WSJ: Millennials discover 'free TV' over the air

NAD80 said:
Reality is FUN!. Anybody remember the era (40's,50's,60's,70's) before cable? I do. All I get OTA is ABC,CBS,NBC,PBS 12-14 channels total from here.
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For the 70's all we got was NBC and ABC. If we moved the antenna we got a fuzzy CBS. Then FOX came onto the scene and we got 3 channels all the time! We were too far out from things for cable and surrounded by tree covered hills. On the plus side we were too far out from things and surrounded by tree covered hills :)
 
If you live in a urban area you do have a lot of over the air choices here in Cheyenne there are prehaps 7 stations of those only 4 have strong signals. I don't do cable or satellite either. There is so much stuff to watch on a Apple TV, Roku, Amazon FireStick. I have lost interest in most everything else.
 
Just shows how brain dead so many people really are. I have only used OTA and a Roof Antenna and will not pay for TV until there is no other choice. I have FIOS for Internet Only.
 
transmaster said:
There is so much stuff to watch on a Apple TV, Roku, Amazon FireStick. I have lost interest in most everything else.
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Between the Roku for Netflix & HBO Now and Amazon Prime for everything else, I really can't say the last time I had network on for anything.
 
soundmotor said:
Between the Roku for Netflix & HBO Now and Amazon Prime for everything else, I really can't say the last time I had network on for anything.
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What few times I am where I can see network TV it is like I am watching something from a strange alien planet.
 
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NAD80 said:
Grew up watching Creature Features, ABC (7) put on the Japanese Godzilla movies at 4:30-6:00 during the afternoons. Managed to catch quite a few of the SF,Horror flicks of the 30's thru the 60's growing up. MannyE the 4am timing was a filler spot and then they could get away with showing the show with less cuts. Faulty Towers. Loved the British Comedies.
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In Cincy we had a great independent station when I was a kid, channel 19 WXIX. Had Godzilla, bunch of other Asian TV shows (Ultra-Man, anyone?) and Marvel cartoons after school. Ended up a FOX affiliate I think.

OTA, from the northern burbs of Cincinnati in the 1970s we could get:
2: Dayton
5: CIN NBC
7: Dayton
9: CIN CBS
12: CIN ABC
19: CIN Independent, later FOX
(22?): Dayton
45: Dayton
48: CIN PBS
64: CIN Independent (1980s-on), CW now?
I think channels 9 and 12 flipped networks at some point. On very rare occasions, I have seen ch. 3 Louisville (WAVE) come in, in that area.

In the late 1980s in Columbus, there was a low-power station which I could pull in because I lived across the river from the station, W08BV. They played music videos about 18 hours a day, HS sports evenings, then did a creature feature on weekends. When they went off the air, I gave in and signed up for cable.

Those were the days.
 
No cable TV here. The only thing I've ever used were OTA antennas, or DirecTV back in the early days. $29.99/month used to get you every basic channel; premium movie channels were more, but I never had a reason to view those. (And in the earliest days, all of the premium satellite channels were offered by a company called USSB, except for Starz which was on DirecTV.) Satellite back then never had the approvals to broadcast local channels, although they finally worked out deals and started adding them. Kind of felt like a "wild frontier" at the time, and the small satellite dish was a conversation starter for visitors and neighbors. :)

My better half streams Netflix and maybe one other service but other than that, no cable TV programming. Internet is through regional provider WOW, who has always given me more reliable service than Comcrap ever was able to. AT&T is running fiber throughout our area, but I don't know if I would want to attempt switching. I like what I have now, and the price is fair.

The only thing I miss out on is NHL. I would pay NHL or Fox Sports just to get Red Wings games, maybe $5/month or so, which is probably more than the share they would get through my paying for a premium cable TV package just to get those games. Yet neither NHL or FSD offers this as an Internet streaming option (and neither does ESPN for that matter). These cable networks are behind the times. If they realized they could make money offering a la carte streaming choices to customers, they'd probably do it. But they are too stuck in their ways, and legal contracts, for it to happen any time soon.

toxcrusadr said:
150 miles is beyond the line of sight for TV due to the curvature of the Earth, isn't it? Although I suppose you have to take into account the elevation of the broadcast tower.
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My guess it is marketing-speak. 150 miles...75 miles in each direction, in other words. Typically misleading. FM and TV are similar in range and it is fairly hard to get anything beyond 60-70 miles, amplified or not.
transmaster said:
If you live in a urban area you do have a lot of over the air choices here in Cheyenne there are prehaps 7 stations of those only 4 have strong signals.
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We have access to a handful in the greater Detroit area, but I've found that it was easiest to get one antenna to point towards Southfield where most of the local broadcast antennas are located, and then point one southwest towards Canada (Amherstburg if I'm not mistaken, where a couple of channels broadcast from). They can be "multiplexed" together with the right box outdoors, and feed a single antenna input. I do have a spare amplifier sitting around unused, in case I should ever need it.
 
CT_Ohio said:
It almost reads like something from The Onion. Not sure why younger viewers singled out; my mother will *not* miss her Columbo reruns on the local broadcast side channel.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/millen...ng-hack-to-get-free-tv-the-antenna-1501686958

excerpt:

Carlos Villalobos, 21, who was selling tube-shaped digital antennas at a swap meet in San Diego recently, says customers often ask if his $20 to $25 products are legal. “They don’t trust me when I say that these are actually free local channels,” he says.


Earlier this year, he got an earful from a woman who didn’t get it. “She was mad,” he recalls. “She says, ‘No, you can’t live in America for free, what are you talking about?’”


Almost a third of Americans (29%) are unaware local TV is available free, according to a June survey by the National Association of Broadcasters, an industry trade group.
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I wouldn't normally awaken an older thread like this but I doubt the original poster will mind... oh, that's me. Huh. I don't even have a WSJ subscrip anymore.

And as of this evening, I don't have cable TV either. Switched to OTA plus streaming (Sling and Am Prime over Roku device). 12 buck '1byone' brand antenna w/nice long lead (makes a huge difference in placement) pulled in 41 channels on first scan; and a Roku Premier which I got a discount on. Only hassle so far is basketball on streaming is a bit hit or miss due to the amount of motion in picture. Audio's good; watched an Expanse episode last night, that was 5x5.

So one more vote for cutting the cord, I guess. And Mom's still watching her Columbo on OTA :0
 
IIRC it was some disparaging comments about millenniums by some of the codgers that may have shut it down or set it aside for review.
Mods may have cleaned it up and turned it back loose tho.
 
transmaster said:
If you live in a urban area you do have a lot of over the air choices here in Cheyenne there are prehaps 7 stations of those only 4 have strong signals. I don't do cable or satellite either. There is so much stuff to watch on a Apple TV, Roku, Amazon FireStick. I have lost interest in most everything else.
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Cheyenne is certainly an urban center. Only problem is if one person leaves, that creates a vacuum there.
 
I think a lot of people that didn't grow up around a rotary phone are going to be baffled at first. When I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s, we lived a ways out in the country but not too far from a highway. We were still using rotary phones at the time. Being pre-cellphone days, it wasn't terribly unusual to have motorists stop and ask to use the phone. Even back then there were a few 20-somethings who would gingerly poking at the holes on the dial for a few seconds and then have to ask for help.
 
I wonder if the "codgers" in the 50s were mocking the kids that didn't know how the pedals on a Model T operated or how to hand-crank a car to start it. Maybe in the 30s the old timers were laughing at the kids with their new-fangled gasoline engine tractors that didn't know how to run a coal-fired steam traction engine. I don't know how to salt pork to lay it up for the winter, but my great-grandmother did. It doesn't automatically mean she was a smarter person than me, it just means that I have a freezer and she didn't.

Dunno, I guess I just get tired of hearing the constant bashing of the younger generation. Maybe try teaching instead of laughing at people's ignorance.
 
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