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Consumer Reports is running an article titled Free Over-the-Air TV Is Going to Get Better. They're rolling out a new standard, ATSC 3.0.
According to the article, you'll be able to watch OTA (over the air) TV on your phone or tablet! I wrote an article a few years back wondering why you couldn't already.
It's a fairly long and very informative article, but very much worth a read. It only talks about American broadcasts, no word about when or if it will reach other countries, but my guess is it won't be long.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @04:17PM (1 child)
Probably because you'd have a hard time getting sufficiently good VHF reception for an ATSC broadcast with an antenna that fits in a phone. It might be reasonable for higher UHF broadcasts, but then people would complain if they can only receive some of the stations broadcast in their area.
Actually the antennas usually don't fit in the phone at all. For FM reception (also in the VHF range) typically a headphone connection is required and the headphone wires are used as part of the antenna. The quality of reception is usually pretty terrible, but FM will work in much less favourable conditions than a TV broadcast.
If it worked at all you'd probably have to move around a bunch to find a good spot to watch your broadcast, and then stay in one spot while you watch it. All in all, it will be much more reliable to use the phone's internet connection over the mobile network to receive video and audio.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @02:42PM
Ideally, an antenna should be 1/4 of the wavelength of the carrier wave. For FM radio around 100MHz, the full wavelength is 3 metres. So, a 75cm antenna is best. This can be achieved with 75cm of coiled wire (or even 75cm of etched wire) inside a smaller device but manufacturers are too stingy to add such components. For UHF television transmission, frequencies generally used are from 470MHz to 890MHz [wikipedia.org]. So, one or more antennas ranging from 15cm to 8.4cm would be required.