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