How long before broadcast TV disappears?

Grampa Don

Grampa Don

Yep, that's me
Location
Orange county, Calif.
Shortwave broadcasts are mostly gone because it was much cheaper to put programs on the internet. Those big transmitters cost a lot of money to run. Local broadcast TV stations are already putting some things on the internet, and over the air viewership must be down due to cable and internet competition. How many people still have antennas? And, those frequencies could be used for other services. I suspect there will be some big changes.
 

The FCC mandates that network TV stations broadcast OTA free of charge so even poor slobs (like me) can find out what's going on in the world.

We subscribed to YouTube TV for a while, but at $75 a month, after football season was over, we were paying all that money just to watch the news, which is mostly just commercials, so I cancelled it and set up an OTA antenna. We get great reception with it, and it's completely free since the antenna came with the house. It was sitting in the laundry room.
 
Last edited:
Of course we have Antennas, HDTV in windows. There are outdoor Roof mount HD TV Antennas that can rotate to the Signas Strength, Say Mount Vernon Illinois for an example of bringing in the signal.

HD TV has mostly shut down Cable. Except in Rural Areas where Satellite direct TV / internet is great. Live in a City an HD & a ready smart set U have Internet TV and HD Broadcast with just a 20 dollar antenna. Plug in USB and you can pause record all of them. I have 1000 channels to choose of. Some are Subscription like Amazing Prime and Thursday football but Baseball is gone mostly now. OH well its not americas sport now, Soccer is. Pro Football, boring.
Mostly Prime and Starz are what we watch evenings On Solid wire telephone & internet & HD broadcast tv.

One of the Win - Wins is the national safety broadcast over Broadcast TV / Radio and PBS. Its the PUBLIC SAFETY at stake during a Mega catastrophic event. No mater !

U no I remember the 50's when DC 3's constantly flew over the place at 5000 feet and screwed up the tv for maybe 5 minutes with their
Magneto Ignition systems.

That usually quit when the sun set. 707's stopped the DC3's ignition interrupt crap. I remember Ozark Air and their cool Jets.
 
Last edited:
HermitHogan said:
The FCC mandates that network TV stations broadcast OTA free of charge so even poor slobs (like me) can find out what's going on in the world.

We subscribed to YouTube TV for a while, but at $75 a month, after football season was over, we were paying all that money just to watch the news, which is mostly just commercials, so I cancelled it and set up an OTA antenna. We get great reception with it, and it's completely free since the antenna came with the house. It was sitting in the laundry room.
Click to expand...
We have OTA, too, Hermit. When I first saw your post I thought it said you got over the air if YOU were sitting in the laundry room! :ROFLMAO: :ROFLMAO:

Ours OTA is this flat metal thing up in the attic. FREE!!!
I love it as it screws liars like cable out of money. I REFUSE to use cable TV because I am old enough and still know how cable got IN to everyone's homes: through a lie.

This is EXACTLY how it was marketed: "You pay a cable provider so you can get TV with NO commercials!"
I could SEE paying for that because I figured: cable companies will need to make money somehow, if they don't have commercials. Well, ta da: Cable providers are scooping up money from payers of cable PLUS commercials ON the cable channels.

Consumers are nearly always considered stupid by anyone selling something and I resent that in them.

I fear OTA will go the way of the affordable hard copy newspaper, and the DoDo bird.

What will budget challenged folks do then??

Listen to big brother on the computer I suppose?
That is what bad governments want: control over what you hear, see, say and want.

I don't care if "private" forums are supposedly private.
If those forums are there for public to read, there should be ZERO censorship by "moderators" or "admin" because if one's youngish population gets used to ANY censorship by an unknown cloaked entity about what they can say?

Freedom is over and out.
 
We dropped cable TV quite a few years ago, tried satellite for one year, and then the promo price went way up, so we dropped that, too, got an antenna from Amazon, and that is all we use for television.
Neither of us watch it much anyway, but when bad storms come through, we watch the local channels to see what is happening on their radars.
Most of what we want to look at we can find on our iPads, so that is what we do instead of watching television.

I do think that they are losing viewers because even the big cable networks are having a really hard time right now. MSNBC. Is going to be put up for sale by Comcast, from what I read, because viewers are down so low, and CNN has been laying off some of their announcers, so none of the legacy media is doing very well right now, it appears.
 
For the record, I "cut" my cable over 25 years ago. I think I might be a pioneer! These days I watch a bit of ROKU but I'm a big fan of buying DVDs from Amazon. I'm sure over the last decade I have spent several thousands of dollars buy them. I don't mind spending the dough since I am a fan of TV shows from the 50s/60s and 70s and I really don't like commercials. I can't understand why people sit and watch 7 minutes of nonstop "brainwashing."

I have watched the entire series of the following TV shows: Hawaii 5-0 (the original with Jack Lord), Dr. Quince, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rebel (Johnny Yuma), The Waltons, Gunsmoke, The Streets of San Francisco, The Untouchables; just to name some of them.
 

Attachments

  • Gunsmoke.jpg
    Gunsmoke.jpg
    45.8 KB · Views: 0
  • Dr. Quince.jpg
    Dr. Quince.jpg
    107.1 KB · Views: 0
  • Have Gun Will Travel.jpg
    Have Gun Will Travel.jpg
    75.9 KB · Views: 0
I would rather see the Test pattern of the 50's on the set than listen to nonstop mouths shooting off for 30 minutes.
That includes the Tucker Carlson types of the hate media and Theorists.

Same with the sports entertainment. STFU and show the half time and fore game entertainment on the field. I get
so tired of big mouths being paid to talk nothing but BS. I shut it off after the Half and final seconds.

We love the heavy drama series like Outlander and Hell on wheels and other high drama shows. X out the Action chases too.
 
I used to like the PBS NewsHour, but it's getting a bit too "woke," and even that would be okay if the reporting was good. I remember the days of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and in comparison, today's reporting and commentary on the NewsHour doesn't measure up.

Some of the local news is even worse. On the local ABC station, it would be "news" if there was a White male reporter or news anchor. They're all either Black or Hispanic women any more. Maybe White men just aren't going into that line of work any more, and it's mostly women who are getting journalism degrees. More women than men are going to college these days by about a 15% margin, so that's probably part of it.
 
Grampa Don said:
Shortwave broadcasts are mostly gone because it was much cheaper to put programs on the internet. Those big transmitters cost a lot of money to run. Local broadcast TV stations are already putting some things on the internet, and over the air viewership must be down due to cable and internet competition. How many people still have antennas? And, those frequencies could be used for other services. I suspect there will be some big changes.
Click to expand...
Those frequencies would most likely be grabbed up at song prices & owned by Amazon's partners, Televising / recording/ plotting drone deliveries. ... :coffee: ... The end of the Delivery Guys life too. Just more robots stuffing drones with stuff.
 
Last edited:
HermitHogan said:
The FCC mandates that network TV stations broadcast OTA free of charge so even poor slobs (like me) can find out what's going on in the world.
Click to expand...
Well that's not true any more.

ATSC 3.0 has encryption features intended to make OTA pay TV possible. It has even caused problems with some tuners failing because encryption is even used by some stations when there is no pay requirement. There are licensing woes with the chosen encryption, bad enough that some TV makers rejected ATSC 3.0 and went back to making 1.0-only receivers.
 
Grampa Don said:
And, those frequencies could be used for other services.
Click to expand...
Much of the broadcast TV spectrum has already long ago been clawed back and sold off to (mainly) cellphone providers.

"Digital" (ATSC 1.0, 3.0) "TV channels" are now virtualized, and they don't physically use the actual channels any more. "Channel numbers" are now marketing labels and do not correspond to frequencies.
 
Happyflowerlady said:
We dropped cable TV quite a few years ago, tried satellite for one year, and then the promo price went way up, so we dropped that, too, got an antenna from Amazon, and that is all we use for television.
Neither of us watch it much anyway, but when bad storms come through, we watch the local channels to see what is happening on their radars.
Most of what we want to look at we can find on our iPads, so that is what we do instead of watching television.

I do think that they are losing viewers because even the big cable networks are having a really hard time right now. MSNBC. Is going to be put up for sale by Comcast, from what I read, because viewers are down so low, and CNN has been laying off some of their announcers, so none of the legacy media is doing very well right now, it appears.
Click to expand...
 
I have an antenna, but I rarely watch local broadcasts. I dropped Spectrum cable but I have their internet connection and ROKU for my TV's. All I pay for is the internet. I have my own modem and router so I don't have to rent Spectrum's.

I just wonder if broadcast TV is economically viable anymore. Advertisers get more bang for their buck on the internet. Can the government force a station to stay on the air? Maybe PBS due to some government funding.
 
There is a lot of battling over revenue between streaming services and the local OTA stations some of them carry. The streamers pay, but the OTAs want a bigger cut for the content they create or license for broadcast.

Some of the OTA operating costs are alleviated now, since they can bundle several streams of programming sent out via a single transmitter and physical channel.

My biggest challenge with OTA is trees. So tall, so dense, so many that in Summer even with a roof antenna many local stations don't come in and the rest get choppy and break up a lot. Almost unwatchable aside from one fairly nearby transmitter.
 
Packerjohn said:
...

I have watched the entire series of the following TV shows: Hawaii 5-0 (the original with Jack Lord), Dr. Quince, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rebel (Johnny Yuma), The Waltons, Gunsmoke, The Streets of San Francisco, The Untouchables; just to name some of them.
Click to expand...
You named some pretty great TV shows there, John! I was a big fan of the ones that I bolded above. I liked "Gunsmoke" for awhile, but it eventually became more like a soap opera.
 
Grampa Don said:
I have an antenna, but I rarely watch local broadcasts. I dropped Spectrum cable but I have their internet connection and ROKU for my TV's. All I pay for is the internet. I have my own modem and router so I don't have to rent Spectrum's.

I just wonder if broadcast TV is economically viable anymore. Advertisers get more bang for their buck on the internet. Can the government force a station to stay on the air? Maybe PBS due to some government funding.
Click to expand...
How do you watch football games?
 
It's not the technology, network tv just has terrible programs. I have a few OTAs along with Roku. The only broadcast tv I watch are things like Metv, Comet, Antenna tv..etc. The new stuff on the networks is pretty much unwatchable. I can usually last only till the first commercial then I'm gone.....so I gave it up. With Roku I'm able to find something I've never seen before every day. I use the odd little known apps instead of the popular regular so-called trendy stuff. This is how tv is supposed to be. Plus with a video streaming caster on Roku, I can watch absolutely everything for free. I watched 'Landman' last night for free and I don't have cable. Netflix shows and everything is free.
 

You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top