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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I still pay less than when I had a cable bundle with the caveat that, then, I didn't have premium channels and, now, don't have live TV. In my personal book, I'm still ahead in the game.

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Yeah, exactly. I can appreciate that people don't like how these services are raising their prices. If you don't think you're getting your money's worth, then cancel. If you want to turn to piracy instead, then I know I don't care. But people comparing these streaming services to cable really don't seem to understand just how bad cable was (and still is). It was way more expensive, you got way less content, and the quality of the experience was way worse.

I swear, the people who compare these streaming services to cable are all too young to remember that the average cable experience was flicking through channels until something remotely reasonable was on (and it was likely an episode or movie you've already seen many times before), you'd hop in part way through the content (so hopefully it was something you've seen before so you knew what was going on), you wouldn't be able to pause anything obviously, and about a third of your viewing time was forced ads. And all of this could be costing you over a hundred bucks a month in 2000s money in a locked-in contract lmao

TiVo et al. helped somewhat. But at one point I realized I hadn't watched anything on my TiVo in months and the landline on my triple play Comcast plan wasn't worth the cost as a backup or because I had to train my dad to call my fricking cell phone.

I get way more video than I have time to watch and I do monitor things so if I'm really not using a service I can always drop it. I care very little about having access to EVERYTHING which I never had before streaming anyway. If I really miss anything, it's DVD by mail.

You can have live TV with a cheap antenna with a better image quality than any streaming platform.

I can not pick up anything with an antenna, cheap or otherwise.

I'm at the foot of of a hill that's between me and where broadcast antennas are 40-50 miles away. I had no TV when I moved in until Comcast eventually put in cable. The seller had even tried putting an antenna up in the attic which did no good. So I would need to subscribe to a live TV streaming service which isn't worth it for me as I don't really watch sports much.

But I'm glad you're so confident of your knowledge of my situation.

You're the reason cable was invented in the first place

Along with more channels; many cable adopters got perfectly good OTA signals. And I used it for many years. It just became not a good value for me at one point.

No, cable was specifically created to deliver broadcast to those that could not receive it[0]. Those many more channels came some time later

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United...

Very early on. The real growth of cable aligned with the growth of stations like MTV, CNN, WTBS, etc.

even though this is very late, cable was developed in late 40s/early 50s. Those stations did not come until the 80s. So 30 years qualifies very early on I guess, but sounds more revisionist time to me.

6-12 ft. C-band satellite antennas that piggybacked on unencrypted programming traffic certainly existed. My neighbor had one and I did some research but decided it wasn't worth the effort /money when I moved in. Whatever broadband cable company did eventually wire me up a few years later; this was in the late 90s. And I'm about 40 miles west of Boston.

Maybe revisionist but what most people think of as "cable" was broadband cable (maybe DirecTV, launched 1994) with lots of commercial channels. They don't think of having a 12 foot antenna scouring the sky for signals.

There was certainly some earlier cable, e.g. HBO, if you could pickup broadcast, that predated channels like CNN.

> You can have live TV with a cheap antenna with a better image quality than any streaming platform.

OTA video quality isn't that great anymore. ATSC is 20mbps per RF channel, but most broadcasters multiplex video streams into that and use mpeg-2. ATSC3 can do more (or less) bits on the same RF channel, and uses a better codec, but at least for me, tuning channels is even slower than ATSC, half of the broadcasters won't let me use their signals, and the audio codec is difficult to use.

Admitedly, my tvs don't have atsc3 tuners which would have helped, but I bought a network tuner from the same vendor as my atsc tuners and ended up wishing I hadn't.

When I can watch the same event over the air or via a streaming service, my expectation is quality would be better with streaming, but I'll use OTA cause it gives me slightly better feels. Between interference from low band LTE and 5G on refarmed spectrum, reception issues from foliage and airplanes, and technical issues at the broadcasters, I don't know that reliability is higher either... But it feels wasteful to use bandwidth for something that's already being beamed to my house.

> OTA video quality isn't that great anymore.

While this might be true from the intended full stream for a single channel (Congress wasn't happy when they authorized without understanding the network's intentions of multicasting), but I did an A/B test for people during a Super Bowl comparing Comcast to OTA. Nevermind the delay in Comcast signal, the image was noticeably better.

> Congress wasn't happy when they authorized without understanding the network's intentions of multicasting

Well if they don't like multiplexing, they really shouldn't be refarming OTA RF channels to cell carriers and they might want to relax the requirements for migration. As I understand it, stations that want to broadcast ATSC3 are required to find an ATSC broadcast to multiplex all of their existing streams onto.

That said, I'm not surprised Comcast is worse than OTA, they (and satellite) have been bitstarving video streams for a long time. When I've watched regular games on ESPN+ or Amazon, they usually have sufficient bitrate that I rarely notice video artifacts, which is better than I get with OTA. ESPN+ does like to start at a low frame rate and then transition a few seconds in, which isn't ideal, but I can deal.

I don't know the stream details, because effort, but I suspect with the streaming device I use that they're using h.265/AV1 and a decent amount of bitrate, and at a higher resolution than 720p or 1080i.

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