Broadcast TV seems laughably irrelevant. It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable, satellite TV, home Internet, or a cell phone. The latter two are how people consume video and TV to a large degree today.
In exchange, we have a great deal of spectrum tied up for terrestrial TV, much of which goes to running infomercials or else is surreptitiously leased for terrestrial data broadcasts. And the government gets to decide to regulate it so it becomes inherently politicised - like favouring certain owners.
Realistically - this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc.
(Radio is pretty much the same boat but I can see a case to be made for keeping some analog FM radio broadcasts. The 6MHz per channel for TV is insane.)
> Broadcast TV seems laughably irrelevant. It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable,
It's not that people are literally watching these on over the air digital TV antenna systems, but that if you have a "Broadcast TV" station in a certain market, it becomes carried by default on cable systems, direct to home satellite satellite dish systems, and regional FTTH providers' last-mile cable-tv-equivalent products.
Look at for example how all the Seattle TV stations are carried on Comcast or Astound's networks.
> this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc.
We've got internet, but no cable. So we still watch over-the-air TV, though it's mostly PBS at this point (which is non profit). Also listen to FM radio - mostly NPR, a jazz station and a classical station - all also non-profit.
We have everything and still use antennas for local broadcast: NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Fox. Sports, especially football, are very easy to access over the air.
The advantage of watching live sports over the air rather than streaming is that there is no delay and the broadcast is as high quality as it can get rather than getting compressed by your streaming app.
> Realistically - this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc.
They did this in the US already, three times.
In 1983, channels 70 to 83 were taken for mobile phones. In 2008, rf channels 52-69 were reassigned, and 2016, rf 38-51 were reassigned. rf 37 is reserved for radio astronomy.
> It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable, satellite TV, home Internet, or a cell phone. The latter two are how people consume video and TV to a large degree today.
Fairly wrong/irrelevant metric. Lots of people subscribe to Netflix and watch OTA broadcasts.
Lots of people stick to a Plex membership just because of its DVR capability - that's for broadcast TV.
Lots of DVR and adjacent products out there on the market for people who watch broadcast TV.
I wouldn't dream of getting a cable subscription when I can get so much good content for free. Streaming fills the rest.
Irrelevant? I was under the impression cord cutting is pretty common. If you want to watch live sports or the news, you need CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX. We use a MoHu antenna in the attic.
I get all of those via streaming, local affiliates even, on Fubo. Hulu was similar IIRC. Have not had cable TV in years, even longer since I used an antenna.
Even then you're watching them from those broadcast stations. The live channel feeds in those apps is from your local station, and if you're watching any local news it's also clips from your station's newscast. You'll be impacted by fewer perspectives as stations consolidate.
Is easy to think about content from a consumer mindset that everything just exists for you, but no the stuff on the internet is made by real people who are impacted by the works around them.
They replace it for delivery. That's not what this is about. The change discussed here is about content creation. That content is already delivered through multiple channels.
This isn't about content delivery, it is about content creation. The rule change allows further centralization of editorial control of what your local reporters broadcast across all mediums.
This analysis doesn't pass the sniff test. The presence of cable, satellite, or internet access says nothing about broadcast TV viewership. This is ownership of the content creation of local stations, not just the broadcast towers. Those stations have a presence on social media and streaming services.
That's just step 1. In step 2, the argument goes: "See this is already allowed for broadcast tv. Streaming is no different, so we demand the same change there"... and so on.
Why the fuck would I spend thousands of dollars on cable or satellite or streaming when I can buy a $20 antenna once, plug it into the back of any modern TV, and get free channels (including major sporting events) forever?
People don’t use broadcast because they don’t know how to set it up, or because they don’t have a TV, or because they can justify buying cable for whatever reason.
I heard in some European countries they packed digital SD channels into less spectrum (one 6 MHz channel can carry 4-5 TV channels). We should have done that here instead of broadcasting HD.
If you plug in an antenna and scan for local channels, what used to be one analog TV channel on colloquially-named "channel 7" in the defined channel 7 frequency range will now be seen as "channel 7-1" which is often (but not always!) actually broadcast on the old frequency. During the ATSC transition, it was important to retain the branding and consumer memory of "channel 7" even when the RF transport frequency changed.
The transition opened the ability to have an arbitrary number of digital subchannels, 7-2, 7-3, etc etc. The total bitrate available on a given ATSC broadcast is fixed, but it can be partitioned among multiple MPEG streams. The typical setup is one (occasional two) HD channels and several SD channels. Obviously there's a balancing act between bitrate and visual quality for each subchannel. It's often used as a way to broadcast older (read: cheaper) syndicated SD content on which they can run more ads while keeping the main HD channel quality reasonably acceptable.
Seventeen years ago, when we transitioned, the state of available and deployed equipment, codecs, and home receivers would not have permitted it.
I mean sure, you could pack four streams into one 6MHz channel. They could even be "HD" insofar as the transmitted stream is 720p or 1080i.
The result would have been MPEG-2 program streams of about 4.5Mbit each instead of about 18-19Mbit (assuming no other subchannels). That would make live sports or anything with significant motion look like absolute dogshit.
You might say that you don't care about that, and that is fine for you. However, in that case, I would respectfully submit that opinion to be far from the center of the bell curve of television-viewing American public of that era.
We could do a lot better with ATSC 3.0. So, there might someday be a second round of broadcast frequency reclamation, just as there was with ATSC 1.0.
A single 6MHz channel at the top end of UHF band would be enough to implement a universal cellular telephony service - simple calls and texts - at very low cost if phones had modems for it. I think that would be the better use of spectrum.
RF Channels 38-83 have all been taken from (US) TV since the 80s. Mostly used for mobile phones.
rf 70+ is 800 Mhz
rf 52+ is 700 Mhz
rf 38+ is 600 Mhz
Lots of phones support these frequencies.
Kind of annoying for tv, because cell towers on frequencies that used to be tv frequencies can overload amplifiers, so peeps need to go put filters up before the preamp.
The original transition (and release of extra frequencies) was a delicate and painful process with lots of involved parties who had to spend lots of money to make it happen. Politically speaking, it could only happen if everyone involved saw some actual benefit from the change.
If you got into a time machine and tried your plan two decades ago, the conversations would have gone something like this:
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Government: "Hey broadcaster, we need you to throw out and upgrade all your broadcast equipment that's working just fine today."
Broadcaster: "Why?"
Government: "So we can auction off some of the broadcast channel bandwidth."
Broadcaster: "Why else?"
Government: "That's really it."
Broadcaster: "How about instead, I take a little bit of that money you're asking me to spend, and give it to your political opponent's campaign?"
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Government: "Hey citizens, we need you to buy a new TV or buy an adapter for your current TV that's currently working just fine."
Citizen: "Why?"
Government: "So we can auction off some of the broadcast channel bandwidth."
Citizen: "Why else?"
Government: "That's really it."
Citizen: "How about instead, I vote for the opposition candidate who says he'll let me keep my TV and my money?"
-----
We're able to juggle broadcast frequencies more easily after the transition. Not only did we shrink the broadcast frequency range at the time of transition, we did it again about ten years ago with far less pain.
480i? Nobody owns CRTs anymore, so interlaced content is inferior in many ways. 720p is already garbage for 2026. We shouldn’t be reducing resolution, if anything it should be going up.
Atsc 3.0 does this in a lot of areas, it is in my area, all the channels are multiplexed from one broadcast, although it's hard to tell on the tv since you get the virtual channel numbers that are different and the same as the atsc 1.0 channels
The very VERY unfortunate thing about ATSC 3.0 is it has an internet optional requirement which broadcasters have decided to use as a gate for watching ATSC content. They've turned it into a premium service rather than just simply using the open codecs.
Here in the US I get PBS on Channel 10 - there's 10.1 (straight PBS), 10.2 (PBS-World) and 10.3 (PBS kids) - do each of these take a separate 6MHz bandwidth, or are they packed into that single 6MHz bandwidth like in Europe?
Why shouldn't they get 6 MHz? My PBS station broadcasts 4 subchannels: the main PBS channel, PBS Kids, a channel with programming about our local region (which airs live coverage of our state legislature when it's in session), and a loop of weather information with audio from the local NOAA Weather Radio broadcast. Those are all useful public services. PBS Kids in particular I think has a very good reason to exist, considering the absolute wasteland that is young children's media on streaming.
Funny how this has diverged in Canada/USA which otherwise have broadly similar broadcast markets in many respects. The broadcast stations have been gutted of sports content in favour of a couple of specialty channels which are a combined $70/month for streaming/app subscriptions.
In exchange, we have a great deal of spectrum tied up for terrestrial TV, much of which goes to running infomercials or else is surreptitiously leased for terrestrial data broadcasts. And the government gets to decide to regulate it so it becomes inherently politicised - like favouring certain owners.
Realistically - this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc.
(Radio is pretty much the same boat but I can see a case to be made for keeping some analog FM radio broadcasts. The 6MHz per channel for TV is insane.)