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Cable is a stinking pile of sog stuff. 90% of the channels are garbage and the picture quality sucks. I recently put an old-fashioned $40 antenna in my attic.
by mgleason_3 8y ago
Cable is a stinking pile of sog stuff. 90% of the channels are garbage and the picture quality sucks. I recently put an old-fashioned $40 antenna in my attic. It pulls in 156 channels (I’m in OC, CA about 40mi from Mt Wilson and 80mi from San Diego).
Compared with the 148 channels Spectrum provided (about 1/2 where duplicates) the quality is better on the few I watch intermittently (PBS, ABC, CBS...)
The crazy thing is my bill dropped from over $200 to $70 (for just internet).
Yea, I’m and idiot for not doing it sooner.
- guiomie 8y ago156 stations with one antenna in one location, really?
- mgleason_3 8y agoI know right? It’s amazing how many side channels it stacked up. I’ll admit there’s a lot of garbage and languages I don’t speak - that I should delete..
- prostoalex 8y agoWhich antenna did you end up using?
- ChuckMcM 8y ago192 in Sunnyvale, but I typically delete all but 30 or so.
- derefr 8y agoWe switched to digital OTA in part because it’s narrower. We can fit a lot more channels into the OTA TV bands than we used to. Too bad there’s so few people taking advantage.
- bamboozled 8y agoThe only thing is, once the streaming market has dominated, there is nothing stopping it to also turning into crap full of advertisements. I remember when cable was cheap and as-free. The transition looks good because it has too (to lure customers away from cable). My bet is that it’s only a matter of time till “personilized ads” are forced upon you.
- tachyonbeam 8y agoYouTube has definitely become more and more ad-ridden since its inceptions, and the ads are definitely personalized (though badly). There are now videos with multiple ad interruptions, a bit like ye olde TV. I do think one difference here is that on YouTube, if a video is full of ads, I won't keep watching long unless the content is solid and interesting. I, as a watcher, have a choice as to what I watch. Though of course, YouTube could fix that by imposing the same amount of ads on all videos.
- zwkrt 8y agoJust today I swear I was served an ad that didn't have a yellow bar, so we can all look forward to that hell. At least cable is produced to have ad breaks that make sense, as opposed to cutting sentences in half.
- Waterluvian 8y agoWhat's the point of the yellow bars? I'm a little surprised they exist in the first place. What were they added in response to?
- therealx 8y agoTo let you skip the ad before it's over. You typically have to wait a few seconds but it's less than the full wait.
- pjc50 8y agoAdblockers (and youtube-dl and newpipe) still work on youtube, fortunately. It'll be a sad day when they ban those.
- jchw 8y agoyoutube-dl already violates the ToS, of pretty much any service it supports. But I doubt it'll ever make up a noticeable amount of traffic and it's certainly very useful, so my personal bet is tools like this will mostly continue to work unless they somehow become a threat to services in some way.
- BadassFractal 8y agoIt's somewhat reminiscent of Uber/Lyft vs taxis, minus the sketchy business practices. The convenience and personalization of streamed content is so far superior to the previous solution.
- taxicabjesus 8y agoBusiness models change. Cable was a good business to get into 40 to 50 years ago. But it was a flash, soon to be replaced by the onward March of progress. I don’t stream anything regularly, because I find there are better things to do with my time than to veg out in front of a t.v. With regards to your dismissal of the old school transportation companies: The cab company I drove for dominated the market because it was basically reliable. There were problems at surge periods (rush hour and drinking holidays), but for the most part people could order a cab and expect it to arrive. The automated phone system worked fairly well to order a cab to an address your phone number had used previously. The upstarts fixed the 12-hour shift problem: their drivers can start and stop working whenever they want, whereas most taxi companies used 12/24 hour leases or week-long leases. The upstarts have not fixed the fact that cars are expensive and depreciate rapidly. Our little team put 100,000 miles a year on the cab we shared... The upstarts have also not figured out how to make driving pay well for the drivers. In the old days, drivers could buy their own cab and make a little bit more every week, and lease it out to other company drivers for the times they needed to take off. I think the transportation upstarts are going to run out of money. I’ve heard the old taxi company has reworked their business and is making more money than ever. Fewer employees (maintenance, etc) because now their drivers are using their own vehicles to take their contracted fares around. When/if they need a fleet again (after the upstarts run out of money) I’m sure they’ll figure something out.
- tyingq 8y agoIt's hard to use it after using Netflix or similar...the amount of commercials is just over the top. Even skipping them with DVR/FF is highly irritating.
- ukyrgf 8y agoIs this even really a comparison? You only watch broadcast channels, and now that you set up an antenna to receive those broadcasts, you're able to get broadcast channels. This has nothing to do with cable TV, premium networks, streaming platforms, etc.
- OrgNet 8y agoI get only about 60 free channels with my antenna but I pay $30/month for my internet... I also pay for Netflix though... If you use Comcast, you could probably lower your bill by visiting https://ns.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/ https://ns.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/