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.
Have you checked signal finder sites like tvfool.com? I’ll show you what (if any) signals you should get and from where they are transmitted.
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.
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.
Ditto. We went from having five channels, one snowy on a bad day, plus a bonus 6th channel when the stars aligned, to two channels at best.
The broadcasters and regulators took a basic fact about digital signals “We can get a better quality signal with less transmission power” and saw it as a challenge to set up their digital transmitters with the most conservative estimate of minimum power required. I haven’t studied well enough for my amateur radio exam to know if I’m comparing apples to oranges, but I’m still shocked to see descriptions of transmitter power go from 100kW in one case to below 20kW.
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.
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
You can also just 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
Whatever, all free broadcasts are on YouTube anyways. But on demand and adblock exists
Wait, what? Are you talking about people who upload content and try to slide by the copyright filters?
Does this include american football games?
I love my rabbit ears. Watch local news and the super bowl if I care that year.
They recently cut our cable because it’s no longer included in the rent and I’m not willing to pay extra. I haven’t even noticed.
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
23 year old here btw
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.
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
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.
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
(Assuming you mean DVB-T). In some place OTA is just the standard. Where I’m from cable TV is simply unheard of and all terrestrial digital channels are free with varying degree of ads.
Another great example of how things work so different in different parts of the world
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.
I am curious though, what do you recommend?
YouTube, free broadcasts are on there
Pick up Tablo or HDHomerun. Connect an antenna. Drop it in a closet or wherever you get the best reception. Then just record stuff you like. You can browse from any media streaming box (AppleTV, etc).
There’s decent content in there and after the upfront cost, it’s free.
Vaguely aware that’s a thing you can do, but I have no reason to use it as I don’t really watch anything on regular TV anyway
