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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

My hunch is that over-the-air broadcasts are much less popular in the US than they were 30 years ago. A lot of Americans probably don't even know they can get digital broadcasts with a coax antenna. One group is probably paying for cable or satellite, and another, probably the one with more growth, is mostly watching stuff on phones and tablets.

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A whole lot of people (including myself) became incapable of getting OTA television after the digital switchover.

Personally, I don't actually mind. OTA TV had already become a shitshow of advertisements anyway. Once they started overlaying them on top of shows and even embedding them within shows, it all became too much to put up with.

But I also don't use streaming services. If I want to see a TV show or movie, I get it on physical disc. But I mostly don't want to see them -- because I've filled my time with stuff that is much more useful and fulfilling.

I'm curious, why can't you get digital OTA TV? I haven't tried to use it myself.

This is speculation, but I think that it has to do with the geography of the area. Digital TV is much pickier about line-of-sight, and there are large parts of my city where that doesn't exist to the broadcasting antenna.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more susceptible to multipath interference. Analog multipath leads to ghosting, but in the digital realm it might be too much for the ECC to handle.

Analog degraded gracefully with distance, but digital works until it doesn't.

As I understand it (and I'm not an expert just curious reader), it's part of what ATSC 3 is fixing by moving to OFDM instead of 8-VSB. Multipath in OFDM leads to some (hopefully few) number of subcarriers fading out, which error correction can manage. Conversely, 8-VSB is a regular single carrier (ish) (with 8 different analog signal levels, hence the name), so in order to decide the value of any bits at all the TV needs to identify and delay (line up) many of the ghosts up with the main signal. That's a more challenging signal processing task, especially given the diversity in age of the TV tuners (the ones from the late 2000's didn't have as advanced DSPs).

In addition to what others say in the thread, I think the range is worse than analog was.

1) Digital is pickier. You practically either have it or you don't. Too much signal noise and it's stuttering and compression artifacts where otherwise it would have potentially been a fuzzy but still probably understandable signal.

2) a lot of channels were reorganized with a lot of the VHF frequencies moved up into UHF. VHF tended to get a bit better penetration and range than UHF.

I've noticed a decent bit of variance in quality of digital tuners. And as long as I could kinda point in the direction of the towers in the area I could get good signal.

> My hunch is that over-the-air broadcasts are much less popular in the US than they were 30 years ago.

Well, obviously.. there's a lot more than 3 choices for most people now.

> A lot of Americans probably don't even know they can get digital broadcasts with a coax antenna.

The people who watch sports know this, and it is reflected in the Nielsen ratings... this is still a huge market.

That second group still uses TVs, but they don't watch OTA TV. They use streaming services.

Or, when they do watch live OTA programming they do it via a streaming service like Hulu+/YoutubeTV

That's true, I do a lot of that myself but somehow I overlooked it in my description.

For me the larger screen provides a social aspect, it's something to do with family or with guests, vs. consuming alone on a phone.

Or they use a device like a Tablo to get free OTA TV with all the advantages of streaming to devices, no subscription needed. I've done this for several years. I can be out working in the yard and pull out my phone to watch couple minutes of a football game on ABC or whatever, as long as I'm in WiFi range.

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