Just curious because I don’t see people talk about it a lot.
I assume this depends on where you live, though.
r/piracy megathread all the way
Definitely depends on where you are in the world. I don’t know if you could do that here in the upper Northwest of the States. I know my parents have a little tablet looking TV receiver they used to use that would get them free TV, but I don’t think it gets free sports or my dad would absolutely flip out over that football season.
I’m 28 so a little older than the prompt, I have a setup i never use it. I used it a lot as a kid but it doesn’t hold up to the alternatives.
- tv & movies: the worst matchup with alternatives. In the time of the first adbreak i could add the show or movie to my *arr and get it before the ads are done. I also don’t have to tune in on the hour/half hour and can switch to my phone/pc if I want/need to go somewhere else.
- live news: i don’t like tv news generally, but if i wanted i could watch it for free on YouTube or via free app.
- live sports: the most compelling usecase. Unfortunately when I did follow sports I followed a team from the next city over, which means they get no coverage here making it useless. It also more ads than streams. Streams are honestly still pretty inconvenient and still pretty ad filled (banner ads, “this goal sponsored by” physical ads in the arena). None of this is worth it to me anymore so I just don’t watch anymore.
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.
I’m 26+ miles away from the broadcast antennas as the crow flies and I get great reception from an approx $100 antenna mounted in my attic. Some HOAs don’t allow antennas and people might be surprised to learn how good your reception can be from an attic.
I guarantee a large rooftop a antenna would out perform anything you have indoors or those terrible small ones. The one you linked is way too small to work properly for the wavelengths used by TV stations.
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.
The switch to UHF is also a factor. Compared to VHF, UHF is much more susceptible to blockage by things like leaves. I live in a forest, and 70cm is basically useless while 2m is unaffected and I can work the nation on 6m.
The cost to move to America is quite steep, though, and there are significant drawbacks.
Dunno where you are but most countries I’ve visited in Europe have hundreds of free TV channels broadcast over the air. Minimal ads because a lot of the channels are tax subsidised, or like the UK, a loicense innit
Where I am, you get a TV streaming box from your ISP for a few euros, and streaming is free for about 200 channels; ad breaks are around one minute long every 30 minutes
Heck, here in the UK, we have a TV licence and the OG ad-free service, the BBC.
Yeah, the BBC has had its fair share of controversies over the years, but I’m still glad it’s there and still ad-free.
People who say the TV licence is a ripoff should be made to watch US cable TV. I nearly gouged my fucking eyes out with a rusty spoon.
The BBC produces the best quality TV programming on the planet
An awful lot of shite as well
That’s interesting! So it’s like free cable TV?
Not free, tax subsidised. It’s about €120 per year paid through local taxes. If it had the number of ads that cable has, nobody would watch it lol
I pay that much per month and get more commercials :(
The cost to be born and continue existing in the US is also quite steep and if you hope to avoid these costs, dying is also quite expensive and in some cases illegal.
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
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.
Cable isn’t the same as OTA but from a viewer standpoint they’re both live TV. Live TV in the US is basically unwatchable unless you really like sports or 24/7 news commentary (even then live news is usually also available through phone apps) and don’t mind being interrupted by ads every 2 minutes.
Anything else is better watched with torrents/piracy streaming sites. They don’t stop the show to serve some random combination of medicine, home insurance, and car ads.
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.
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
There being Hungary?
Yep.
Bad news, here is quickly turning into a shithole as well!
What about sports tho?
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 am aware. I am also aware that I haven’t used cable tv over a decade and I do not regret ditching that garbage
Yeah but instead of $60/mo, it’s free.
Free garbage is still garbage
So to answer the original question, have you tried it and are you under 25?
As someone who meets your criteria, why would I ever put an antenna on my shit again when I can just pirate things or block the ads? An added benefit is that companies think both hurt them as if they are people and subverting their BS fills me with joy.
Whether the commenters are talking cable or not, both are arguably garbage alternatives to more contemporary methods of streaming media except in special circumstances due to the abundance of cell tower coverage and bandwidth. I wish I could say that radio was not also lumped in with this, but again, 50% of airtime is ads and I find the radio in my car less useful with each passing year.
You’re allowed to like something and have people younger than you disagree. Fighting and talking down to them isn’t going to change their minds. It’s cool that you still get use out of older technology for free, but not everyone gets the same value from it.
If anything, don’t blame young people for ruining your technology, blame capitalism for enshittifying it.
17 here, my grandparents used it before switching 1-2 years ago. Can’t imagine the ads are any better that less people watch it and staticy stations were annoying.
I myself don’t watch TV that much, mainly YouTube or music. In the last month I’ve watched ~3 episodes of impractical jokers on the family TV, and 8 episodes of South Park on my Steamdeck before bed.
Bro is 17 in this economy 💀
Imagine
Ads, ads everywhere.
Besides there, there is also a 4k OTA standard, ATSC 3.0. Most TVs don’t support it yet, but some do. Worth googling before you buy. You can also get something like an silcondust 4k standalone tuner and plug that into your home network instead. You then load its app to watch over the air TV in 4k.
If you do buy the silicondust tuner, you can go further and get a DVR going. Plenty of free projects that will help you setup and record TV like jellyfin, and many of them will auto-skip the ads too with an application called comskip.
No OTA broadcasts in the US utilize 4k yet. ATSC 3.0 is being utilized some, but not exclusively, but no one is broadcasting 4k unfortunately
Atsc 3.0 requires an internet connection for it’s bullshit DRM
Woww, over the air broadcasts with copy protection? 🤮
It’s like they want OTA TV to die off.
That seems entirely pointless then, why not just stream the content.
Bandwidth is cheaper from the tower since the signal is the “same” for each client and it can then be distributed over a wide area. You send the “DRM” (Just a fancy encryption key) over the network since it’s relatively small and likely unique to each device (probably fingerprinting the device ids to the content invisibily in case of piracy).
Multicast is a thing, though it doesn’t seem to be widespread. That would make a lot more sense than this weird DRM broadcast system.
Multicast still requires more expensive less widespread bandwidth than sending out analog signals ota & shooting off a few packets of encryption information every now and then. US infrastructure has rapidly improved over the past few years, but we’re still a farcry from anything robust and reliable enough to serve the people benefiting from this type of content.
Having the receiver phone home would have the benefit of generating more accurate viewership data, where broadcast tv has historically relied on representative cohorts.
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.
Also attempts to make the ads more invasive (louder in this case) are literally legally limited by the federal government.
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
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.
Ah. Well if your PC is static, a USB tuner isn’t too much. Plus then you have a built-in DVR.
If you have a TV, you likely already have the receiving device. Antenna can cost, or you can play around with wire length and orientation.
You mean OTA TV? I don’t even watch sports, the rest has 10 minute advertisements. And considering it’s digital, I don’t find it interesting at all. Yes, a weird reason, but anyway.
For like $150, you can get a Tablo DVR or similar that records what you want to watch, auto skips the ads, and streams it over WiFi to your phone or laptop. Just leave it on for a year and boom: entire season of whatever show is now yours forever for free.
Just pirate it at that point.
Eh. There’s also the serendipity of it. There’s a half dozen shows that we regularly watch that we only know about because they were randomly on TV.
I think the overlap of tech literacy and nostalgia for a 90s/00s tv feel is quite small. You found your niche though my man, good work.
How do you skip live ads unless you’ve pre-buffered at least 1hr in advance
You don’t, but that only applies to sports or things that you need to watch live.
My mum has a Tivo-like box that allows her to record things and catch up with them later. She still watches all of her series live, so she can gossip with her friends about it the next day. The most useful feature of that setup is that she can pause the show if someone calls her or she needs the toilet, but she wont miss a show that was scheduled for that day
Or you could just use https://bitsearch.to/and save yourself buying a TV
