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Buying a new TV set with ATSC 3.0
- Thread starter e-dawg
- Start date
It goes beyond cookies and following what you watch. Most of the ATSC 3.0 TV's require Internet for watching anything other than local HD signals carried via a 'lighthouse' station, which all the ATSC 3.0 transmissions already are.
In other words; want to watch something in 4K? Need to download it to your TV via the Internet.
All they wanted was to watch only local TV or their disc player. They have absolute no interest for the tv's other features. They did find a dumb TV (non 4k) at Worst buy.
Just about every new TV with ATSC 1.0 tuners will display 4K video via the HDMI input. There's simply no advantage to purchasing a TV with an ATSC 3.0 tuner.
What if you live in market like Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville on the southern edge and have trouble with the WLOS signal. Having the main signals on one tower has to make it easier to pick up the top stations in the market. Maybe not a pic improvement but when your three main stations have their main towers in different directions their has to a benefit to the stations being in the same spot.
That's what I've heard. All the ATSC 3.0 signals will be on a "lighthouse" tower. So if you get your TV signals over the air, the major channels will come in via that one signal that your antenna is pointed at. You mention WLOS, the ABC station that tries to serves Upstate South Carolina from a tower in North Carolina. I've seen You Tube videos from "The Antenna Man" saying WPVI 6 Philadelphia is on an inferior VHF signal that some folks in the suburbs have trouble getting. ATSC 3.0 solves that problem for the Philly market.
And I guess the TV set has to be connected to the internet to give you all the features you want, like the program guide, video recording and program pausing.
That's really the only advantage to ATSC 3.0. In theory, the FCC could mandate only one lighthouse facility that carries all the local ATSC 1.0 stations on one ATSC 3.0 signal, then the remaining channels across the country could be gathered-up and auctioned off to PCS and Cell providers. The problem is; as discovered in this past round of repack auctions nationwide, Cell PCS providers are much less willing to pay big bucks for UHF spectrum. Instead, they're using more compression and since 5G wasn't the hit they thought it would be just don't have the same appetite for spectrum as say ten years ago. Also, after money went to displaced broadcasters, the total revenue in the government pocket was a fraction of what estimates originally predicted.
Somehow I doubt the Commission wants to have another broadcaster migration for auction money blow up in their face.
Unless broadcasters can get a premium dollar out of it, don't hold your breath.
Asheville and Greenville-Spartanburg-Anderson really need to be separate markets, obeying the NC/SC border, with Asheville having PSIP 13/21/62 and GSA ("A" here meaning Anderson) having PSIP 4/7/40, but the FCC long ago collapsed them into a single market. It would mean that one of the stations in each market would have to carry two of the Big Four, but that's done in markets all the time. It would also mean two smaller markets instead of one market in the top 50 (#36, larger than Cincinnati or Milwaukee), which wouldn't be good for any of the stations, so that's probably one big reason it remains that way.
With Asheville being a smaller city and the only city in the bisected market I propose, two of the three stations would probably have to have some kind of LMA, but that, too, happens all the time.
As a practical matter, 4/7/13 lean more towards their respective cities in news coverage, and WHNS-21 is a little bit of everything to everybody.
