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I just explained this to my son yesterday, ending with a demo where I dug up an old coax antenna, connected it to the TV, and showed him channels of free content (also, what static looks like). He was amazed. (What else have I forgotten to tell him about? I've failed him as a father!)

He thought the over-the-air picture quality was better, which considering the bitrates he's used to with Netflix and YouTube, is probably true.

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OTA picture quality varies. Each physical channel gets 20mbps of mpeg transport stream, almost always with mpeg2 video. If the physical channel has one or two streams, and a good multiplexer, the quality is pretty nice. If they're running 12 streams of video, it's going to be awful.

ATSC 3, if it's ever deployed, has a lot higher data rate and requires support for h.265 deciding, so it could be really high quality, or full of even more crappy substreams.

In my experience it's almost always better than cable, which has horrendous compression rates.

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