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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

The post is about "streaming" but this relates to a legacy method the two answers so far have mentioned:

Broadcast!

It isn't dead. You don't have to "subscribe" to it. The antennas are probably much smaller than your TV, and very cheap (look on Amazon).

Last night, I watched Arthur C. Clarke on the Dick Cavett show. Looking on YouTube, they do have some of the key moments of that interview, but not the whole thing.

And there's sports. Broadcast doesn't replace streaming, of course, or even come close.

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Over here, all the broadcast stations also offer on-demand streaming of most of their shows, and live streaming of the channel. I don't have to worry about antenna, extra cabling or clarity of reception. And I can get local content from outside my immediate locality. I don't see much future in TV antenna installation. If they all didn't insist on stupid signup processes it would be more convenient than broadcast.

I think broadcast is pretty dead. If it wasn’t, they’d be able to afford sports.

OTA broadcast only exists because the spectrum has some value to the legacy providers as they have consolidated. Eventually, the value of the spectrum for 5G or 6G will justify decommissioning.

> If it wasn’t, they’d be able to afford sports

They do have major sports events. Besides the big pro events, most of the college football games are on OTA. Not quite all. Just do a search on "broadcast tv listings <your area>"

Unfortunately I don't have a DVR anymore, so I still prefer to watch it on streaming if it's on there.

Only big events are still on broadcast.

College football, for instance, is spread between:

ABC, NBC, Fox, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SEC Network, Big Ten Network, ACC Network, Bally/other RSNs...

7+ of those are cable-only.

Local non-big pro sports in most markets are RSN-only as well.

I am a cord-cutter. On Sunday I can watch the NFL from 1pm until 11pm on three separate channels. On Saturdays I have a choice of three or four channels for college football and I have games on most of the day. During hoops season I can watch college basketball on some weeknights and then during much of the weekend.

That being said, I will not be able to watch any of the College Football Playoff over the air, and I only get a smattering of baseball games over the air during the regular season.

Damn. I just checked & you're right about NCAA tomorrow.

For baseball, I did buy mlb.tv, and it was great to be able to watch any game (except the hometown ones).

This isn't because broadcast "can't afford" sports. It's because they've learned that moving this amount of sports away from OTA makes them more money.

ABC/ESPN/ESPN2/ESPNU/SECN/ACCN are all the same company, all under the Disney umbrella. Bally is what used to be FSN, which was temporarily owned by Disney as well after their acquisition of Fox, but Disney was ordered to divest itself of FSN, so they're now owned by Sinclair. As well, Fox's broadcasting properties were spun off into their own company right before the acquisition, including BTN.

There are basically four major sports juggernauts in the US right now. ABC/ESPN, NBC, CBS, and Fox (which for obvious reasons Disney was not allowed to operate after the merger). Notice how that does cover all the broadcast networks. The lack of sports on broadcast television is not because they "can't afford" to license it.

Big events are only on broadcast because there would be riots if, say people couldn't watch the Super Bowl without paying a subscription fee. I remember when Disney moved MNF to ESPN, quite a few people complained.

There's two angles here:

* cable networks can get more revenue for a lot of types of sports than broadcast. ABC and their affiliates can make more in ad revenue from their regular programming than by showing random college basketball games every night.

* there's only so many broadcast channels anyway. ESPNU can make money from every national cable subscriber without having to find and pay a broadcast station in every single market.

The reason ABC can't afford to be sports-only is about both the cost of the sports content and the opportunity cost of using that spectrum just for sports.

And yes, Disney owns ABC and ESPN both. But that's because ABC chose to buy ESPN in the 90s than risk getting shut out of the sports game entirely. ESPN was a disruptoer before it was part of the establishment.

And a lot of today's ESPN content didn't come from ABC/NBC/CBS in the first place - early-2000s college sports, for instance, were broadcast by a lot of regional affiliation networks that were often shown OTA on various non-major-network stations in the conference region. Things like the B10 Network and SEC Network (aka ESPN) killed those because cable money (or the gamble that the cable money would be there, for the Big 10) let them outbid the old groups.

Thanks. I'm trying to unravel the 2nd paragraph. You seem to be explaining more why sports are NOT on OTA than why some still are. I'm not questioning the former.

"There would be riots" certainly explains the Super Bowl and World Series, but lots of other events are on OTA, too.

In particular, Fox. You said, "Fox's broadcasting properties were spun off into their own company." So why do Fox's broadcasting stations have any sports?

Is it that OTA still has a large viewership and thus ads are sometimes more lucrative than (small) subscription revenue?

Part of it is capitalizing on FOMO - if you can see some of the sports your relevant friend/family circle follows, and you wish to keep up with all of it, you're more likely to purchase the additional subscriptions necessary to do so.

Also, remember that a huge percentage of "OTA" viewership is from a non-OTA source, which today requires payment of fees to station affiliates (some of which are owned and operated by the networks, and all of which have agreements to pay a portion of those fees to the networks, even when independently owned). So the networks are making money from "OTA" besides the advertising. Thus, they do have an incentive to want people watching OTA, but they also want the additional money they can get from subscription services. I don't think I'd class OTA as a "loss leader", even if it does sometimes serve some of the same purposes as actually providing a service as a loss leader would.

Thanks again. Here's the NFL on OTA today for me: https://www.tvtv.us/ca/san-jose/95129/luUSA-OTA95129

10 am on CBS: Broncos at Kansas City

1 pm on Fox: 49ers at Las Vegas

5:30 on NBC: Steelers at Ravens

can you say more about what "huge percentage of 'OTA' viewership is from a non-OTA source" ? What does that mean?

Edit: Maybe you mean "people with a cable package that includes local stations?"

That's kind of circular, or perverse: they think they can't get them OTA (or maybe they really can't), so they pay for them. I don't think that really devalues OTA.

Further hypothesis: when people say "I can't get any reception where I live" they're talking about the old analog days?

When broadcasting first went digital, I bought one of those converters and used my old antenna. It really sucked and I got hardly anything. Now I have a new digital antenna, and it's like night and day.

By "non-OTA sources" I mean cable and streaming packages that include local stations, yes.

People by and large don't want to spend time getting their antenna setup just right, if I'm honest. It was always a bit of a pain in the rear, but the way digital OTA falls off means that marginal reception results in no viewable image, instead of a highly snowy but still quite functional signal (the brain can usually pick through even a huge amount of analog noise and still understand what is going on and being said). They'd much rather pay a service that will provide them the signal hassle-free.

The inherent need to orient your antenna correctly (or even move the rotation between channels), and the huge glut of extremely poorly made antenna equipment, is probably what heavily results in "I can't get any reception where I live". I understand 8VSB is also not the best form of encoding that the US could have chosen, and that COFDM (as used in Europe) is technically a better solution.

Regardless, the channels are still counted as OTA for the discussion. I only brought this up for awareness that TV stations, and by extension the networks, do make money directly from OTA broadcasting, besides that which comes from advertising revenue.

You're right, not everyone will have the experience I had, which was:

I hired a guy on TaskRabbit who attached the antenna to my already-existing old pole on the roof, and ran coax in the crawl space. All the stations in the Bay Area one cares about come from Twin Peaks in SF, and nothing's in the way for me. It never needs rotating. Many people in a suburban, flat area probably have a similar geography.

The antenna cost around $70. The TV has a coax connector on the back. That's it. The picture is perfect. YMMV.

I guess the takeaway is that OTA is NOT going away soon. It may well be a loss leader, but you can still go into a Safeway, buy their loss leader items, and leave without buying anything else.

Agreed, OTA isn't going away. The OP at the beginning of the thread stated that "broadcast" couldn't "afford sports" and I was merely countering that opinion. It's clear that for numerous reasons, the networks do have a vested interest in OTA broadcasting's continued existence.

I myself use an antenna, in mountainous Tennessee, and it's a little bit annoying to get a good signal sometimes. However, I handle it all myself, and I use an indoor antenna with all the downsides that brings to the table. Fortunately, all of the relevant transmitters are in roughly the same direction from where I'm located. You're fortunate to be in a situation where the geography favors OTA reception.

All this was enlightening, thanks. I already had an old antenna on the roof that was guy-wired down, so I was all set.

True. The NLDS and ALDS in baseball were all pay-only, except maybe one game on the weekend. I forget about the LCS's.

but both the big NCAA football games tomorrow will be on broadcast, I'm pretty sure.

Most football games are on over the air broadcast. Most big playoff series of the major leagues are too.

What channel was broadcasting old Dick Cavett?

I think the brand name is "TV through the decades."

Channel 1 in the Bay Area.

Neat. I like footage from young Cavett’s shows. There is a lingering and sincerely curious atmosphere to the conversations not present on Carson.

This same episode also had Rod Serling. The one tonight had Bette Davis.

I fear for the day when over‐the‐air broadcasts are no longer a one‐way connection. Apparently ATSC 3.0 has a capability to broadcast webapps that are then run on the receiver side.

I live in the middle of nowhere. I'd get one digital signal OTA, and I'd need an outdoor antenna above my roofline to get it.

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