We have an Apple TV which plays Netflix, Hulu, PBS, Rented Movies, Music and YouTube.
After 2-3 months of us never switching off of the Apple TV HDMI port, I told the kids I was going to cancel cable which they could never find anything of substance to watch anyway and they didn't even put up a fight.
None of us watch sports so there was virtually no reason to keep cable anymore.
What I found slightly disturbing was how hard it is to setup an over-the-air TV setup. It's going to cost about $200 in equipment and another $100 to setup on my roof. It seems almost insane how expensive free TV has become to get. It'll still pay off because we were paying over $100 for TWC; it's just strange to see something that used to be so simple become so complex and I didn't care about it because I thought I would just have cable the rest of my life.
Have you tried using a cheap box and rabbit ears? You probably don't need a fancy setup unless you're in a building that blocks reception or MANY miles from a major city.
My friend who was (recently passed) a telecommunications engineer made one of those "clothes hanger" antennae and stuck it on the side of his house -- not even high up. Worked a charm. And they're a good 25 - 30 miles from most of the broadcast locations.
He sent me a YouTube link to instructions for one. Not hard to do.
Of course, results vary. But perhaps worth looking into.
I just stuck one end of about 3 feet of hookup wire into the antenna port on my TV and it worked fine. I made one of those HDMI antennas from instructions off the internet, and it only works marginally better.
The interesting thing is I could pick up channels over the air that were not on the cable TV lineup.
Over the air has been exceedingly hit or miss for me also. Even after the equipment the actual delivery seems very scattered. I know in my head that the delivery of digital with correction should be better than analog, but the experience simply is not.
I am not a electrical engineer, so can anyone shed light on why the range for channels on digital is so much lower than it was with analog, also is weather much more impeding for digital than analog?
The simplistic answer is that they are cramming a lot more information into less bandwidth. Analog TV resolution was 640 × 480 (approximately)[1] where digital TV is 1920 x 1080 [2]. Digital also aggravates reception issues because it doesn't degrade gracefully. Instead of "snow" and color issues, it goes all blocky and then takes a couple of seconds to resynchronize... if it recovers.
The Shannon–Hartley theorem[3] relates the necessary signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) that is required to cram a given amount if information into a given amount of bandwidth. Digital TV uses a lot of compression to reduce the amount of information that has to be crammed through the pipe and extremely sophisticated encoding to cram a bunch of bits into each symbol (baud[4]), but, at the end of the day, you have to have an adequate S/N ratio (good enough reception) to decode the signal.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC "Each frame is composed of two fields, each consisting of 262.5 scan lines, for a total of 525 scan lines. 483 scan lines make up the visible raster."
Lots of VHF broadcasters switching to UHF as part of the transition? Not all have done so, but "many" have.
All things being equal, an ancient coax cable with X milliliters of water contamination or Y amount of corrosion will have more loss at UHF than VHF. Pretty much everything is more critical at UHF. Even antenna aiming.
The other way its a problem, which is actually pretty funny, is marketing of "HDTV" antennas where HDTV means UHF only, which works great if all your local broadcasters moved to UHF with the transition; As you can imagine a UHF antenna doesn't work so well if you live in an area with one of the few remaining VHF-Lo band transmitters which you "need".
To say this is a local issue would be an understatement. I'm sure you'd get a better answer from a neighbor than HN.
OTA can be tricky because its not as simple as just throwing up an antenna and calling it a day, the system has to be engineered. Check out www.tvfool.com for some great info on properly designing a system. Also, avsforum.com has some great info.
We have an Apple TV which plays Netflix, Hulu, PBS, Rented Movies, Music and YouTube.
After 2-3 months of us never switching off of the Apple TV HDMI port, I told the kids I was going to cancel cable which they could never find anything of substance to watch anyway and they didn't even put up a fight.
None of us watch sports so there was virtually no reason to keep cable anymore.
What I found slightly disturbing was how hard it is to setup an over-the-air TV setup. It's going to cost about $200 in equipment and another $100 to setup on my roof. It seems almost insane how expensive free TV has become to get. It'll still pay off because we were paying over $100 for TWC; it's just strange to see something that used to be so simple become so complex and I didn't care about it because I thought I would just have cable the rest of my life.