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Comment by tgorgolione | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of impressions on this post that antenna tv is a dying, but I think there's potential for antenna tv usage to go up.

As a value proposition, you have an initial cost of $50-$300 (depending on what kind of reception you get and what features you want, like DVR), but if you consider basic cable these days being $20/mo it's a nice way to save money on the one thing you can't get fully yet - live news and sports. Also, if we are allowed by the broadcast overlords, you can DVR movies and tv shows and keep a library for yourself without another subscription.

I have an antenna at home but I don't use it primarily because I get poor reception. ATSC 3.0 has been proven to fix this in many cases, so I'm hopeful this could be a great way for many people to save money.

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This is certainly not going to help the industry.

It was already hard enough to kill off NTSC. Now, with ATSC 3.0 they want anyone that's still watching OTA to also need to provide internet access to their receiver so it can give them advertisements?

Have you watched the ads for OTA content? They are all geared towards geriatrics. That's because almost nobody under 60 is watching OTA (except maybe exceptions like you and I that don't mind older TV shows and are willing to DVR it).

So, for a media format primarily consumed by geriatric people the new standard proposes they now need a functional internet connection hooked up just to watch M*A*S*H. The previous standards just needed a coax cable hooked up to an antenna.

I love that ATSC 3.0 uses better codecs. But, it's really dumb that they added the internet backend requirement. The entire point of OTA is you don't want to stream stuff over the internet.

>the one thing you can't get fully yet - live news and sports.

i'm not sure how many people really care much about the live news side of it. sports are definitely a big one right now, but that's only a licencing and rights problem, not a technology problem. as TV dies, those rights will get bought up by people who want to put sports online. Your $300 investment is only saving you money for as long as those sports are actually available on broadcast TV

> but that's only a licencing and rights problem, not a technology problem

A lot of good points here, but I would still prefer antenna TV to internet live sports because of the buffering. I feel like when I have to resort to using an internet live stream I'm not getting it truly live.

> As a value proposition, you have an initial cost of $50-$300

You can get a cheap antenna off Amazon for $10-$20, and even my budget-oriented TCL Roku TV has a built-in tuner. In cities, this works pretty well! I don’t think many young people realize this is just available to everyone basically for free.

Anything that calls itself a "TV" has to have a tuner.

I bought my current Vizio in the period where they were omitting them and selling as "displays" but they've since switched back to just being TVs again and including the tuners.

> In cities, this works pretty well!

Not in my city. You have to be lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where the signal actually reaches. My decidedly not scientific observation is that's about 75% of the city.

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