Calblog: The End of Cable?

September 28, 2004

The End of Cable?

Long ago, I mentioned my ability to capture HDTV Over The Air(OTA) Broadcast Signals with an indoor antenna. Now about 4 months later, I'm still happy to say I'm receiving broadcasts in HD, and let me tell you...Football in HDTV is amazing...Scary at times (people look a lot more flawed), but Amazing!

If you didn't believe me before, now a technology writer for MSNBC is writing about getting HDTV over the air. I quote for your amusement "Over-the-air HDTV is amazing when you see it. There is no snow, ghosts or shadows. Either you zero in on the signal and have perfect video � or you receive nothing at all. The picture quality is so good it even fooled two cable installers in my home. They had to physically watch the antenna move before they believed that they were watching over-the-air HD television."

One of the interesting things about HDTV OTA is that multiple channels can be broadcast in a single FCC bandwidth range. (In English) So, when I get PBS (UHF Channel 53) I get PBS-1, PBS-2, PBS-3, and PBS-4. For ABC (UHF Channel 61), I get ABC-1, the regular local channel and ABC-2, (ABC News Now), with any luck 2 years down the road FOX will Multicast Fox News Channel, and NBC multicast CNBC. Maybe it'll never happen, but I can dream. As more people discover this more, I think more people will move away from traditional cable, and companies will decide to broadcast.

Oh by the way, the Terk antenna mentioned in the article does work, but you can find cheaper antennas that work as well or better pretty easily. Additionally if you want to see what channels you can easily receive over the air, the best site for that is www.antennaweb.org.

Posted by Joel at September 28, 2004 04:28 PM | TrackBack

Comments

I doubt they'll decide to start broadcasting their cable channels, because they're so used to getting money out of fees.

I actually suspect that if digital TV becomes popular, it may actually reduce the number of channels, since it's harder to support all the little networks without charging the viewers, especially when broadcasting TV over the airwaves costs considerably more than sending it to Comcast and letting them do the legwork.

Posted by: John A. Kalb at September 29, 2004 08:20 AM (Permalink)

OTA is fine, but I love my DirecTV HD TiVo.

As far as antennae go, Terk isn't widely praised.

A great site for entirely too much information is AVS Forum

Posted by: Kevin Murphy at September 29, 2004 03:15 PM (Permalink)

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