Millennials Unearth an Amazing Hack to Get Free TV: the Antenna (wsj.com) 564
From a report on WSJ: Dan Sisco has discovered a technology that allows him to access half a dozen major TV channels, completely free. "I was just kind of surprised that this is technology that exists (alternative source)," says Mr. Sisco, 28 years old. "It's been awesome. It doesn't log out and it doesn't skip." Let's hear a round of applause for TV antennas, often called "rabbit ears," a technology invented roughly seven decades ago, long before there was even a cord to be cut, which had been consigned to the technology trash can along with cassette tapes and VCRs. The antenna is mounting a quiet comeback, propelled by a generation that never knew life before cable television, and who primarily watch Netflix , Hulu and HBO via the internet. Antenna sales in the U.S. are projected to rise 7 percent in 2017 to nearly 8 million units, according to the Consumer Technology Association, a trade group. Mr. Sisco, an M.B.A. student in Provo, Utah, made his discovery after inviting friends over to watch the Super Bowl in 2014. The online stream he found to watch the game didn't have regular commercials -- disappointing half of his guests who were only interested in the ads. "An antenna was not even on my radar," he says. He went online and discovered he could buy one for $20 and watch major networks like ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS free.
If you color the tip of the antenna with a (Score:5, Funny)
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Can you explain the joke for those of us who didn't grow up with antennas?
Re:If you color the tip of the antenna with a (Score:5, Informative)
Can you explain the joke for those of us who didn't grow up with antennas?
The joke is about CDs (compact discs) and coloring the edge of the CD to improve sound quality.
http://www.snopes.com/music/me... [snopes.com]
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This hack only works for Bruce Banner.
Paywalled (Score:4, Insightful)
Article is Paywalled. Alternate Source?
I grew up using an antenna for all of my TV needs. Now I have a TiVo Roamio OTA with a lifetime subscription (which I got a for a couple hundred dollars) for all of my DVR and app (Netflix, Hulu, etc) needs.
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Same here, although I found the Tivo interface with Amazon Prime, Netflix somewhat clunky and sloooooww.
I only use the Tivo OTA Roamio to DVR my over the air stations, and I also have Tivo Minis that connect to it for each room with a TV.
I use an Amazon FireTV for my streaming....much better for Netf
Re:Paywalled (Score:5, Funny)
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Next up, Millennials will "discover" an amazing hack to reading the news -- buying a printed newspaper from a newspaper stand! More at 11!
"There's no batteries to run out!", they exclaimed.
Re:Paywalled (Score:5, Funny)
Next up, Millennials will "discover" an amazing hack to reading the news -- buying a printed newspaper from a newspaper stand! More at 11!
"There's no batteries to run out!", they exclaimed.
Oh, no no no, not printed newspapers.
Those things can catch fire.
Just try it. Spread one out on the floor or sofa and just light one corner of the thing. See what happens. You'll want to be able to put it out, so be sure to have a full bladder before you begin.
When I was a kid, all we had to play with was fire. And we were glad to have it.
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Okay, found news stand, bought newspaper, I've been tapping and swiping it for half an hour now and it still shows the same page. Halp!
Re: Paywalled (Score:5, Funny)
I tried one of those. Fairly low resolution but huge screen size for a portable; manual zoom and the other controls are basic but work well, though not when it's windy for some reason. Easy to read in bright sunlight but sadly there's no backlight. Water resistance is poor though I saw someone using one as a makeshift hat in a downpour! Annotations can be made with an ink or graphite stylus. Cut and Paste works but is messy and Copy is quite slow. I've had mine for several weeks and as far as I can tell, it never needs recharging. I can't get the updates to work though.
This is not news, news for nerds, or interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
What the fuck.
Re:This is not news, news for nerds, or interestin (Score:5, Insightful)
For real.
"We interviewed some dumbshit kid and he said some dumbshit things! Millenails are turning society on it's head!"
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Boomer here. You sound like a Gen X'er who's having a little difficulty with the generational succession thing; let me help you out.
On the plus side, your're older and wiser now. Congratulations. That's something you should feel proud of.
On the minus side you are no longer cool. You are the opposite of cool. It happens almost overnight. Yesterday you and your cohort were on top of the world, the center of attention, the apple of the media's eye; but when you woke up to day you didn't realize it, but yo
Re:This is not news, news for nerds, or interestin (Score:4, Insightful)
You are the opposite of cool. It happens almost overnight.
Indeed. I remember the day it happened to me!
I am amused by all this millennial hate. The generational wars have always been with us and will always be with us, and they're always stupid.
As a wise (older and deeply uncool) man once told me: every generation thinks:
1) That they invented sex
2) That the generation before them are corrupt idiots
3) That the generation after them are lazy idiots
4) That their generation is the last reasonable one before the collapse of civilization
All of those things are just as true now as they were a thousand years ago. Which is to say, not even a little bit true. But it amuses me to see the tradition carrying on.
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But it's about those wacky millenials!
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Most old TVs did not come with a built-in antenna. You used rabbit ears externally.
Wha? I remember pretty much all TVs coming with a built-in antenna, usually of the telescoping variety. Cheap ones would come with an external antenna you had to snap on.
Using a TV antenna to watch TV (Score:5, Funny)
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I wish i had mod points for this!
Re:Using a TV antenna to watch TV (Score:5, Funny)
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Whoooosh!!
Is this sarcasm? (Score:5, Funny)
Or are people really stupid enough to not know about broadcast fucking TV?
an M.B.A student
Oh, nevermind.
Re:Is this sarcasm? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or are people really stupid enough to not know about broadcast [expletive] TV?
It's quite easy to not know about a technology from before your time. It's not like kids are born knowing how to wash clothes on a washboard either. Some of them don't even know how to wash clothes with modern technology by the time they go to college. I've known brilliant people who didn't know how to use a mop because nobody had ever taught them.
Re:Is this sarcasm? (Score:5, Interesting)
I get it, but this guy isn't that much younger than me. Maybe if it was a 15 year old kid or something...I know what a telegraph is even though I've never even seen a telegram let alone used the equipment!
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I know these are all arbitrary distinctions anyway, but technically Generation Y === Millenial [wikipedia.org]. Being born in the early 2000s is the end of the Millenial generation.
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In this day and age, with information literally at one's fingertips, there is no excuse for not being informed on a multitude of subjects. If you don't know something, you look it up.
There are many things I didn't know how to do, but guess what, I learned on my own, either by asking someone who was doing the thing I wanted to know, or read a book (pre internet) or now, DuckDuckGo it.
Perhaps if people such as the one in the a
Re:Is this sarcasm? (Score:5, Funny)
In order to look something up you have to know it exists.
You've obviously never gotten lost on a wikipedia excursion. After a few hours not only do you find things you had no clue existed, you find things you would have never wanted to know about.
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In order to look something up you have to know it exists.
You've obviously never gotten lost on a wikipedia excursion. After a few hours not only do you find things you had no clue existed, you find things you would have never wanted to know about.
Little known fact about wikipedia - go to any random page and click the first link, and then the first link in the page that loads, and repeat the process. After around 15 clicks you end up at philosophy :-)
Re:Is this sarcasm? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not farfetched (Score:2)
A few years ago, an acquaintance was between jobs, controlling his budget, and had dropped his cable subscription. He knew about broadcast TV, but the thought of getting an exterior antenna (more money), mounting it on a roof, wiring it, aiming, etc. was daunting. I told him that where I lived, a plain old FM dipole antenna was sufficient to pull in all of the major local channels, since FM radio is close to TV channel 6. I could get sufficient signal for testing a new TV, say, just by pinning the dipole
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Or you can get a prepackaged flat antenna for around $15 that you can stick on the wall with a command strip...
Re:Is this sarcasm? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is this sarcasm? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or are people really stupid enough to not know about broadcast fucking TV?
Sadly, this is a real phenomenon, and it isn't limited to Millennials.
My folks had a couple in their mid-40s over for dinner a few years back (2014ish, I think). At some point during the conversation it came up that my parents used an antenna to watch TV, rather than subscribing to cable. The wife insisted that TV channels aren't available for free, so no matter what my parents called it, what they were really doing was stealing TV from the cable companies. It took my parents and her husband a good 20 minutes to convince her that it was not, in fact, a form of theft and that OTA TV is, in fact, freely available to anyone willing to put up an antenna.
Mind you, this woman was old enough that she wouldn't have grown up with cable TV in her home, since it wasn't widely available during her childhood. The fact that she didn't remember that or know that it was still a thing was astounding.
So yes, these sorts of people really exist, and it's not just MBAs.
Re:Is this sarcasm? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is this sarcasm? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? Look at SiliconDust (Score:5, Informative)
Get a HDHomeRun [silicondust.com] and you can watch broadcast TV from pretty much any modern device. Each one has two tuners, and they can be split across devices. Want to record? Connect a cheap NAS. Want more than two channels at once? Just get another one -- they work in tandem.
Been using these for about a decade now and couldn't be happier. The quality is even better than basic cable because you don't need to deal with their re-encoding antics.
Re:Seriously? Look at SiliconDust (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually look into this, and found that the cost to buy a computer and put something like MythTV on it or whatever, to get DVR capability along with the HDHomerun (I used to use these awhile back)....was GREATER and more of a hassle than to just buy a Tivo OTA DVR/tuner unit...
The Tivo comes with 4 tuners, 1TB DVR storage and lifetime "service"...for about $399.
I set up one of these with Tivo mini units throughout the house for every TV I have...for my over the air needs. I used Amazon FireTV for streaming Playstation VUE, Netflx, etc....
But do look into the Tivo OTA unit....it was plug and play, 4 tuners and less $$ than the DIY route with HDHomeRun.
Re:Seriously? Look at SiliconDust (Score:5, Informative)
The advantage of the HDHomeRun solution, at least with Plex (if not with its own software) is that you get unencrypted feeds recorded on your hard disk. You can do what you want with them - you can generate DVDs or Blu-Ray discs from them, stream them, put them on a flash drive and share them... it's not trapped inside your box.
Re:Seriously? Look at SiliconDust (Score:4, Interesting)
Very valid point!!
I did like having that capability back when I was running HDHomerun with MythTV back in the day.
I found, however, that I rarely if ever had any need or want to capture for keeping anything I got off of OTA TV.
I'm gonna have to look more into PLEX. I'm not terribly familiar with it, other than my friend has a server set up that I hook into occasionally, but thought it was only for pre-recorded content.
I was actually looking to maybe put my CD/Music collection that I have ripped into FLAC onto a PLEX server (they run on linux, right?) and use that to stream to my living room good stereo...from FireTV box over HDMI to the Marantz AV receiver, out....I'm thinking that would be a pretty darned good signal for my set up.
Anyway..rambling....but I'll have to look into Plex more.
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I've been using a HDHomeRun dual-tuner since 2007 with mythtv on my home linux server, a schedules direct subscription (since 2010) for guide information, and basically just using VLC and MPC-HC for playback via "Direct Download" URLs from mythweb interface. The setup has worked out very well for me.
Re:Seriously? Look at SiliconDust (Score:4, Interesting)
I picked up one of these tuners about a year ago, but without the added option of recording. Nobody in my house cares enough about TV to record, so it wasn't an issue. Most of our content is either PBS or available on Amazon Prime or some other streaming service. We mainly wanted it for live broadcasts (such as local sports or news)
With a rooftop mounded antenna, surprisingly, my house is currently picking up 56 stations. The absolute minimum cost for cable in my neighborhood right now is $20/mo, which is exactly the same channels as the broadcast list, except we get a few extra international and religious stations, and are missing some government stations.
The HDHomeRun was around $80, plus another $20 or so for the antenna, and another $20ish for wiring. That is the same as about 6 months of wired service from the cheapest local option for nearly identical content. This was simply a no-brainer!
Free, assuming your time is worth nothing. (Score:2)
Yes, if you want to sit through 18 minutes of advertisements (average) per 60 minutes of programming, sure, use broadcast television. If you work out the amount of television / streaming content the average person consumes versus the cost of fully-paid streaming, then your "savings" put the value of your time at far less than that of a fourth-world sweatshop worker. But whatever floats your boat.
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It's 2017. Who watches anything in real time?
I skip the ads, and I usually speed up the playback to 1.5X, so a "60 minute" program usually takes well under 30 minutes to watch.
Re:Free, assuming your time is worth nothing. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Free, assuming your time is worth nothing. (Score:4, Insightful)
You do know that those breaks are good times to go to the bathroom, wash the dishes, make the bed, start a load of laundry, etc.
Also that a PVR works with it.
Re:Free, assuming your time is worth nothing. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with streaming per se. I love Netflix, big Stranger Things fan, but the argument that I'm "saving" something by skipping ads I feel is quite silly to me. It was time that I originally planned to be non-productive. I planned on that time to yield nothing. So getting back the 18 minutes that I would have spent in ads still yields me $0 since that's the value I placed on that time originally. I just don't get this notion that every second of someone's life has some dollar and cents attached to it. We're not 100% productive beings, in fact that's very much the core reason we've invented things to increase our productivity.
If putting a price on every second someone is alive is your kind of thing, then more power to you. I'm not calling you wrong in any sense of the word because I just feel that this isn't one of those things that has a "correct" answer. It's just a matter of how one values their time. I'm sure there's pros and cons to either perspective, but I vote with my dollars based on how much I enjoy the content, not the lack or presence of ads.
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"Commercials" are called "Designated Piss Breaks" - learn to use your time more effectively!
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The antenna is just great for picking up network stations for local news broadcasts, the local PBS stations for the kids and occasional documentary (Frontline, etc.), and the occasional surfing across the nostalgia channels (MeTV, Heroes, JusticeTV, etc.) And for that rare, can't miss broadca
A bit early/late for April Fools' Day... (Score:2)
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So use your genius-level brain and learn that foreign language.
Why? I haven't watched TV in 20+ years. Heck, my 48" HDTV doesn't even have an OTA TV turner.
In the UK, we still use them... (Score:2)
In the UK, "digital terrestrial broadcasting" still requires the use of an antenna, which is usually mounted somewhere on the roof. Although it's called "Freeview", you still have to pay an annual TV license (and almost all non-BBC channels have adverts). You get a selection of HD channels and even more SD channels, but if it's even more free channels you're after, something like a sat dish is probably the way to go in the UK.
Next up they will discover untargeted ads (Score:2)
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They make OTA DVRs, you know, so you can record your programming and watch it afterwards, skipping through the ads.
More than half a dozen (Score:5, Interesting)
I count 36 OTA channels in my current lineup. That's about as many as I got on my first cable service in the 1980s. Admittedly, most of the channels are crap, but so are most of the channels on cable.
My favorite way to set it up is to get one of those huge outdoor antennas and just throw it on top of the fiberglass in the attic, generally pointed at the transmitters. I've always gotten flawless reception that way (much better than rabbit ears), without having an ugly lightning magnet on the outside of the house.
Re:More than half a dozen (Score:5, Informative)
The plans [blogspot.com]
Onion? (Score:2)
Rabbit ears? (Score:2)
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The corresponding UHF antenna is a "bow ties" (and often just a loop).
Network broadcast stations were on both VHF and UHF.
In another 5 years (Score:5, Insightful)
they will discover "radio" and forsake the AUX in jack they all live by...
Not for me (Score:3)
Millennial Manifesto violation (Score:2)
You might be shocked about someone discovering OTA programming in the year 2017.
I'm more shocked over the fact that he didn't know about a free product, which is a clear violation of the Millennial Manifesto.
Bow-tie (Score:2)
I strongly recommend the bow-tie type of antenna. Works very well and doesn't break the bank (I think it's about $35 on amazon).
If you get a smallish one, be sure to be aware of where your local broadcast towers are and point it towards those.
Better option - build your own! It's super easy (Score:5, Informative)
This was posted here on slashdot years ago... I followed the instructions and it worked EXTREMELY well. When I hooked it up, it picked up 30-40 stations around the Phoenix metro area without a glitch. I used a scrap piece of 2x4, so I put the ugly thing up in the attic, and my entire house can hook into it. Less than $10 out of pocket (needed some washers, screws, and a UHF/VHF transformer from Radio Shack.)
Coat Hanger HDTV Antenna [youtube.com]
Not just millenials (Score:3)
My girlfriend is 42 and was raised with cable TV and she never knew about using an antenna until she met me. The commercials suck but that's what the mute button is for.
The only down side I've found is that if you have spotty reception, it's choppy (kind of like buffering). Whereas pre-DTV spotty reception was static but tolerable.
Too bad... (Score:2)
Too bad the FCC just held an auction for a lot of the spectrum that these TV stations use. In many markets, half of the stations you can get over the air with "bunny ears" will go dark or cable-only within the next year. The spectrum is being sold off to the cell phone companies.
Are people that stupid? (Score:2)
Full retro (Score:2)
Article is annoying but accurate (Score:3)
In my area we have all of the big networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CW, 7 PBS channels), plus Cozi, MeTV, Charge, Comet, TBI, Bounce, Justice, GetTV, Grit, Escape, MyTV, Movies, HgI, Retro, ion, ThisTV, and a ton of foreign channels. The only things I'm missing even a little are FX and AMC.
And because reality doesn't have to make sense ... (Score:2)
My favorite part of this story is that they're doing it so they can see the commercials. Cable company execs are probably losing their minds over this.
All that hassle to see commercials? (Score:2)
Advice for beginners who use linux (Score:5, Informative)
All of my TV watching is OTA broadcast. I used to record analog with TV capture cards. I also used them to 'digitize' my old VHS tape recordings so I could get rid of the VHS tapes. (Digitizing preserved the recordings, and also allowed quicker access since I didn't have to fast forward to watch something recorded on the tail end of a 6 or 8 hour tape.)
When the USA switched to digital by mandate, I had to adjust. It took some doing and maybe I can offer some useful tips. A lot of stuff is European which uses a different system than the USA which uses ATSC. So, if you're European, or if you're searching the 'net and come across some European software like say kaffeine, beware.
MythTV gets a lot of attention. I never got it to work and it seems like overkill to me anyway. What I use is me-tv. That's an unfortunate name because if you google me-tv you get a lot of false hits.
Me-tv doesn't work well with ubuntu (something about gui libraries.) It also doesn't work very well with pclinuxos. But it works very well with Mint and Devuan! It's not really good for watching 'live'. But, you can start it recording and then watch the recording while it's being recorded with vlc or mplayer or something like that, and, depending on when you start watching or how far you've skipped ahead, you may be only seconds behind the live broadcast. Also with those players you can pause, go back, whatever, while it's continuing to record the program.
When you've installed me-tv and first start it up, you do a scan and it finds the local TV stations. Then edit the channels list it created. Also be sure to edit the preferences as the default settings can be pretty wrongheaded, like starting a recording 5 minutes in advance and continuing after you've specified it should stop. You can put it in your 'startup applications' with the invocation /usr/bin/me-tv -s -m. This way it will start up automatically in the background and quietly record programs you have specified. But, if you're using a USB stick that has custom firmware this might not work because the OS has to find and configure the USB before it starts me-tv. My pcHDTV hardware has no problem because it's hardware support is build into the kernel, but with my Hauppauge TV stick, I have to worry about timing.
Some stations will broadcast several programs at once and you can record several at a time if they use the same base carrier signal. If the station is broadcasting in full HDTV you get a nice high res picture. If they multiplex several shows, which happens a lot for local community and religious stations, you'll get a lower res picture. But there's a lot out there. If you like some of the PBS programs like 'Nova', it's nice to get the high resolution videos of nature. (Just so you won't think I'm too much of a culture vulture, I also watch 'Supernatural', and see it in all its 1280 by 1024 glory.)
If you use a hauppauge tv tuner stick you have to copy a small file to /lib/firmware to get it to work. For my particular hauppauge the file name is xc3028-v27.fw, but it probably varies dpending on whihc model you have. Besides hauppauge, I've used pcHDTV which works 'out of the box' on newer systems.
I hope this saves some of you some of the pain I went through getting all of this to work.
Not worth the $20 (Score:4, Interesting)
In the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, there is very little to see OTA, unless you want to watch reruns of 60's sit-coms (Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, etc) or westerns, so interspersed with adds for senior citizens (literally: "I've fallen and I can't get up", walk in bath tubs, scooter chairs, etc.)
I've watched a bit for nostalgia (that's what was on daytime TV when I was a kid), and the cheesiness was unsettling, but it is not something that I would call "entertainment".
I saw Super Bowl LI OTA, via an antenna (Score:3)
...because Centurylink had a 36+ hour total outage in my area, starting Saturday night.
To this day no explanation, no apology, no rebate or refund for service not delivered. When my 'contract', triggered by signing up for automatic pay, expires, they will see me gone. I would rather have DirecTV than Prism ever again.
Ever. I just won't pay extra to leave.
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This is digital. HDTV is ... digital.
And you can still get old format analog too.
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50 miles west of Chicago, I get about 40 digital channels, most with perfect pictures from my attic antenna.
Free, but some channels are in Spanish and Polish !
The transition to digital was painless and good,
more channels, better picture.
I wouldn't exactly call it "painless", but probably overall a good thing.
I still feel like certain channel frequencies should have been left operational if only for public safety and emergency purposes. You do not need transistors to wire up a black-and-white analog signal television receiver.
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Maybe the headline for the next article will be "Millennials get butthurt whenever you mention them"
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(Note: I am not a millennial according to most definitions, but as a general rule I despise most "generational" research.)
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Err..I have no problems saying anything about any group if it is true.
Geez, you get too politically correct, and there becomes a real danger of anything being actually said.
There are observable differences between groups of people on this earth, and there is nothing wrong with pointing it out.
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Antennas are cool and all, but did the headline have to be sarcastic and condescending to millennials?
When the level of ignorance exceeds a certain threshold, the end result is often sarcasm.
That concept is way older than antennas or Millennials.
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The antennas haven't changed. Only the contents of the signals have changed.
In fact, old analog antennas still make great TV antennas, as long as your channels haven't shifted from VHF to UHF (as has happened in some markets). Even then the old antenna will still probably work well enough in many circumstances.
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You don't talk on your iPhone silly. You talk into your Apple Watch!
Actually... that would spiffy if there were a show where a person talked to their watch to communicate. Apple should patent that because no one EVER would have thought of that!!!
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A TV show where a person talks into a watch? Don't be a Dick.
Re:Free TV? Who knew? (Score:5, Insightful)
Reads like an Onion article
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But does it have layers?
Lunch is over, time for a parfait.
needs more avacodo toast angst (Score:4, Funny)
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I wonder how many TV show execs have forgotten about over-the-air broadcasting and will be surprised to hear this.
On the other hand, you need to be in a good location to receive a view-able signal. While we still have an antenna on the roof of our house, we located in a marginal area for reception. With analog broadcasting, just meant a little random "snow" in the image. Now that broadcasting has gone all digital, we get a lot of freezes and "pixel blocking", making the image unview-able. (I still try the a
Re: Free TV? Who knew? (Score:3)
Get a powered signal amplifier
They are $25 bucks on Amazon for a decent one.
I lived rurally for many years. Makes a hell of a difference.
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Yeah, I haven't been able to get a decent OTA signal since the switchover (if I can get a signal at all). On the other hand, that got me to pretty much stop watching TV, so there's an upside.
Re:Free TV? Who knew? (Score:4, Informative)
Make sure your antenna receives UHF in addition to VHF. Lots of older antennas were VHF-only (channels 2-13).
Remember that the digital channel number shown on the screen now doesn't necessarily correlate to the actual radio channel. In our area, digital channel 7 (7.1, 7.2, 7.3) is transmitted at the pre-digital channel 21 frequency band.
An outdoor antenna with an outdoor amplifier is also recommended for fringe or rural areas.
Broadcast TV works pretty well in our rural area. Lots of people have dumped $60-120/month satellite subscriptions.
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...Mr. Sisco, an M.B.A. student in Provo, Utah, made his discovery after inviting friends over to watch the Super Bowl in 2014. The online stream he found to watch the game didn't have regular commercials -- disappointing half of his guests who were only interested in the ads.
That's 4 jokes in one right there. I'm actually disappointed that this WASN'T an Onion story.
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Holy crap! Did you know you can get basically Pandora for free? And more than likely your car already has the equipment for it!! I usually plug the iPhone in before I start the car up, but one day I totally left it in the cup holder forgetting to plug it up. I thought that the silence would have been a cue for me to plug it in but boom! Music was playing when the car turned on. I looked at my phone, looked at the console of the car, back at the phone, back at the console. I just couldn't understand w
Re:what's old is new again (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds interesting. I do see an "FM" button in my car but the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons appear to be missing. Any suggestions on how I can permanently block specific songs from playing or make other songs play more frequently on this "FM" device? Oh, and where's the "search" box? Obviously with Pandora I just type in the name of a song or artist on the qwerty keyboard, but it's not clear where the corresponding UI is in my car.
I tried pressing the "FM" buton but it seems to play quite a lot of crap that I don't want to hear. It definitely needs some serious thumbs down input.
Re: Hipster? (Score:3)
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Try a directional high gain rooftop antenna. Perhaps one with a built-in RF amplifier. I can pick up Seattle stations from about 60 miles away, down in a valley.