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Millennials Unearth an Amazing Hack to Get Free TV: the Antenna (wsj.com)
From a report on WSJ: Dan Sisco has discovered a technology that allows him to access half a dozen major TV channels, completely free. "I was just kind of surprised that this is technology that exists (alternative source)," says Mr. Sisco, 28 years old. "It's been awesome. It doesn't log out and it doesn't skip." Let's hear a round of applause for TV antennas, often called "rabbit ears," a technology invented roughly seven decades ago, long before there was even a cord to be cut, which had been consigned to the technology trash can along with cassette tapes and VCRs. The antenna is mounting a quiet comeback, propelled by a generation that never knew life before cable television, and who primarily watch Netflix , Hulu and HBO via the internet. Antenna sales in the U.S. are projected to rise 7 percent in 2017 to nearly 8 million units, according to the Consumer Technology Association, a trade group. Mr. Sisco, an M.B.A. student in Provo, Utah, made his discovery after inviting friends over to watch the Super Bowl in 2014. The online stream he found to watch the game didn't have regular commercials -- disappointing half of his guests who were only interested in the ads. "An antenna was not even on my radar," he says. He went online and discovered he could buy one for $20 and watch major networks like ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS free.
I count 36 OTA channels in my current lineup. That's about as many as I got on my first cable service in the 1980s. Admittedly, most of the channels are crap, but so are most of the channels on cable.
My favorite way to set it up is to get one of those huge outdoor antennas and just throw it on top of the fiberglass in the attic, generally pointed at the transmitters. I've always gotten flawless reception that way (much better than rabbit ears), without having an ugly lightning magnet on the outside of the house.
I get it, but this guy isn't that much younger than me. Maybe if it was a 15 year old kid or something...I know what a telegraph is even though I've never even seen a telegram let alone used the equipment!
I actually look into this, and found that the cost to buy a computer and put something like MythTV on it or whatever, to get DVR capability along with the HDHomerun (I used to use these awhile back)....was GREATER and more of a hassle than to just buy a Tivo OTA DVR/tuner unit...
The Tivo comes with 4 tuners, 1TB DVR storage and lifetime "service"...for about $399.
I set up one of these with Tivo mini units throughout the house for every TV I have...for my over the air needs. I used Amazon FireTV for streaming Playstation VUE, Netflx, etc....
But do look into the Tivo OTA unit....it was plug and play, 4 tuners and less $$ than the DIY route with HDHomeRun.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yep. A cheap Roku TV (<$150) and a 16G USB stick, and you can pause OTA TV for up to 90 minutes. Start your show, pause it, go off and do other things for 30 minutes, then come back and FF through the commercials.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It's quite easy to not know about a technology from before your time.
In this day and age, with information literally at one's fingertips, there is no excuse for not being informed on a multitude of subjects. If you don't know something, you look it up.
There are many things I didn't know how to do, but guess what, I learned on my own, either by asking someone who was doing the thing I wanted to know, or read a book (pre internet) or now, DuckDuckGo it.
Perhaps if people such as the one in the article would get out more and experience the world they wouldn't look like such dumb shits to the rest of us.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Very valid point!!
I did like having that capability back when I was running HDHomerun with MythTV back in the day.
I found, however, that I rarely if ever had any need or want to capture for keeping anything I got off of OTA TV.
I'm gonna have to look more into PLEX. I'm not terribly familiar with it, other than my friend has a server set up that I hook into occasionally, but thought it was only for pre-recorded content.
I was actually looking to maybe put my CD/Music collection that I have ripped into FLAC onto a PLEX server (they run on linux, right?) and use that to stream to my living room good stereo...from FireTV box over HDMI to the Marantz AV receiver, out....I'm thinking that would be a pretty darned good signal for my set up.
Anyway..rambling....but I'll have to look into Plex more.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Or are people really stupid enough to not know about broadcast fucking TV?
Sadly, this is a real phenomenon, and it isn't limited to Millennials.
My folks had a couple in their mid-40s over for dinner a few years back (2014ish, I think). At some point during the conversation it came up that my parents used an antenna to watch TV, rather than subscribing to cable. The wife insisted that TV channels aren't available for free, so no matter what my parents called it, what they were really doing was stealing TV from the cable companies. It took my parents and her husband a good 20 minutes to convince her that it was not, in fact, a form of theft and that OTA TV is, in fact, freely available to anyone willing to put up an antenna.
Mind you, this woman was old enough that she wouldn't have grown up with cable TV in her home, since it wasn't widely available during her childhood. The fact that she didn't remember that or know that it was still a thing was astounding.
So yes, these sorts of people really exist, and it's not just MBAs.
I picked up one of these tuners about a year ago, but without the added option of recording. Nobody in my house cares enough about TV to record, so it wasn't an issue. Most of our content is either PBS or available on Amazon Prime or some other streaming service. We mainly wanted it for live broadcasts (such as local sports or news)
With a rooftop mounded antenna, surprisingly, my house is currently picking up 56 stations. The absolute minimum cost for cable in my neighborhood right now is $20/mo, which is exactly the same channels as the broadcast list, except we get a few extra international and religious stations, and are missing some government stations.
The HDHomeRun was around $80, plus another $20 or so for the antenna, and another $20ish for wiring. That is the same as about 6 months of wired service from the cheapest local option for nearly identical content. This was simply a no-brainer!
In the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, there is very little to see OTA, unless you want to watch reruns of 60's sit-coms (Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, etc) or westerns, so interspersed with adds for senior citizens (literally: "I've fallen and I can't get up", walk in bath tubs, scooter chairs, etc.)
I've watched a bit for nostalgia (that's what was on daytime TV when I was a kid), and the cheesiness was unsettling, but it is not something that I would call "entertainment".
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba