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.
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.
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).
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.