Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Cord-cutting (still get Internet from the cable company) has saved me a fair bit of money after I realized that I could go a month without watching a live broadcast or a show recorded on my TiVo. But you pretty much only get significant cost savings today if you're willing to do mostly without live TV 100% or jump through some hoops for a rare exception.

In spite of the occasional annoyance, I'm fine with it but I realize a lot of people wouldn't be--especially for sports.

View on HN

Don't forget you can still get a DTV OTA antenna and watch live TV with a much much better image quality and without cable's delay. Admittedly, in can take a bit of effort finding a location to place the antenna for best reception for your location, but so worth not paying for cable any longer.

Sports is the primary reason for me messing with this, but it is definitely worth it.

> live TV with a much much better image quality and without cable's delay

Depends. In our area they have split the digital signal so many times to carve out additional subchannels (10.1,10.2,10.3, etc) that the effective bitrate is now pretty dang low.

When watching football, the channel may only be delivering 720p, and with tons of compression artifacts to boot.

Way back in the late 90s, the place I was working had a subscription to a trade rag called TV Broadcasting News (or something like that). I remember reading an article on how Congress was upset at the networks for splitting the bandwidth. But being feckless like Congress is, they did nothing about it and just shrugged their shoulders.

Fox was famous for choosing 720p as its broadcast format specifically to get 60fps for its sports programming while the other networks chose 1080i5994.

"You" can :-) But fair comment. For many people, OTA offers good enough live TV. I live at the base of a hill blocking me from the nearest major city about 40 miles away. I've never been able to pick up anything OTA even before digital signals; there was even a big "external" antenna in the attic installed by the previous owner to no avail before he just got a big C-band dish. Even a lot of radio is pretty bad.

I was able to get cable TV before taking any extreme measures.

The irony here is that your specific situation was one of the driving factors of why cable was created

Even leaving aside the cable-only stations (both premium and non-premium), even getting the basic networks and maybe some UHF channels was marginal for a lot of people involving a lot of fiddling to get a usable signal.

And pre-DirectTV, the alternatives were pretty much geeking out with a big Satellite dish which only worked out on your big country property and were willing to spend the money.

> even getting the basic networks and maybe some UHF channels was marginal

In my day, we only had 3 networks and we liked it! You kids and your choices!

But seriously, it is fascinating how in ~20 years of HDTV we've gone so far away from a small collection of channels with nothing worth watching to nothing worth watching available everywhere 24/7. Giving people their own agency in creating content has not increased the PSNR levels in the great vs dreck.

Having to invest time and money into the antenna is definitely what's stopped me from using OTA up to this point. Especially given that our location is between multiple broadcast points so it's not as simple as pointing an antenna in one direction, it would have to be a multi-directional antenna. Last I looked a decent one of those wasn't cheap.

I have one of those little table top style ones that came with a pretty long cable. It is a bit of an annoyance in that in my location, there are different places I need to place the antenna for best reception for that channel. Luckily, I only use it for sports, and I know the best location for each channel. So I just move it as needed, and then place it back behind the TV when done. I look at it like being similar to grabbing a gaming controller and putting it back on the charger when done.

Fun things happen with reception though. Just this weekend, I was watching a match and everything was coming through just fine. The UPS truck pulled up to deliver a package to my house, and the whole time the truck was parked, the signal was struggling. As soon as the truck pulled away, everything was fine again.

As much "fun" as all of that is, it is much cheaper than me finding a sports bar to watch a match. Besides, at the time of the morning what I'm watching is on, I really am not in the mood to go some where.

I'm in the same boat, and on-the-ground isn't even good enough. I'll have to mount a big antenna on top of my roof, which is a tall order. Not worth it to me so far.

Yup, the few more basic antennas I've tried effectively got no signal worth using on any channels.

Note that they have added DRM to the ATSC 3.0 standard, and its being implemented quite widely. This means that you'll be unable to freely record time shift sports using applications like MythTV, etc.

This adds an uncertain future to OTA, but I don't think you can say it's implemented widely yet.

Here's a list of current ATSC 3.0 channels, with an indicator for the encrypted ones: https://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=atsc3

For now, most network affiliates that air an ATSC 3.0 signal must simulcast the primary video programming stream in ATSC 1.0 format. So most primary channels are still available without DRM. [1]

[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-C...

In my market (Miami) almost everything is encrypted on ATSC 3. Do you know how long ATSC 1 will be up?

No, I don't. It looks like the FCC is going to let the market decide on this one. The sunset date for ATSC 1.0, meaning the date that stations can choose to turn off their ATSC 1.0, is 17 July 2027 [1].

Unfortunately, I feel that content providers have a financial incentive to discourage OTA reception. I'd take that 2027 date seriously.

[1] Paragraph 39 [PDF] : https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-53A1.pdf

Usually after a sports event is over, it's worth a lot less than when it's being played live, too. E.g. The Super Bowl's value is only worth something when people don't know what's going to happen. After the game everyone pretty much knows what has happened.

To each his own. At least for American football, there are so many advertisements and so much dead time between plays, I will typically record a game and then start watching it about 90 minutes after the start. That usually works out so that I finish the game just as I catch up the real time in the recording.

I'd question the better image quality part of this, almost all broadcast providers have chosen to use their bandwidth to ship the maximum number of 480p subchannels.

You can question, or you can do the A/B test yourself and no longer have it as a question. Sure, they've sub-divided their bandwidth, but their flagship station still receives much more bandwidth than your cable provider.

Just do the Amazon rental for a weekend. If you don't like it, return it. You'll see the difference.

This is very much a regional thing.

After the repack many markets have multiple HD channels sharing the bandwidth previously allocated for one OTA HD channel. In addition, as ATSC 3 is being deployed these channel sharing agreements are only becoming more common.

In addition, some cable providers are taking this over-compressed feed and compressing it further.

In many situations, streaming is the best option for picture quality now.

I did some comparisons in the Philadelphia market: https://www.somesortofweatherexperiment.com/tags/tv-source-p...

Even flagship events like the Super Bowl are not exempt to from low detail, compression artifact video in this market.

I haven't been near broadcast engineering since the DTV transition, but at one point in time, they wanted to have dial-a-yield type of abilities for the splitting of the bandwidth. For primetime, they wanted to to be able to give the main channel a larger portion of the bandwidth when people were watching, and then during the day provide more options for people to view alternate programming. Even if you gave each of the .2-.X channels 3Mbps, that's still a lot of bandwidth in comparison for the .1 channel. Of course any live realtime encoding of 3Mbps will never rival a 3Mbps encode from someone like Netflix, but a lot of that is just SD content anyways so meh it gets.

Yeah it’s all VBR (statmux) and they do make manual adjustments around special events. But at this point, in this market, there are multiple “.1” channels sharing the same physical channel. They are just out of bits.

When NBC last broadcast the Super Bowl there were two 1080i broadcasts (NBC and Telemundo) of the same game sharing the same physical channel (along with some sub channels). It was borderline unwatchable IMO.

I’m sure the situation isn’t as dire in all TV markets, but I think we are looking back on the days during which we could unilaterally state that OTA provides the best picture quality.

While the image quality is better (and the price difference is beyond compare), I've noticed that a lot of channels are still broadcast at 720p.

do people still watch live TV? I’m only exposed it to when I stay in hotels and it seems to only be Seinfeld reruns and Shark Tank

It's for sports and news (which both earn many many eyes and are most satisfying when watched live), not so much for reality or scripted productions. Even if you like channel surfing among the latter, you can do that in most service-specific streaming apps now.

At least for news, something like [PBS NewsHour](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/) is available free for cord cutters. Sports, you're mostly looking at illicit streams from dodgy sites.

It's great for when you don't want to choose something to watch

A lot of people including my brother do like to have TV as background. (Personally I hate it.)

Way back when I would travel in groups and sometimes have a roommate one of the nails on chalkboard things for me was people who would turn on the TV the first thing when they walked into a room.

I usually have music going in the background instead, which I would guess a lot of people would find just as annoying.

I don't find it as annoying--and sometimes even like it--but I don't routinely put music on as background especially if I'm reading/writing/etc.

My guilty pleasure have been the Roku Digital Channels. They have channels that are just a 24 hour feed of MST3K, or Cook's Illustrated, or How It's Made, or Antiques Roadshow. Just to turn on some background while I am making dinner or working on a project has been enjoyable, commercials and all.

I watch those occasionally. I couple weeks ago I happened across some South Korean movie that was their own version of a Tom Clancy war thriller. It was horrible but fascinating(1), and I would never have sought it out on my own. I like the stumble-upon factor that channels give you.

(1) Fascinating in how it depicted other nations. South Korea as competent protagonists who are threading the needle in a dangerous world, North Korea as a broken relation who needs to redeem themselves, China as a looming threat that can still be diplomatically dealt with, USA as clumsy good guys who have lost their way, and Japan as just horrible villains.

I was recently on vacation where they had a roku TV and watched these. I watched some old Unsolved Mysteries episodes, honestly there weren't really that many commercials on this at all compared to my parent's cable subscription.

I recall that after well after I had cut the cord a lot of channels on cable had switched to just playing one show all day on some channels so the concept seemed to pre-date the roku setup.

Many of the smart TVs have similar (I think they're just repackaging what was already out there on Pluto etc; Sling also includes those same channels in their Freestream)

I actually watch a ton of This Old House on my Samsung TV in my home office.

Sports fans watch a lot of live TV.

Based on the couple times I have watched sports recently, I would have thought it was a series of gambling ads interspersed with sports.

That’s because the TV system is going to collapse soon, and gambling and data neeed for gambling will replace that revenue.

Old people watch a lot of TV, so pretty much every commercial is targeted at them. Medications, retirement planning, predatory "manage your finances" apps, and of course commercials for thinly veiled clones of NCIS.

There's a large population of people from a prior generation to you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com