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.

Comments

How many are making their own antennas...

[Sooner Boomer]

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.

Re:How many are making their own antennas...

[deek]

Some people just like to build stuff. There is an inherent satisfaction factor that you cannot buy, in creating something yourself.

Did his post touch a sore topic with you? It rather seems that way.

Re:How many are making their own antennas...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

I made one out of a piece of wood, six screws, some leftover # 14 wire from a house rewiring project, and a balun (also lying about).

The townhouse is within about a mile of the east end of the Dumbarton in silicon valley. Pretty much ALL the digital signals the FCC says are detectable in my area are on on of three towers: North San Jose on a hilltop overlooking the bay (and a naked-eye object from my front yard), Sutro Tower near the Castro in San Francisco, and one to the east, just over the hills (near Walnut Creek if I recall correctly)

Left off the reflector, since the SF and SJ towers are almost exactly opposite directions at my site. No reflector means I hit them both at about 3dB down from what I'd get from just one with the reflector present.

Did I need to put it on the roof? In the attic? Heck, no. I stood it up it behind the TV -and-audio cabinet on the ground floor of a two-story house. It works just fine right through the wall, insulation, orchard, neighbors' houses, etc. (Also through the TV console to hit San Francisco.) AND it gets the signals from the one over-the-hill in the middle. (Didn't really expect that.)

In fact the only thing it DOESN'T get is the last analog TV signal, a low-power channel-6 station south of San Jose, run by a church (mainly to broadcast their services to their shutins, from what I hear).

For those familiar with analog TV, the channel 6 FM audio carrier is just below the FM band, and many older FM radios will pick it up just fine. That's probably why they didn't go digital.

The Gray-Hoverman is a great (and open source!) design. And while digital TV doesn't carry quite as far as analog (because it suddenly dies when the signal-to-noise ratio overcomes the forward error correction), when you CAN get it it is either just perfect, or (if on the ragged edge) has the occasional freeze, while analog would be "receivable" but horribly corrupted by multipath ghosting and "snow" from noise.

does broadcast-only include people with internet?

[Wycliffe]

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.

OTA fills a perfect niche

[ZorinLynx]

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.

Re:OTA fills a perfect niche

[Ken_g6]

ATSC is being upgraded "real soon now" to version 3.0. On one hand ATSC 3.0 will have up to 4K resolution compressed with HEVC. On the other hand, it's may also have stuff like an effective "broadcast flag", so you may not be able to record your favorite shows, encryption, so you may get OTA pay-per-view or something, and upstream transmission which may be used for Facebook-like spying for advertisers or something.

On the other other hand, there's supposed to be a "lighthouse" station for awhile with the major ATSC 1.0 channels, but they'll be compressed to heck, like Joe_Dragon says below.

Re:Antenna are still worse then netflix

[Anonymous Coward]

Netflix is slowly but surely bringing unskippable ads back, so...piracy it is.

Re:Digital antenna???

[Scarletdown]

But no one here knows schmitt.

Re:PBS made a big mistake

[Trip Ericson]

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.