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Antenna Sales Are Rising, In Another Sign of Churn In TV Watching (startribune.com)
Rick Schumann shares a report from Star Tribune: Twenty percent of homes in the U.S. use a digital antenna to access live TV, up from 16 percent just two years ago, according to Parks Associates market research in Texas. The Twin Cities has an even higher antenna percentage. Local antenna installers say business has been rising about 20 percent to 25 percent annually for several years. It's the eighth largest broadcast-only market in the country, with more than 22 percent of homes using antennas to get local TV, according to TVb.org, a local broadcast trade association. Duane, Wawrzyniak, owner of Electronic Servicing in Silver Lake, Minnesota, cites high TV bills every month for the increased antenna sales. According to the report, "In the Twin Cities and much of Minnesota, antenna users can receive 10 to 60 TV channels, often in high-definition quality, over the air at no expense."
You can check the DTV signals that are available at your location here.
You can check the DTV signals that are available at your location here.
versus buying one. I've made a bunch of Gray-Hoverman style antennas using foam board and foil tape (indoor use only, obviously). These pick up everything in my area and cost less than $5 each.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Is that a middle finger reference? I am pretty sure that 95% of households use that to communicate with neighbors. There is no such thing as a digital antenna in electronics.
It doesn't surprise me that broadcast-only is increasing especially if it includes people with broadband-only.
If most of your entertainment is coming from netflix but you occasionally want to watch the news,
it makes sense to get an antenna versus paying high prices for a cable service you don't need.
Streaming video is great, but when it comes to watching news or local sports, having access to the local TV stations is still useful. An OTA antenna can fill in that gap, allowing you to still have access to live TV without an expensive monthly fee
I do wonder how much longer OTA broadcasting is going to be around, though. ATSC is an incredibly inefficient standard (hell, it still uses MPEG-2 video! That's a few codec generations behind) and you just know telcos and others are desperate to get their hands on that spectrum. I'm glad more people are starting to tune in; that means there will be more pressure to preserve it. I just worry that most of these people are getting up there in age, and that this trend will reverse again once we start losing them.
Local news is a cesspool of local criminal influence where I live.
Better than the national cesspool of higher-level criminal influence then. At least local criminals care about the city they live in too.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I read something somewhere recently... Oh yeah:
Get a job, or move away, or SOMETHING! Don't you like the flavor of food? Why would you live in place like that? ...
Just tell your mom you're sorry, find a real job, and fly her out once you get your first paycheck.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
and more to do with a soft economic situation combined with rising cable tv costs.
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Netflix is slowly but surely bringing unskippable ads back, so...piracy it is.
...I didn't do it sooner!
I started out using cable, but our local provider had terrible signal and service. We experienced complete loss of signal out anytime it rained, go figure. Calling their service line would usually take over an hour of waiting to reach a human, Due to all the problems in our area, their repair teams are spread so thin that they can't arrive for at least a full week after a service call by which point the problem would gone so they can't ever find the root cause to fix it. This entire neighborhood, and adjacent ones had the same issue and the repair guys were completely clueless as to how to fix it which is why everyone moved to satellite or antenna. We opted for satellite and initially liked the service, but the costs kept creeping up until it was well over $100 per month with no premium channels.
After checking the OTA coverage in my area with various sites (tvfool.com, antennaweb.org, dtvmaps), I was surprised that we could probably receive broadcasts from at least nearby towers with over 30 channels of programming, much of it in HD. I bought a up a small, flat rectangular indoor antenna for under $50 that has an amp and was supposed to have a 50 mile range, and it pulled in all of them plus a few more. We now get 33 channels, and 11 of them are in HD. Best of all, it's all the major networks and PBS that comprised over 90% of our regular viewing.
So for less than half the monthly cost of the dish, our 1 time antenna purchase allows us to watch the same major networks. Whenever I tell people about this, they are usually shocked, but after investigating it, several have since made the switch themselves. As the word continues to spread, I would expect more and more to cut the cord and make the switch.
"Churn" equates to "change" or "fluctuation" and it doesn't have any associated upward or downward velocity. In fact, a common phrase is "steady churn" which essentially means constant change or continual fluctuation.
In this phrase "Sign of Churn In TV Watching", it means is that there's still a continual change affecting how people are watching TV. Historically, the changes been::
- OTA viewing being displaced (and almost fully replaced in many areas) by cable TV broadcast
- Cable TV viewing being displaced somewhat by satellite
- Both Cable and satellite TV viewing being displaced by online streaming services
- Now it appears that cable and satellite are also being displaced by a significant number of people returning to OTA TV viewing.
I'd much rather ditch all broadcast TV and push people towards IP services, personally.
Because once you have a decent line for IP transit (however that may happen), everything can be pushed down it - Internet, telephony, video-on-demand, etc.
We need to wake up and realise that IP is a standard that you can use for almost any kind of data distribution in an efficient manner, especially with multicast / broadcast being used properly.
Give people reliable IP, all those old services will be absorbed and made more efficient. And then you free up a ton of spectrum from broadcast systems that you can use for other things (in the UK, digital was used to "free up" analogue channels for use by 3G... supposedly. But free up both and you can just add them into one giant spread-spectrum, frequency-hopping bunch and improve things like Wifi and cellular access).
My house is entirely "IP". Over 4G no less. No phone, no broadband line, no alarm line, no CCTV cables, no TV connection (despite having satellite on the roof, antenna in the loft, etc.), etc. etc. And my workplace is basically the same now - we cut all the analogue and ISDN phone lines, we changed all the internal phones to IP, we put everything from CCTV to wireless to tannoy/bell systems to access control onto IP / PoE. It's just so much simpler and connecting to any part of the infrastructure means you have potential access to anything and everything that's IP'd (VLAN and permissions not withstanding).
Here in the UK things are going the other way, almost every household had an antenna (or aerial as we call them). Very few people had any kind of cable, although sky satellite became quite popular in the 90s. It was only with the introduction of broadband that cable started to get more popular, but still a majority get their broadband over some kind of DSL. Now there is a growing movement away from broadcast, people are now choosing what they want to watch and when they want to watch it, using on-line services.
This is false. I have no idea where this is coming from. There are about 20 PBS stations that sold spectrum in the 2016-2017 auction the FCC held to channel share, and considering there are hundreds of PBS stations out there, it's certainly not "most." And among those, most are not "renting" from commercial licensees.
The complete list of such stations and what they're doing follows:
KOCE Los Angeles, CA - shares on KSCI (commercial; no programming was lost)
KLCS Los Angeles, CA - shares on KCET (non-commercial)
KQEH San Jose, CA - shares on KQED (its PBS sister station, which was already airing its programming)
WEDY New Haven, CT - shares on WEDH (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast)
WXEL West Palm Beach, FL - shares on WPBT (its PBS sister station)
WUSF Tampa, FL - shares on PBS WEDU and sold the license to them
WYCC Chicago, IL - shares on PBS WTTW and sold the license to them
WCMZ Flint, MI - went off the air entirely; PBS remains on WTVS/WDCQ
WNJN Montclair, NJ - shares on WNJB (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast; no programming was lost)
WNJT Trenton, NJ - shares on WNJS (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast; no programming was lost)
WPBO Portsmouth, OH - went off the air entirely; PBS remains on WOSU/WKAS/etc.
WLVT Allentown, PA - shares on WBPH (commercial; no programming was lost)
WYBE Philadelphia, PA - shares on WBPH (commercial) and sold the license to WLVT
WVIA Scranton, PA - shares on WNEP (commercial; no programming was lost)
WRET Spartanburg, SC - shares on WNTV (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast; no programming was lost)
WVPY Front Royal, VA - shares on WVPT (its PBS sister station)
WMSY Marion, VA - station was already off the air for financial reasons
WSBN Norton, VA - station was already off the air for financial reasons
WVTA Windsor, VT - station will share on WVER, its PBS sister station of which it is a 100% simulcast, and will refill lost coverage with booster signals that are being built right now
WMVT Milwaukee, WI - shares on WMVS (its PBS sister station)
The vast majority of the above did not have any change in resolution. To the extent there's a change in bandwidth, newer encoders have better performance, and you cannot measure picture quality from bandwidth alone.
A FEW have given up their licences for payment by the Telcos during the current TV repack ... Definitely not most...
There are no "full power" analog tv stations in the USA. They all ended in 2009. Many tried to extend analog operation, but were told by the FCC to either convert to digital or go off the air. There are quite a few LPTV (low power TV) and translator (picks up a distant signal and re-transmits it with low power) that are still in analog...The deadline for them to move keeps changing, originally it was 2012 IIRC, but now looking like 2020 or beyond. A big push to keep analog LPTV operations are the franken-FMs, analog LPTV stations that run on channel 6, who's FM audio carrier is on 87.7 Mhz at the low end of the FM band that can be tuned in by most receivers.