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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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Free TV Will Have 4K Content in a Couple Years
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Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Monday May 29 2017, @09:23PM (9 children)
I don't think so.
Significant events in television broadcasting technology history (US-focus):
1920s - television broadcasts begin.
This was an improvement: "TV" is much better than "no TV" on the TV scale. (Keep this one in mind, there is another event in 2009 where it becomes real important.)
1941 - Color is added as an option, pioneered by CBS.
This was an improvement: Color TV is better than no color TV.
1984 - Stereo sound becomes available, introduced by NBC.
This was an improvement: Stereo sound is better than mono-but-hi-fi sound.
2009 - Nearly a hundred years of technology infrastructure in both broadcast and receiving sets is discarded as broadcast television is completely discontinued. Introduced in its place is a much more narrow-band token broadcasting service carrying digital channel data. All television sets ever produced before this date became, and remain, unable to receive broadcast television.
This was not an improvement. An improvement means you take something and make it better. That didn't happen. Instead of adding digital HD capabilities, TV was discontinued entirely, and then an inferior technology was introduced that "Looks-Better" if you happen to live right beside its transmitter, but doesn't reach the areas that broadcast TV reached before, eliminating the TV reception ability of huge swaths of the planet.
I live in one of those places, by the way: There are TV stations 25, 35, 40 miles away, all of which I could easily receive before on rabbit ears, and none of which I can receive now well enough to watch even on an outdoor amplified antenna. (Note: A great digital HD picture that freezes every couple seconds (or minutes) accompanied by great quality audio that cuts in and out is not watchable, in case you were curious. The powers that be seem to not have been curious.)
A couple years from now maybe: Resolution of digital TV increases to 4K.
This perhaps would be an improvement in that it will suck ever so slightly less: Instead of not being able to receive Digital HD TV, those enormous areas that used to pick up TV just fine will then not be able to receive Digital HD 4K TV. On second thought, receiving nothing vs. receiving a shinier nothing is in fact no improvement at all.
So, Looks-Better!=Is-Better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @09:43PM (5 children)
Pro-Tip: You are an outlier.
Analog TV didn't work perfectly for everybody either.
Sucks to be you, but your problems are rare.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday May 29 2017, @10:11PM (2 children)
People who watch over-the-air TV are rare, because it's more common to have a cable or satellite provider.
But among most non-urban areas where watching over-the-air TV was previously well-supported, "Can't pick up anything watchable" is by far the most common result of the replacement of broadcast analog TV with the less robust all-or-nothing digital broadcasts.
By land mass, areas that are not urban make up almost all of the planet.
Previously, in most areas, it was a matter of how high your antenna, and whether it was pointed at the right city. Now, it almost doesn't matter. Either you get a perfect signal that's watchable, or you get less than a perfect signal, which isn't watchable.
This answers the question, is "Looks-Better" equal to "Is-Better". No, it isn't. We measure that by previous coverage area compared to current coverage area. No TV is not better than TV regardless of how pretty the picture would be if you had TV.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @11:53PM
Facts not in evidence.
You are the outlier. Stop indulging in the base rate fallacy.
PS. No need to lecture me about how OTA works. I cancelled my cable-tv subscription over a decade ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @04:31AM
If that were true, the FCC would be flooded with complaints about it. And yet they aren't.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 30 2017, @06:53AM (1 child)
The difference between analog and digital TV:
Analog TV degrades gracefully if reception gets worse. You just get more noise, both in the image and the sound. Depending on the content, even stuff with very much noise can be useful to watch. Sure, you don't want to watch a concert on a super noisy channel. But if you are after information, even very noisy channels can give you recognizable video and audio content.
Digital TV fails catastrophically if reception gets worse. While it can compensate a certain level of reception noise (and indeed looks better in that range), as soon as the noise gets too large, you get unwatchable content. Not barely watchable, unwatchable. Information throughput zero.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @08:24AM
Graceful degradation was not a design requirement in analog TV, it was more of a lucky coincidence, or a result of evolution. In this case, only the people on the geographical margins suffer, but as the noise floor rises, this problem will affect more OTA-ers, which will prompt regulators to demand amends to the system, probably stronger forward error correction, and/or layered quality, with FEC being weaker for the additional information which carries more quality (resolution). Or, even if they don't push such a thing, then equipment producers will develop algorithms for their products to always try to reconstruct content from damaged frames instead of discarding them completely.
I say give it time. Analog TV probably itself haven't had good reception in its first decades.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @09:43PM (1 child)
Ah, but you misunderstand who it was "better" for.
It was better for the content providers, as now everything is digital they can tack on DRM as they like. Better for you the consumer, was never on the table.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday May 29 2017, @10:55PM
Well, I wouldn't say never was--it was just long ago. In the United States, licensed radio (since 1927) and television (since 1934) broadcasters are required by the Federal Communications Commission to serve in the public interest. This was begun during a time when "serving in the public interest" actually meant acting in the interest of public service.
Commonly "public service announcements" are one tool that they use to meet this goal. News and weather broadcasts were also started for the purpose of the benefit to society and communities they would provide, not because they looked like good ways to make money or serve the interests of content providers.
That's pretty much all in the past, of course, but I am old enough to remember when it was taken seriously, and I grew up against that framework. I was actually surprised when the digital disaster happened--in the public interest it would have been added to conventional broadcasting ability, and not have completely replaced it. It was not lost on me, as it seems to have been on so many others, that the radio spectrum formerly devoted to television was sold for cash not long after, despite digital's failures in coverage area and signal degradation.
The More You Know(tm):
http://jux.law/public-service-announcement-requirements/ [jux.law]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_service_announcement [wikipedia.org]
http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/piac/novmtg/pubint.htm [unt.edu]
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101541768 [npr.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_effect [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday May 30 2017, @02:29AM
Introduced in its place is a much more narrow-band token broadcasting service carrying digital channel data.
Which gives me over three times as many networks on the same channels, all without snow, static, or other analog noise. WTF? Digital was a great improvement, grandpa!
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org