

As more people decide that their TV needs can be met by OTA HDTV and Internet video, it may be cable TV that soon becomes obsolete.

Not sure if this is what the author implied, but it's important to remember the reason why so many people have cable and satellite are programming options.

When you ask yourself, do I want The Office or The Office AND Hannah Montana, quality (of compression, anyway) isn't important at all.

OTA gets 13 MB/s, and I'm pretty sure that's what Cable uses. That's not really enough for 1080i. I know that DirecTV moved to MPEG4. Not sure if it helped at all. And FiOS using more bandwidth than OTA, I believe.

ATSC in the USA is 19.28 Mbit/sec.

In short: make money fast auctioning off the broadcast TV radio spectrum.

[Author is] a professor of economics and behavioral science. Dismal and abysmal, then ?

No. Why is over-the-air broadcast is obsolete? What a piece of sheet article that makes unjustified assumptions. I'm using over-the-air broadcast and I intend to keep it this way. Finally, a piece of technology that benefits everyone, and especially those who cannot afford the cable fees.

If we assume the facts cited in the article are true:

* 99% of households have access to cable * satellite could reach almost all of the rest * 10 million households rely on broadcast TV currently

In terms of access (subscription fees aside), using radio spectrum to deliver television content is no longer necessary--i.e., obsolete.

The question is about the opportunity cost of continuing to use this spectrum to deliver television content to American households. If we can make use of this spectrum in a way that provides an overall greater benefit (government revenue, new & better performing wireless services) than the benefit of providing free over the air broadcast television, then we should be seriously considering it, especially if some of the revenues (in the way of subsidies for satellite or cable hookups; and mandates for those services to provide low cost limited programming analogous to current over the air offerings) can mitigate any negative impact of taking these services away -- what's the problem? IMO access to free (as in beer) broadcast television is not a fundamental human right.

> using radio spectrum to deliver television content is no longer necessary--i.e., obsolete

There is a huge difference between "obsolete" and "not necessary".

Good point. Unnecessary is not sufficient -- however that fact that fewer than 10% of US households rely on a broadcast signal indicates this technology is trending toward obsolescence.

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