Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I'm not sure what you're getting at here?  The same could be said of alternate programming on CBS when Fox is showing BiG football, and/or NBC, or whatever.

Yeah, ABC and both main ESPNs are competing with each other throughout the day, pretty much every Saturday.

Those have to be old people watching local news and Wheel of Fortune.  I can't imagine anyone who cares about college football just getting over the air broadcast TV

OTA HD broadcast is better than most cable or streamed HD signals, because it's uncompressed.  I know a couple of hardcore sports fans that have reinstalled their OTA antennae and insist on watching the OTA broadcast rather than cable/streaming when it's available.

That's not me of course, I'm far too lazy to bother with switching back and forth btw OTA and cable/streaming.

Interesting, have not heard that

I liked the headline lol:

Millennials Unearth an Amazing Hack to Get Free TV: the Antenna

I did think they overlooked the point I keep making, that with digital transmission all the bad reception problem of old-school analog antennas go away. And that with the ability to send less-compressed broadcasts than cable/satellite, picture quality is IMPROVED by going OTA.

Most people of our generation that grew up with an antenna and then switched to cable did so partly for more channels, but partly also because the signal was much cleaner. That's no longer the case, and that's something I don't think people recognize.

Especially since 29% of them don't even realize free OTA TV exists lol.

"Channels"? What are those? I'm unfamiliar with these antiquated terms
So far I get most of my Netflix, and the few things I watch on Amazon Prime Video, in 4K. I wouldn't say it's especially world-changing relative to 1080p, as the compression is such that the bitrates aren't as high as what you see on those Costco displays. But it's an upgrade.
That's the thing whether it's cable, satellite, or streaming. They all have to manage their bitrates. The "preview" will likely be at a very high bitrate, so the quality will be stellar. But the actual broadcast will be compressed as much as they need to do based on their bandwidth limitations.
That's why I watch my local networks through the antenna rather than through Hulu... It's 1080p either way, but since the towers don't have the same bandwidth limitations as Hulu, they can leave their signal less compressed and the OTA antenna actually looks BETTER than cable/satellite/streaming.

Just an interesting point in favor of the antenna...

Way back in the analog days, using an antenna often led to a pretty poor picture, and spotty reception. One of the key selling points of cable at the time was picture quality.

This has reversed. These days, both cable and satellite have bandwidth limits because they have SO many channels to carry on a limited-bandwidth coax [cable] or limited amount of wireless spectrum [satellite]. It's made even harder, because due to backward compatibility with older set-top boxes, they often have to carry the same channels in older MPEG-2 compression for their old boxes, and carry the same channels in MPEG-4 or HEVC for their newest boxes. They're trying to carry 10 pounds of potatoes in a 5 pound bag, and the only way to do that is to COMPRESS the hell out of the source.

This is also true of streaming and IPTV services, because they're optimizing for bandwidth as well. They have some advantages since they're point-to-point transmissions so they only need to send ONE signal, but they still try to compress it to reduce bandwidth use.

Digital broadcast doesn't have that problem. Each network has their own frequency, and they can broadcast a signal tuned for picture quality rather than tuned for saving bandwidth. And since digital is basically a "you have a picture or you don't" situation, rather than a progressive loss of quality like analog, as long as you are getting a signal, you're getting a 100% quality version of what was originally sent.

As a result, you'll often find that the network TV programming through your antenna actually looks BETTER than what comes across cable, satellite, or streaming.

Although I now have Hulu Live TV, which includes my locals, I had put an antenna on the house when I used Sling. I actually use the antenna rather than Hulu for most live network sports broadcasts because the signal quality is so much better.

FYI, the OTA is usually not compressed AS BADLY as the satellite feed is. All signals are compressed using industry-standard algorithms, but not all compression is equal in the way it's implemented.

If you've ever ripped DVDs to video files (or even just CD to MP3), you'll know that every compression program will have settings that is always a balance of video/audio quality vs file size.

Satellite and cable are trying to fit as many channels as possible into a single limited-bandwidth cord, so the tighter they squeeze the quality settings, the more content they can provide. IPTV and streaming providers are only giving you one "channel" at a time, but they also know that internet bandwidth isn't free or unlimited, so they have incentive to squeeze it as much as possible as well.

OTA broadcast has a band of spectrum allocated. If they use 100% of their allocation, it doesn't hurt them or cost them extra. So they have more incentive to optimize for picture quality in their compression.

For most things I'm watching, I just let Hulu stream it to me even if it's on a channel I can pick up OTA, because honestly it's just easier. But for sports, if it's OTA I default to the antenna. The picture quality difference is immediately noticeable.

As I always highlight, half the marketing there is showing you content that is SO much better than nearly anything you'll ever watch. It's basically uncompressed and optimized to look amazing.

Anything you watch broadcast/cable/satellite/IPTV/streaming will be EXTREMELY compressed compared to that and won't look anywhere near as good.

If you watch a bunch of 4K HDR movies that you've purchased on physical media, they should look outstanding. But literally everything else will be too compressed to make use of the technology in these TVs.

Compression. All services / channels use compression for digital TV, but at the source they can determine what bitrate they want to support. A lower bitrate (higher compression) causes loss of quality, but in the case of fixed bandwidth or pay-for-transmission systems, reduce the transmission cost. A higher bitrate is higher quality, but the cost of transmission can be higher.

Satellite has to cram a bunch of channels into fixed bandwidth, and they do it by compressing the stream and you lose quality in the process. Cable has the exact same issue--you only have so much bandwidth on that cable, so the quality suffers to compress it as much as possible. IPTV or streaming services have to pay for the bandwidth they use, so they compress the video as much as they can and quality is lost. It's all about either packing in more channels or reducing transmission cost.

OTA broadcast has already secured the rights to the bandwidth associated with a specific linear "channel" for a tuner to pick up. That is a single fixed cost and completely unrelated to the level of compression they choose, so they can choose the lightest compression and the highest bitrate for their transmission without it affecting operating cost. 

Hence, OTA is actually a BETTER picture than cable/satellite/streaming, because they are giving you a higher bitrate content.

Yep, as I've mentioned several times since I've worked with these various companies, cable/satellite is a major headache. They have fixed bandwidth either within the cable or via a satellite feed, and they have a lot of legacy boxes out there in the world that only support less efficient compression. Which means if they are sending ESPN out there, they probably need to have MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and HEVC compression options so they have three different streams they have to fit into their bandwidth envelope for a single channel.

Which means that they compress the HELL out of everything using settings that strip out a lot of the quality, because they're also trying to provide as many channels as possible.

This tends to also affect streaming companies somewhat, as they have to pay for the bandwidth they use. However, their transmissions are point-to-point, which means that if I'm watching ESPN on Hulu, they don't have to send me 100 other channels 100% of the time. It also means that whatever box I have receiving it (whether it's a Roku, or a native TV app, or whatever) can identify which compression protocol it's capable of decoding, and Hulu only has to send one. So while they are also forced to compress quite a bit to save on bandwidth costs, they don't have the same constraints as cable/satellite... Hence why streaming DirecTV will be higher quality than satellite DirecTV.

And that's also why digital OTA network broadcasts are often the highest picture quality. They don't have to worry much about compression settings because they're not "paying for bandwidth" in any meaningful sense.

Which is funny, because people used to go to cable/satellite for the picture quality vs analog rabbit ears... And now the best picture quality is digital "rabbit ears" while cable/satellite is often the worst picture quality.
 

Those have to be old people watching local news and Wheel of Fortune.  I can't imagine anyone who cares about college football just getting over the air broadcast TV

I get your point.  If we think about this in a very antiquated (but probably by-and-large accurate) way, if a given house has a husband who is into sports and a wife who is into reality shows then by showing the FB game on ESPN and Bachelor on ABC then the parent (the Mouse) may get 2 TV's out of that household but if they show CFB #1 on ABC and CFB #2 on ESPN then they'll only get 1 and the wife will go watch some other reality show on NBC or CBS or whatever. 

That said, there are some people (like me) that you just flat lose if you don't have a game OTA.  There were times this past season when I watched some random ACC or SEC game because it was on OTA when the game I would have preferred to watch was a B1G game but it was on BTN or ESPN or Peacock or whatever.