Okay, not exactly cable, and there may be a little upfront cost; or not, if you or the previous people who lived in your place were lazy enough.
See, the other thing about over-the-air digital TV is that in addition to providing video good enough to show on a giant screen (seriously, guys, when I was in my teens, we thought a 25" color screen across the living room was huge and now that's the size of my computer monitor), there was bandwidth left over -- as the technology has improved, a lot of it. So now every over-the-air-channel has multiple extra "dot channels" to fill.* You can watch them free for nothing -- if you've got an antenna.
Some of the TV stations put together newswheels or local weather services for their additional channels, but there were already a few companies providing programming to low power TV stations, and a few independent TV channels in the largest cities that weren't quite the size of Chicago's WGN or Atlanta's WTBS but provided a similar mix of old and new. Those stations and not-quite-networks saw an opportunity and stepped up, making most of their money from commercials and offering their programming to fill the otherwise unused dot channels.
That was over a decade ago. In and around a big city, like, oh, Indianapolis, these days you have the usual ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC/PBS, but also MeTV (a kind of homage to a well-run independent local station, complete with Perry Mason and Andy Griffith reruns, Saturday morning cartoons and a Saturday night monster-movie host), a science fiction channel, two different Western channels, a full-time cartoon channel, a channel of action/adventure programming, one aimed at Black audiences, one for Indian/Southeast Asian viewers, scads of religious channels, a local newswheel and at least two classic-movie channels. It's better than you used to get from cable TV without the premium channels (and those are all available on streaming).
Tam mentioned this on her blog recently. If you live outside the big city and its bedroom communities, you'll probably need something better than old fashioned rabbit ears or a modern flat-panel indoor antenna (bigger is better for those -- you can hide it behind a picture if need be). You may find a spiky Yagi antenna hiding in your attic or on a pole strapped to your chimney, left over from the days before most people got cable TV. They work just as well with digital TV signals as they did with analog ones; the only difference is that if you had a lot of "snow" back then, digital TV will either come in great now or not at all; there's not much in-between with a digital signal. (If you do have to buy an antenna, all I can tell you is the brand I have stashed away in case the well-worn one on our chimney doesn't survive the raccoon removal process: Winegard has been making home TV antennas since way, way back. I'm sure there are other good brands, and there are still contractors around who install them.)
Rabbitears lets you look up TV stations serving your location, and lists the channel they transmit on ("Digital Channel") as well as the one your screen displays; it's not always the same. (This was supposed to be a clever idea to let stations maintain their established identity while everything got shuffled around during the analog-to-digital transition, but I have my doubts.) There are still a lot of stations on the VHF channels, even low-VHF, so in many locations, you want an antenna that picks them up as well as UHF. The channel information will help you figure that out.
Indianapolis has a staggering number of free channels, well over 70 depending on how fancy an antenna you have and if you're willing to point it in other directions than at the main cluster of towers on the northwest side of town. And that's about average. It's not "500 channels and nothing on," but these channels have to sing for their supper and there's probably something on one or two of them that'll hold your interest.
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* People call them "subchannels," which is technically inaccurate, or "dot channels," though the main channel is always "[Channel Number].1" and the others are 2, 3, 4, etc., so they're all dot channels. The channel changer on your remote clicks through them in order, same as always.
Update
1 year ago
4 comments:
It's good if you live in or near a metro area. If not, meh. I did a search for my location; two stations were rated "fair" and the rest were "bad".
Yes, digital has a shorter reach than analog as you can’t “sorta” get a channel that’s made of 0s and 1s. But for the 80+% of the population that lives 30-40 miles from an urban center, this is useful.
The other 20% are probably too busy sitting in diners waiting to be interviewed by the NYT. ;-)
I'm not even sure I'd say "shorter." Unless there is ghosting (reflections, a real problem for ATSC 1.0 signals), digital will give you a good signal where analog was fairly snowy and you got to know the pattern of every passing gas-burning tractor's ignition.
Borderline digital signals blink in and out in an annoying way, and that's the usual symptom of trying to use a set-top antenna where a larger attic or outdoor antenna is needed. A complicating factor is that a lot of set-top or wall hung indoor "digital" antennas are really only good for UHF channels, and sometimes not even the fine print will tell you -- though usually if you can't find the information, that means it's a UHF antenna that picks up VHF stations a little worse than a wire coat hanger would.
Most big cities have a "lighthouse" transmitter carrying all the N.1network stations via ATSC 3.0, and most recent TVs will prioritize that over the older standard. 3.0 is far more ghost-resistsant and noise-preventing, persistent stuff that will not be stayed by rain, snow, gloom of night or passing farm machinery -- but if you watch it side-by-side with an ATSC 1.0 version, it's tens of seconds delayed. All that fancy signal processing takes time!
In Toronto, and on a high bluff above Lake Ontario. Straight line of sight to Buffalo's WNED, broadcasting from Grand Island in the Niagara River (50 miles). Depending on weather, I can get other Buffalo stations too. Their transmitters are located farther, south of Buffalo.
I like free😀.
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