Keye TV and Direct TV

[jras20]

Here we go again, A station may be dropping on Direct TV. Sinclair wants me to go to Dish or cable? I have been with Direct TV for over 10 years. If that's the case I just won't watch them no more. I'll just half to setup a pair of rabbit ears if my parents can't live with out k-eye.

 

[fredcantu]

KEYE's not alone.
Sister stations KABB, KMYS and WOAI-TV are all in the same boat.

Nothing like a good antenna even if you have satellite or cable.

 

[jras20]

I love it when they say "You can still watch K-eye on Cable and Dish or off the air" Switching to another provider is not the answer. Dish and cable both have those same problems with other channels from time to time. I remember Corpus Cable did not have NBC for almost a year. I do have a antenna up in the attic setup pointed to San antonio. I can pull in both Austin and San antonio DTV for a back up.

 

[intx]

Sinclair had a tiff with Dish Network last fall. Funny that they're now encouraging people to dump DirecTV for Dish. Supposedly, Sinclair wants more than 2x what it currently gets.

http://www.austin360.com/blogs/cont...eye_might_go_dark_for_directv_customers.html/

 

[sshuffield70]

Sinclair has owned WSTR (Star) 64 in Cincy for several years. Last year, they bought WKRC (CBS affiliate) from Newport and sold Star 64 to Deerfield, but still operate it. Now both are in the crosshairs.

 

[willdav713]

I love it when they say "You can still watch K-eye on Cable and Dish or off the air" Switching to another provider is not the answer. Dish and cable both have those same problems with other channels from time to time. I remember Corpus Cable did not have NBC for almost a year. I do have a antenna up in the attic setup pointed to San antonio. I can pull in both Austin and San antonio DTV for a back up.

I don't even know why Cable wastes their time with the "broadcast stations" The solution is to cancel all of them, instead of being held hostage by these greedy companies. They could offer their converters with built in A/B switches for this purpose. I know Direct TV does that, when you turn the box off you can watch the OTA channels. (I have my set in San Antonio set up like that to watch 12.2 KSAT (Me-TV)

 

[JHBrandt]

These situations are just one reason I've long recommended dual OTA/cable setups when possible. But most cable users want an integrated solution. An A/B switch would be unacceptable to them. Satellite vendors found that out the hard way when they first started out: a lot of folks wouldn't switch from cable to satellite until satellite could provide local OTA channels along with the satellite channels. It's cumbersome to deal with different guides and remotes for OTA and satellite/cable channels.

An alternative might be to provide dual OTA/cable RF inputs on cable boxes, with an integrated OTA (ATSC) tuner inside. (Some satellite receivers have a similar option.) The box could then integrate the OTA and cable channels so you'd have one remote, one EPG, etc. But to take advantage of an option like this, the customer would still need to hook an antenna feed up to each box, and it wouldn't help customers that couldn't put up a good enough antenna to receive an acceptable OTA signal.

 

[mmnassour]

I don't even know why Cable wastes their time with the "broadcast stations" The solution is to cancel all of them, instead of being held hostage by these greedy companies. They could offer their converters with built in A/B switches for this purpose. I know Direct TV does that, when you turn the box off you can watch the OTA channels. (I have my set in San Antonio set up like that to watch 12.2 KSAT (Me-TV)

An alternative might be to provide dual OTA/cable RF inputs on cable boxes, with an integrated OTA (ATSC) tuner inside. (Some satellite receivers have a similar option.) The box could then integrate the OTA and cable channels so you'd have one remote, one EPG, etc. But to take advantage of an option like this, the customer would still need to hook an antenna feed up to each box, and it wouldn't help customers that couldn't put up a good enough antenna to receive an acceptable OTA signal.

That option with DirecTV is the AM21 adapter. It enables you to bring your local OTA stations directly in to the DirecTV guide and if you've got a DVR, even record them just like the stuff from the birds.

Oh, and cable "wastes their time" because people want to watch the local stations. Can you say NFL, boys and girls? Once you install an A/B switch, you show folks how little they really, really, need cable.

 

[newsmark]

I don't even know why Cable wastes their time with the "broadcast stations" The solution is to cancel all of them, instead of being held hostage by these greedy companies. T

Here's why. Viewing is significantly higher for the big 4 broadcasting nets than for the cable channels. Look at the recent weekly chart from Nielsen in USA today.

[url]http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/news/nielsens-charts.htm[/url]

Only 1 show on cable would break into the top 20 shows if the lists were integrated. And the number 2 cable show would fall far down the list.

Or look at it this way: last Thursday, (2/21/13), the big 4 broadcast networks had 37.4 million viewers (that's the average for 2 hours of programming on Fox, 3 hours each on ABC, NBC and CBS).

It's hard to find numbers to compare apples to apples, so I'm giving cable an advantage in this comparison. Add together the HIGHEST PROGRAM OF THE NIGHT for each of the top 18 cable channels. 26.7 million.

So it takes 18 cable networks added together, and you still don't get the number of viewers of 4 broadcast networks. The numbers aren't the same every night, but that's pretty typical.

Who's gonna spend $80, $100 or more on cable if it doesn't include the 4 channels with BY FAR the most-watched shows? Sure, broadcast networks have lost a percentage of viewers over the years. Of course they have. We went from splitting the pie 3 ways to splitting it hundreds of way. It says a lot that the Big 4 are still as dominant as they are.

Now as far as greed, you may be right. There's plenty of that to go around in the cable fees issue. But that's another rant.

 

[willdav713]

These situations are just one reason I've long recommended dual OTA/cable setups when possible. But most cable users want an integrated solution. An A/B switch would be unacceptable to them. Satellite vendors found that out the hard way when they first started out: a lot of folks wouldn't switch from cable to satellite until satellite could provide local OTA channels along with the satellite channels. It's cumbersome to deal with different guides and remotes for OTA and satellite/cable channels.

An alternative might be to provide dual OTA/cable RF inputs on cable boxes, with an integrated OTA (ATSC) tuner inside. (Some satellite receivers have a similar option.) The box could then integrate the OTA and cable channels so you'd have one remote, one EPG, etc. But to take advantage of an option like this, the customer would still need to hook an antenna feed up to each box, and it wouldn't help customers that couldn't put up a good enough antenna to receive an acceptable OTA signal.

Well if I want to watch C-SPAN, TCTV, and PEG channels I must hook up my DTA Adapter to my TV set, and if I want to watch a broadcast channel kicked off the network, I have to hook up an A/B Switch to my HD OTA Tuner. That is a total of 3 remotes, but Time Warner's Universal Remote also controls my 1987 Canon VR-HF800 VCR, that I do not have the remote for, it also controls my Onkyo Surround Sound Receiver, and my Magnavox DVD Recorder, or the Sony VCR from 2003. But I have to use the original Magnavox Remote to Timer Record. So I have more than 5 different remotes

But I think Cable should integrate the HD OTA converter into their box similar to the Direct TV's AM-21 Adapter.

 

[JHBrandt]

I'd like to see an AM21-style cable box, at least as an option for folks like us who'd appreciate it.

I have a dual satellite/OTA setup. What I do is connect my antenna to my TV's RF input and the satellite output to a different input (S-video in my case, because it's an old SD satellite receiver). That way, my TV set becomes my A/B switch and I don't need a third remote. But it's still not ideal to use the satellite remote to surf satellite channels and the TV remote (actually the same physical remote, but in "TV" mode) to surf OTA channels.

I think Dish makes satellite receivers with OTA tuners, a la DirecTV's AM21, but there's a nasty catch for me: if I make any changes to my Dish subscription, they'll start delivering (most of) my OTA channels via satellite - and charging me for the privilege - even though the whole point of the upgrade would be to keep receiving OTA channels via my antenna! But by now, I'm pretty used to tuning satellite and OTA channels separately anyhow, so I'll just leave things as they are.

 

[willdav713]

I'd like to see an AM21-style cable box, at least as an option for folks like us who'd appreciate it.

I have a dual satellite/OTA setup. What I do is connect my antenna to my TV's RF input and the satellite output to a different input (S-video in my case, because it's an old SD satellite receiver). That way, my TV set becomes my A/B switch and I don't need a third remote. But it's still not ideal to use the satellite remote to surf satellite channels and the TV remote (actually the same physical remote, but in "TV" mode) to surf OTA channels.

I think Dish makes satellite receivers with OTA tuners, a la DirecTV's AM21, but there's a nasty catch for me: if I make any changes to my Dish subscription, they'll start delivering (most of) my OTA channels via satellite - and charging me for the privilege - even though the whole point of the upgrade would be to keep receiving OTA channels via my antenna! But by now, I'm pretty used to tuning satellite and OTA channels separately anyhow, so I'll just leave things as they are.

My father's Sony HD set does that. We can hook a antenna to the coax input of the TV set and the HDMI is hooked up to the Denon 5.1 A/V receiver and another HDMI cable is hooked up to the Direct TV HD Satellite box. Only 2 remotes needed.