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Broadcast TV seems laughably irrelevant. It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable, satellite TV, home Internet, or a
by trollbridge 2mo ago
Broadcast TV seems laughably irrelevant. It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable, satellite TV, home Internet, or a cell phone. The latter two are how people consume video and TV to a large degree today.
In exchange, we have a great deal of spectrum tied up for terrestrial TV, much of which goes to running infomercials or else is surreptitiously leased for terrestrial data broadcasts. And the government gets to decide to regulate it so it becomes inherently politicised - like favouring certain owners.
Realistically - this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc.
(Radio is pretty much the same boat but I can see a case to be made for keeping some analog FM radio broadcasts. The 6MHz per channel for TV is insane.)
- dyauspitr 2mo ago> but under 1% of US households have no cable, satellite TV, home Internet, or a cell phone. Why are you bundling all those things together? The only thing we care about here is cable or satellite TV for your argument.
- eigencoder 2mo agoThose are all the things that replace broadcast TV
- dyauspitr 2mo agoWell, cell phones and home Internet theoretically also replace cable and satellite TV but that’s not really what you see in real life.
- eigencoder 2mo agoMy 70 year old grandpa just cancelled his satellite TV in favor of streaming :)
- mulmen 2mo agoThey replace it for delivery. That's not what this is about. The change discussed here is about content creation. That content is already delivered through multiple channels.
- trollbridge 2mo agoBecause someone with access to those things has no need for rabbit ears. Broadcast TV today is a stream of bytes. The same stream can be delivered via cable, satellite, a cell phone, or home Internet.
- mulmen 2mo agoThis isn't about content delivery, it is about content creation. The rule change allows further centralization of editorial control of what your local reporters broadcast across all mediums.
- wmf 2mo agoI heard in some European countries they packed digital SD channels into less spectrum (one 6 MHz channel can carry 4-5 TV channels). We should have done that here instead of broadcasting HD.
- UncleOxidant 2mo agoHere in the US I get PBS on Channel 10 - there's 10.1 (straight PBS), 10.2 (PBS-World) and 10.3 (PBS kids) - do each of these take a separate 6MHz bandwidth, or are they packed into that single 6MHz bandwidth like in Europe?
- wmf 2mo agoYeah, that's one channel. IMO it's wasteful to give PBS an entire 6 MHz.
- Animats 2mo agoESPN, however, demands that they get the full 6 MHz.
- MrRadar 2mo agoWhy shouldn't they get 6 MHz? My PBS station broadcasts 4 subchannels: the main PBS channel, PBS Kids, a channel with programming about our local region (which airs live coverage of our state legislature when it's in session), and a loop of weather information with audio from the local NOAA Weather Radio broadcast. Those are all useful public services. PBS Kids in particular I think has a very good reason to exist, considering the absolute wasteland that is young children's media on streaming.
- jyoung8607 2mo agoThat's already widely done in the US. If you plug in an antenna and scan for local channels, what used to be one analog TV channel on colloquially-named "channel 7" in the defined channel 7 frequency range will now be seen as "channel 7-1" which is often (but not always!) actually broadcast on the old frequency. During the ATSC transition, it was important to retain the branding and consumer memory of "channel 7" even when the RF transport frequency changed. The transition opened the ability to have an arbitrary number of digital subchannels, 7-2, 7-3, etc etc. The total bitrate available on a given ATSC broadcast is fixed, but it can be partitioned among multiple MPEG streams. The typical setup is one (occasional two) HD channels and several SD channels. Obviously there's a balancing act between bitrate and visual quality for each subchannel. It's often used as a way to broadcast older (read: cheaper) syndicated SD content on which they can run more ads while keeping the main HD channel quality reasonably acceptable.
- CamperBob2 2mo agoBroadcast TV seems laughably irrelevant. The people who watch it vote in numbers far out of proportion to their peers. Nobody would bother to capture the industry if it weren't worthwhile.
- francisofascii 2mo agoIrrelevant? I was under the impression cord cutting is pretty common. If you want to watch live sports or the news, you need CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX. We use a MoHu antenna in the attic.
- sophacles 2mo agoYou can watch all of these things on the internet (legally).
- kelnos 2mo agoFor free? (Legally.)
- DoctorOW 2mo agoEven then you're watching them from those broadcast stations. The live channel feeds in those apps is from your local station, and if you're watching any local news it's also clips from your station's newscast. You'll be impacted by fewer perspectives as stations consolidate. Is easy to think about content from a consumer mindset that everything just exists for you, but no the stuff on the internet is made by real people who are impacted by the works around them.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoI get all of those via streaming, local affiliates even, on Fubo. Hulu was similar IIRC. Have not had cable TV in years, even longer since I used an antenna.
- otterley 2mo agoYou're paying for Fubo, though, are you not? It's not a free service like OTA TV is.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoCorrect.
- UncleOxidant 2mo ago> this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc. We've got internet, but no cable. So we still watch over-the-air TV, though it's mostly PBS at this point (which is non profit). Also listen to FM radio - mostly NPR, a jazz station and a classical station - all also non-profit.
- ericmay 2mo agoWe have everything and still use antennas for local broadcast: NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Fox. Sports, especially football, are very easy to access over the air.
- mikeaskew4 2mo agoIt’s nuts to pay for commercials. More people have antennas (or griddles or whatever they are now) than get credit.
- brewdad 2mo agoThe advantage of watching live sports over the air rather than streaming is that there is no delay and the broadcast is as high quality as it can get rather than getting compressed by your streaming app.
- trollbridge 2mo agoPBS and the rest of the broadcast industry could just offer streams of their channels over the Internet. It’s a choice they make not to. (Disclaimer: used to work at PBS on the team with the guy who was tirelessly trying to get them to do this back in 2001.)
- walrus01 2mo ago> Broadcast TV seems laughably irrelevant. It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable, It's not that people are literally watching these on over the air digital TV antenna systems, but that if you have a "Broadcast TV" station in a certain market, it becomes carried by default on cable systems, direct to home satellite satellite dish systems, and regional FTTH providers' last-mile cable-tv-equivalent products. Look at for example how all the Seattle TV stations are carried on Comcast or Astound's networks.
- Animats 2mo agoAmusingly, there are streaming sites you can't watch without permission from your "television provider".
- erickhill 2mo agoExcept for live sports, for which it is still vastly superior - no subscription required.
- Marsymars 2mo agoFunny how this has diverged in Canada/USA which otherwise have broadly similar broadcast markets in many respects. The broadcast stations have been gutted of sports content in favour of a couple of specialty channels which are a combined $70/month for streaming/app subscriptions.
- mulmen 2mo agoThis analysis doesn't pass the sniff test. The presence of cable, satellite, or internet access says nothing about broadcast TV viewership. This is ownership of the content creation of local stations, not just the broadcast towers. Those stations have a presence on social media and streaming services.
- BeetleB 2mo ago> It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable, satellite TV, home Internet, or a cell phone. The latter two are how people consume video and TV to a large degree today. Fairly wrong/irrelevant metric. Lots of people subscribe to Netflix and watch OTA broadcasts. Lots of people stick to a Plex membership just because of its DVR capability - that's for broadcast TV. Lots of DVR and adjacent products out there on the market for people who watch broadcast TV. I wouldn't dream of getting a cable subscription when I can get so much good content for free. Streaming fills the rest.
- toast0 2mo ago> Realistically - this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc. They did this in the US already, three times. In 1983, channels 70 to 83 were taken for mobile phones. In 2008, rf channels 52-69 were reassigned, and 2016, rf 38-51 were reassigned. rf 37 is reserved for radio astronomy.
- pessimizer 2mo agoWow, the people buying them up must be really stupid then. You should tell them.
- golem14 2mo agoThat's just step 1. In step 2, the argument goes: "See this is already allowed for broadcast tv. Streaming is no different, so we demand the same change there"... and so on.
- anon7000 2mo agoWhy the fuck would I spend thousands of dollars on cable or satellite or streaming when I can buy a $20 antenna once, plug it into the back of any modern TV, and get free channels (including major sporting events) forever? People don’t use broadcast because they don’t know how to set it up, or because they don’t have a TV, or because they can justify buying cable for whatever reason.