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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.
green marker, it greatly improves the picture quality.
Article is Paywalled. Alternate Source?
I grew up using an antenna for all of my TV needs. Now I have a TiVo Roamio OTA with a lifetime subscription (which I got a for a couple hundred dollars) for all of my DVR and app (Netflix, Hulu, etc) needs.
What the fuck.
And they said that MBA's were useless. Sure showed them.
Or are people really stupid enough to not know about broadcast fucking TV?
an M.B.A student
Oh, nevermind.
Get a HDHomeRun and you can watch broadcast TV from pretty much any modern device. Each one has two tuners, and they can be split across devices. Want to record? Connect a cheap NAS. Want more than two channels at once? Just get another one -- they work in tandem.
Been using these for about a decade now and couldn't be happier. The quality is even better than basic cable because you don't need to deal with their re-encoding antics.
For real.
"We interviewed some dumbshit kid and he said some dumbshit things! Millenails are turning society on it's head!"
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.
This is digital. HDTV is ... digital.
And you can still get old format analog too.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Maybe the headline for the next article will be "Millennials get butthurt whenever you mention them"
You do know that those breaks are good times to go to the bathroom, wash the dishes, make the bed, start a load of laundry, etc.
Also that a PVR works with it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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
They make OTA DVRs, you know, so you can record your programming and watch it afterwards, skipping through the ads.
they will discover "radio" and forsake the AUX in jack they all live by...
I would switch to a over the air antenna, but I live where the nearest broadcast tower is over 60 miles away and line of sight to that tower is blocked by hills. A neighbor down the block had a antenna hooked up to a TV in his garage, three channels (one major network, one PBS and one off brand) were watchable and it worked fairly well most of the time. He ran cable and a receiver into the garage and took down the antenna. Now he can watch what he wants. The downsides of living away from a major metropolitan area still have not counteracted the upsides of not living in one.
Passionately Indifferent
Umm, no. Early televisions had dual telescoping antennas in a dipole configuration, for reception of VHF signals (channels 2-13). What you're thinking of is the 'bowtie' configuration that was used for UHF - that came later. The early dipoles were called 'rabbit ears' because you adjusted them at various angles to improve reception. Now, get off my lawn!
Close. Rabbit ears were for VHF, and that round / bow tie antenna was for UHF
But it's about those wacky millenials!
No, rabbit ears are VHF dipoles, made with 2 telescopic elements. Turn them to point them, adjust the length for the frequency.
The corresponding UHF antenna is a "bow ties" (and often just a loop).
Network broadcast stations were on both VHF and UHF.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
My girlfriend is 42 and was raised with cable TV and she never knew about using an antenna until she met me. The commercials suck but that's what the mute button is for.
The only down side I've found is that if you have spotty reception, it's choppy (kind of like buffering). Whereas pre-DTV spotty reception was static but tolerable.
There's nothing wrong with streaming per se. I love Netflix, big Stranger Things fan, but the argument that I'm "saving" something by skipping ads I feel is quite silly to me. It was time that I originally planned to be non-productive. I planned on that time to yield nothing. So getting back the 18 minutes that I would have spent in ads still yields me $0 since that's the value I placed on that time originally. I just don't get this notion that every second of someone's life has some dollar and cents attached to it. We're not 100% productive beings, in fact that's very much the core reason we've invented things to increase our productivity.
If putting a price on every second someone is alive is your kind of thing, then more power to you. I'm not calling you wrong in any sense of the word because I just feel that this isn't one of those things that has a "correct" answer. It's just a matter of how one values their time. I'm sure there's pros and cons to either perspective, but I vote with my dollars based on how much I enjoy the content, not the lack or presence of ads.
This was posted here on slashdot years ago... I followed the instructions and it worked EXTREMELY well. When I hooked it up, it picked up 30-40 stations around the Phoenix metro area without a glitch. I used a scrap piece of 2x4, so I put the ugly thing up in the attic, and my entire house can hook into it. Less than $10 out of pocket (needed some washers, screws, and a UHF/VHF transformer from Radio Shack.)
Coat Hanger HDTV Antenna
Reads like an Onion article
...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.
That's 4 jokes in one right there. I'm actually disappointed that this WASN'T an Onion story.
OTA TV has gone through something of a resurgence after the switchover to digital. There are way more channels on the air today then there were 10 years ago. This happened at the same time cable started raising their prices unsustainably so people are coming back and finding all sorts of channels that they would actually watch. Combine this with inexpensive online streaming options and Cable's $70+ monthly price point is a bad joke.
In my area we have all of the big networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CW, 7 PBS channels), plus Cozi, MeTV, Charge, Comet, TBI, Bounce, Justice, GetTV, Grit, Escape, MyTV, Movies, HgI, Retro, ion, ThisTV, and a ton of foreign channels. The only things I'm missing even a little are FX and AMC.
I read the internet for the articles.
I wonder how many TV show execs have forgotten about over-the-air broadcasting and will be surprised to hear this.
On the other hand, you need to be in a good location to receive a view-able signal. While we still have an antenna on the roof of our house, we located in a marginal area for reception. With analog broadcasting, just meant a little random "snow" in the image. Now that broadcasting has gone all digital, we get a lot of freezes and "pixel blocking", making the image unview-able. (I still try the antenna signal a few times per year. At night, with clear skies, I can get a marginally view-able image - at best.)
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Get a powered signal amplifier
They are $25 bucks on Amazon for a decent one.
I lived rurally for many years. Makes a hell of a difference.
Blah Blah Blah.
Sounds interesting. I do see an "FM" button in my car but the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons appear to be missing. Any suggestions on how I can permanently block specific songs from playing or make other songs play more frequently on this "FM" device? Oh, and where's the "search" box? Obviously with Pandora I just type in the name of a song or artist on the qwerty keyboard, but it's not clear where the corresponding UI is in my car.
I tried pressing the "FM" buton but it seems to play quite a lot of crap that I don't want to hear. It definitely needs some serious thumbs down input.
The old fuds version of hipsters was when in the 80s, you had teens and movie stars dressing like they were from the....50s (punk leather and slick hair) and pop stars using the same music formula but with electronics. So....nothing has changed. Literally at all. We're going to have to have a WW3 and then another economic boom to reminisce over to end this shit.
A TV show where a person talks into a watch? Don't be a Dick.
#DeleteFacebook
Or you can get a prepackaged flat antenna for around $15 that you can stick on the wall with a command strip...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
All of my TV watching is OTA broadcast. I used to record analog with TV capture cards. I also used them to 'digitize' my old VHS tape recordings so I could get rid of the VHS tapes. (Digitizing preserved the recordings, and also allowed quicker access since I didn't have to fast forward to watch something recorded on the tail end of a 6 or 8 hour tape.)
When the USA switched to digital by mandate, I had to adjust. It took some doing and maybe I can offer some useful tips. A lot of stuff is European which uses a different system than the USA which uses ATSC. So, if you're European, or if you're searching the 'net and come across some European software like say kaffeine, beware.
MythTV gets a lot of attention. I never got it to work and it seems like overkill to me anyway. What I use is me-tv. That's an unfortunate name because if you google me-tv you get a lot of false hits.
Me-tv doesn't work well with ubuntu (something about gui libraries.) It also doesn't work very well with pclinuxos. But it works very well with Mint and Devuan! It's not really good for watching 'live'. But, you can start it recording and then watch the recording while it's being recorded with vlc or mplayer or something like that, and, depending on when you start watching or how far you've skipped ahead, you may be only seconds behind the live broadcast. Also with those players you can pause, go back, whatever, while it's continuing to record the program.
When you've installed me-tv and first start it up, you do a scan and it finds the local TV stations. Then edit the channels list it created. Also be sure to edit the preferences as the default settings can be pretty wrongheaded, like starting a recording 5 minutes in advance and continuing after you've specified it should stop. You can put it in your 'startup applications' with the invocation /usr/bin/me-tv -s -m. This way it will start up automatically in the background and quietly record programs you have specified. But, if you're using a USB stick that has custom firmware this might not work because the OS has to find and configure the USB before it starts me-tv. My pcHDTV hardware has no problem because it's hardware support is build into the kernel, but with my Hauppauge TV stick, I have to worry about timing.
Some stations will broadcast several programs at once and you can record several at a time if they use the same base carrier signal. If the station is broadcasting in full HDTV you get a nice high res picture. If they multiplex several shows, which happens a lot for local community and religious stations, you'll get a lower res picture. But there's a lot out there. If you like some of the PBS programs like 'Nova', it's nice to get the high resolution videos of nature. (Just so you won't think I'm too much of a culture vulture, I also watch 'Supernatural', and see it in all its 1280 by 1024 glory.)
If you use a hauppauge tv tuner stick you have to copy a small file to /lib/firmware to get it to work. For my particular hauppauge the file name is xc3028-v27.fw, but it probably varies dpending on whihc model you have. Besides hauppauge, I've used pcHDTV which works 'out of the box' on newer systems.
I hope this saves some of you some of the pain I went through getting all of this to work.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
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
Try a directional high gain rooftop antenna. Perhaps one with a built-in RF amplifier. I can pick up Seattle stations from about 60 miles away, down in a valley.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yeah, I haven't been able to get a decent OTA signal since the switchover (if I can get a signal at all). On the other hand, that got me to pretty much stop watching TV, so there's an upside.
Most old TVs did not come with a built-in antenna. You used rabbit ears externally.
Wha? I remember pretty much all TVs coming with a built-in antenna, usually of the telescoping variety. Cheap ones would come with an external antenna you had to snap on.
This should be "How Millenials are Killing Cable TV with this ONE WEIRD TRICK"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Make sure your antenna receives UHF in addition to VHF. Lots of older antennas were VHF-only (channels 2-13).
Remember that the digital channel number shown on the screen now doesn't necessarily correlate to the actual radio channel. In our area, digital channel 7 (7.1, 7.2, 7.3) is transmitted at the pre-digital channel 21 frequency band.
An outdoor antenna with an outdoor amplifier is also recommended for fringe or rural areas.
Broadcast TV works pretty well in our rural area. Lots of people have dumped $60-120/month satellite subscriptions.
...because Centurylink had a 36+ hour total outage in my area, starting Saturday night.
To this day no explanation, no apology, no rebate or refund for service not delivered. When my 'contract', triggered by signing up for automatic pay, expires, they will see me gone. I would rather have DirecTV than Prism ever again.
Ever. I just won't pay extra to leave.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Boomer here. You sound like a Gen X'er who's having a little difficulty with the generational succession thing; let me help you out.
On the plus side, your're older and wiser now. Congratulations. That's something you should feel proud of.
On the minus side you are no longer cool. You are the opposite of cool. It happens almost overnight. Yesterday you and your cohort were on top of the world, the center of attention, the apple of the media's eye; but when you woke up to day you didn't realize it, but you'd become the generational equivalent of a fish left out on the counter over a hot summer's night.
So the millennials have discovered something you've known all along. You laugh, and look around and notice nobody is laughing with you. That's because you haven't figured it out yet: knowledge isn't cool until someone cool knows it. And that's not you. Nor for practical purposes anyone else over 30.
Now I suppose you could console yourself with the idea that the millennials will learn this very same lesson, but I say wish them well and let them enjoy their fleeting moment as the center of the universe, because soon you'll be feeling the icy winds of mortality at your back. That's a reminder to focus on what's important.
And what people think of you just isn't very important. What people think of other people is even less so.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You are the opposite of cool. It happens almost overnight.
Indeed. I remember the day it happened to me!
I am amused by all this millennial hate. The generational wars have always been with us and will always be with us, and they're always stupid.
As a wise (older and deeply uncool) man once told me: every generation thinks:
1) That they invented sex
2) That the generation before them are corrupt idiots
3) That the generation after them are lazy idiots
4) That their generation is the last reasonable one before the collapse of civilization
All of those things are just as true now as they were a thousand years ago. Which is to say, not even a little bit true. But it amuses me to see the tradition carrying on.
That's crazy. So do you pay for radio too? Is there a cool breeze licensing fee for when the wind blows? How about a tanning fee for when the sun shines? Rain fee for when it rains and waters any grass or plants you may own?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone