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Comment by GeorgeTirebiter | Hacker News Reader

Is OTA TV even relevant anymore, except for the specific content that OTA has that isn't (yet) available over the net for free / ad-supported?

I believe it's a waste of valuable spectrum to burn it on TV. It would be better to allocate TV's spectrum to cell services (for example).

Radio should be used when things are moving relative to each other; AM and FM Radio make sense as receivers are often in cars. People don't watch TV in cars.

If the communications is point-to-point, run the wires/fiber and hook up. If you're in a car, boat, airplane, or train -- fine, use 'wireless'. Yet, even today, wi-fi / 5G + some wide-area services for special cases (planes, boats) gets you there.

TV is a vast wasteland (of spectrum).

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The quality of OTA TV is certainly superior to anything you're gonna get over fiber or coax.

If you're in the US and you have an online provider for cable channels, try swapping an NFL game between the online broadcast and the OTA broadcast. There's a night and day difference in terms of picture quality.

Yes, the bandwidth argument. OTA TV uses MPEG-2 for ATSC-1 as the OP's video describes. If the content is available in higher-res but the streamers aren't sending that, sounds like a marketing reason. Netflix will sell you 'premium' 4K for $ 22.99/mo

There's no good reason the NFL is better OTA than streaming except streamers aren't complaining enough, I would guess. Note this last season, there was one game that was not available on regular TV, only on streaming. That was a 'test run' but clearly, the NFL is there to make money, and if they can make more streaming... well, there's your answer.

There were a number of regular season games on Thursday night carried exclusively by Amazon Prime. I watched them through my Roku devices and the quality was not great but then there can be up to three TVs streaming through their respective Roku devices at once here and our download bandwidth is limited to 25Mbps.

The one playoff game that was carried exclusively via Peacock was the wildcard game between the Dolphins and Chiefs. I also watched it through the Roku devices and I thought the picture quality was fine, better than Amazon Prime had been.

Would I have ponied up $5.99 if it weren't the Chiefs as they're the local team? I don't know. Perhaps next year I'll have to make that decision if they carry another playoff game that has teams I don't care that much about.

I agree, despite the fact that I use OTA TV. I would prefer to just get an internet stream, but I need to pay like $70/mo+ to get the content (plus a ton that I don't want), and it still has ads.

I would be willing to pay a reasonable price to access a live CBS/NBC/ABC/Fox stream, but no one (legitimately) offers that. So OTA it is.

Exactly. OTA remains a little walled garden of content, justifying (?) their wasting of the precious spectrum.

There are some bundles of content (youtube TV, I think)?

But operationally, for the viewer at home -- HOW the bits get delivered to your screen is irrelevant; what's ON the screen is what we care about.

I'm thinking the TV operators are running a scam, in a desperate attempt to hold on to $ and spectrum -- both of which they are less and less capable of justifying.

Analog TV needs a lot more spectrum than digital TV, and in the US analog TV spectrum has already been reallocated.

OTA TV is a vital, free public service. We take high speed internet for granted and think everyone has access. They don’t. OTA is not as it once was, but it isn’t going away for a long, long time.

ATSC 3.0 is dangerous because it brings encryption to the table, and it's already clear that encryption will not only be limited to entertainment and for-profit content, but also E/I content like news.

Encryption must be banned in OTA television.

US TV spectrum has been halved in the last 20 years. Used to have channels 2-69 (minus 37, reserved for radio astronomy). Now it's just 2-36.

Channels 70-83 were reallocated away from TV in 1983.

For those that did not 'get' my reference to TV as the 'vast wasteland' --- that is a shout-out to Newton Minnow, the FCC Chairman in the 60s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_N._Minow?useskin=vector

The TV industry was ticked off by that comment, and do you recall the name of the ship on Gilligan's Island? The S.S. Minnow

OTA TV has one advantage over all of the delivery alternatives: no ongoing access fees. I agree that the spectrum is wasteful, but at least it still belongs to the people in some sense. If we give it up, it will be sold as more 5G spectrum that you then have no option other than to pay for.

Yes, that's true. Until local municipalities consider wifi a service they provide their communities, like parks and libraries.

Until then, yes, probably some spectrum should be devoted to OTA; maybe in SD, mainly PBS, I dunno, because this would be for the 'no access fee' case. That means cheap folks, or really poor folks. Society should be doing everything possible to eliminate the latter.

If TV receivers were built into smart phones, it would be easier to make this case.

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