SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 15 submissions in the queue.
SoylentNews
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.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Free TV Will Have 4K Content in a Couple Years
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 59 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
(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.