Just curious because I don’t see people talk about it a lot.
You can also watch Pluto TV. No sign in or fee. Lots of 24:7 dedicated channels for shows like Midsommer Murders, MST3K, Americas Test Kitchen, etc as well as variety genre channels
Are you my wife? Since we discovered Pluto, our TVs are constantly flipping between America’s Test Kitchen, MST3K, Antiques Roadshow and Jersey Shore if we’re feeling especially rowdy.
There’s also a Mr Rodger’s Neighborhood channel that our we leave running in the mornings for kid and dogs when we leave hah.
I’m aware of it I’m also aware that I live in an area that can’t get any freaking signals at all. Not sure why that’s true though.
The transition from analog to digital really hurt my desire to watch OTA TV (you caught me! I’m not under 25).
With analog broadcast, any weak signal or interference produced a little bit of static, but you could still see and hear what was being said. With digital, any weak signal means dropped frames and silence or weird glitches. You completely lose what’s happening. Even with a powered antenna, I have frequent issues with weak signal. I could probably try to get a rooftop antenna installed, but there’s no guarantee it would be any better. It’s just easier to find other entertainment at this point.
I hear that. We have an attic yagi aimed directly at Seattle from 10 miles away, and we still get the occasional dropout even on our strongest signals.
Still when it works, it works really well. We watch Nature and Nova on Sundays, and the wildlife footage looks incredible.
Linear TV over an antenna? Well that’s only technically free. You’d need to buy a receiving device - that costs money. You need to watch ads - that costs time.
Well considering many paid tiers of streaming services also serve ads, I consider it free-er than that.
Also, most of the hardware is already inside your TV. You just need a $20 antenna.
I have no TV. I watch all my movies and series via a big PC screen which has no TV functionality.
Ah. Well if your PC is static, a USB tuner isn’t too much. Plus then you have a built-in DVR.
You can also just pirate
"Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
You are a pirate!"
A $10 antenna to watch NFL games is so much more convenient and better quality than any of the pirated streaming options. Broadcast TV trumps Pirating for live shit 100%. Pirate everything else.
Yeah but then you have to watch football. Why go through the suffering? Lol
Living in tornado alley, having a TV antenna and a weather radio is almost a requirement. If the Internet gets knocked out, OTA still works. Also, my Internet is shit so I wouldn’t rely on it if a tornado is bearing down on my location, but I do also love watching 9½ hours of nonstop tornado coverage when nasty storms might come my way.
Outside of that, I know to tune in at about :15 past the hour during newscasts to catch the weather report, which gets uploaded to their website later anyway. If the football game is on, I might catch that if I care to watch. I don’t really watch OTA otherwise.
But I’m 32 lol
Removed by mod
I don’t care about cable TV. In Hungary nearly all news broadcasts over here are just propaganda machines and spitting out literal garbage content. Also the ads.
UbO + Internet + torrent goes br
See this is what I’m talking about. Cable is not the same as over the air. I’m not sure how your cable works in Hungary content/pricing-wise, but I do find it funny that a lot of younger people in this thread are lumping the two together.
What about sports tho?
This (applies everywhere). Besides it’s all aimed at boomers and not at all engaging. People who are internet savvy can easily find better free content.
Im really glad I moved to germany, aside from all my bad experiences there, the whole place was a shithole from the beginning. I just want to See that place burn
Whatever, all free broadcasts are on YouTube anyways. But on demand and adblock exists
Does this include american football games?
Not youtube but there are sites that have every game and their condensed versions but never live.
Edit: not including pirate options.
Wait, what? Are you talking about people who upload content and try to slide by the copyright filters?
I love my rabbit ears. Watch local news and the super bowl if I care that year.
The cost to move to America is quite steep, though, and there are significant drawbacks.
Dunno where you are but most countries I’ve visited in Europe have hundreds of free TV channels broadcast over the air. Minimal ads because a lot of the channels are tax subsidised, or like the UK, a loicense innit
Where I am, you get a TV streaming box from your ISP for a few euros, and streaming is free for about 200 channels; ad breaks are around one minute long every 30 minutes
Heck, here in the UK, we have a TV licence and the OG ad-free service, the BBC.
Yeah, the BBC has had its fair share of controversies over the years, but I’m still glad it’s there and still ad-free.
People who say the TV licence is a ripoff should be made to watch US cable TV. I nearly gouged my fucking eyes out with a rusty spoon.
The BBC produces the best quality TV programming on the planet
An awful lot of shite as well
That’s interesting! So it’s like free cable TV?
Not free, tax subsidised. It’s about €120 per year paid through local taxes. If it had the number of ads that cable has, nobody would watch it lol
I pay that much per month and get more commercials :(
Yes.
https://fmhy.net/videopiracyguide#live-tv-sports
Although I don’t tune in to live sports, I just share resources to find free livestreams/media with others :P
IPTV is also pretty great
The ads on over the air programming are so so terrible. And even with a great antenna the many channels aren’t exactly the highest quality content even if they didn’t have ads.
YouTube has taken the place of over the air TV and for good reason.
It has taken the place in people’s behaviour but it has not taken the place functionally. No doubt, you use technology to filter ads out of YouTube viewing, and one could do the same with OTA broadcasts.
Also attempts to make the ads more invasive (louder in this case) are literally legally limited by the federal government.
I am aware. I am also aware that I haven’t used cable tv over a decade and I do not regret ditching that garbage
Yeah but instead of $60/mo, it’s free.
Free garbage is still garbage
So to answer the original question, have you tried it and are you under 25?
Ads, ads everywhere.
Besides there, there is also a 4k OTA standard, ATSC 3.0. Most TVs don’t support it yet, but some do. Worth googling before you buy. You can also get something like an silcondust 4k standalone tuner and plug that into your home network instead. You then load its app to watch over the air TV in 4k.
If you do buy the silicondust tuner, you can go further and get a DVR going. Plenty of free projects that will help you setup and record TV like jellyfin, and many of them will auto-skip the ads too with an application called comskip.
Atsc 3.0 requires an internet connection for it’s bullshit DRM
That seems entirely pointless then, why not just stream the content.
Bandwidth is cheaper from the tower since the signal is the “same” for each client and it can then be distributed over a wide area. You send the “DRM” (Just a fancy encryption key) over the network since it’s relatively small and likely unique to each device (probably fingerprinting the device ids to the content invisibily in case of piracy).
Multicast is a thing, though it doesn’t seem to be widespread. That would make a lot more sense than this weird DRM broadcast system.
Multicast still requires more expensive less widespread bandwidth than sending out analog signals ota & shooting off a few packets of encryption information every now and then. US infrastructure has rapidly improved over the past few years, but we’re still a farcry from anything robust and reliable enough to serve the people benefiting from this type of content.
Having the receiver phone home would have the benefit of generating more accurate viewership data, where broadcast tv has historically relied on representative cohorts.
Woww, over the air broadcasts with copy protection? 🤮
It’s like they want OTA TV to die off.
