“I ask people all the time, ‘Do you know you’re supposed to get television for free?’” Mr. Goodfriend said during an interview in Central Park, gesturing to a gaggle of visitors. “Most people under 50 don’t get it.”
It's really amazing how many people don't realize this. A friend of mine came over, saw I got a bunch of HD channels, and when I mentioned it was free her first assumption was that my $8 antenna was some sort of satellite hacking device.
I just explained this to my son yesterday, ending with a demo where I dug up an old coax antenna, connected it to the TV, and showed him channels of free content (also, what static looks like). He was amazed. (What else have I forgotten to tell him about? I've failed him as a father!)
He thought the over-the-air picture quality was better, which considering the bitrates he's used to with Netflix and YouTube, is probably true.
OTA picture quality varies. Each physical channel gets 20mbps of mpeg transport stream, almost always with mpeg2 video. If the physical channel has one or two streams, and a good multiplexer, the quality is pretty nice. If they're running 12 streams of video, it's going to be awful.
ATSC 3, if it's ever deployed, has a lot higher data rate and requires support for h.265 deciding, so it could be really high quality, or full of even more crappy substreams.
I don't know that this is an age thing so much as an income thing. It's anecdotal, but I'm 21, we weren't well to do growing up, and so the only way to get reliable TV for free was through the antenna.
At least with the HD antenna, nobody knows you're watching (with a dumb TV anyway... and with the microphones ripped out of every inter-connected electronic device you have).
It may be possible to passively detect what channel you are tuned to. I’ve read anecdotes of billboards scanning cars as they pass to determine what FM station they are tuned to, however I can not find a source.
I mean, distinguishing an attenuation related to receiving a signal from an attenuation from literally anything else seems a bit difficult, though I would imagine much simpler with radar.
It's how radar detector-detectors work. If they can tell if you have a radar receiver, I imagine turning a knob is all it takes to change it a FM radio detector.
It's really amazing how many people don't realize this. A friend of mine came over, saw I got a bunch of HD channels, and when I mentioned it was free her first assumption was that my $8 antenna was some sort of satellite hacking device.