FWIW I have heard from many that via Apple TV one can watch FTA live, notwithstanding that as some suggest, the picture quality is not on par with watching FTA TV via means other than internet connection.
As I may have mentioned earlier, to my great surprise, after ditching Foxtel cable (which provided me with FTA channels through its service), I connected my TV to a KMART sourced indoor antenna (on sale for $5 in place of $10) and soon enough, without my prompting, the Freeview app was engaged. Even though when I searched the apps available on the TV (Hisense 2015 model), that app was NOT listed.
After connecting the indoor antenna I can watch all the legacy FTA stations live as well as their more recent digital spinoffs (10Bold, NineGo; 7mate, ABCMe etc).
I narrate my history so others with a similar problem can try my $5 solution rather ourchase a more expensive Apple TV device or similar.
Well⊠as someone who works in the industry, I hope that never happens. They (and Iâm being polite; I know who âtheyâ is) killed community TV in Australia by moving it onto internet delivery. The Commercial TV industry would not want to forego over-the-air transmission any time soon, and consumers wouldnât want that either.
BTW, with OTT delivery itâs not just the cost of the device that you pay for. The provider has to fund the cost of delivering bytes to you. EG: Amazon (the basis for so many services we use these days) doesnât care how much data you upload âfor freeâ, but they charge hugely when you take data back out and deliver it somewhere. Ultimately you pay for that, directly (in streaming service fees) or indirectly (and the operator WILL find a way to pass on charges. They are not in business for amusement).
By comparison the broadcast FTA cost model is largely fixed costs (hardware) and the operational cost of keeping it running - but is completely unrelated to how many viewers are tuned in.
The commercial free to air broadcasters, radio on AM and FM spectrum, and TV on UHF spectrum, pay ongoing license fees to the Government based on a combination of transmitter power and density of potential users in a broadcast area. That is a substantial yearly cost.
They also have to compete with each other, and pay for view providers, for content.
The big advantage for FTA is that since viewers are not paying for what is broadcast, most viewers accept advertising, and arenât too fussed about the content.
Many of the costs are substantial - very true. But my point is that they are fixed costs, and can be factored into the P&L without further burdening each viewer. Five TV sets in a house watching the same channel costs nothing extra compared to all of them turned off. OTOH, every additional stream created by a viewer using a catchup app adds a finite cost to the provider. Five TVs watching the same live program by IP would most likely cost a multiple of one, and measurably more than none.
Completely guessing, but it wouldnât surprise me that the hypothetical sum total cost of all viewers in Australia watching via IP would substantially exceed distribution, operation, transmission and licensing costs of the FTA model.
But if the industry had the smarts to mass customise ad delivery down to the individual viewer then thereâs a business model to cover the cost.
That is sort of the difference between broadcasting and streaming. In your example the provider would have to send 5 copies of the same content, quite possibly at the same time. The capacity of the servers and network connections to deliver that would have to be, one would expect, greater than if they only sent 1 copy out in a broadcast. As in the case of FTA and traditional cable type broadcasting like Foxtel.
Spectrum in Australia is allocated to TV broadcasting in both VHF and UHF bands. In fact, unless you live in a coastal black spot, in Sydney you donât require a UHF antenna at all.
The serious side is that there is a potential for installers to oversell products to consumers, since logical channel numbers give no indication of the physical channel number nor the band used for broadcast/reception.
There are many consumers who would need only either a VHF band III antenna (for physical channels 6 through 12) or a UHF antenna band IV and/or band V (for physical channels 28 through 51), and a lesser number where they would need a combined VHF/UHF antenna. An unscrupulous installer might just recommend the more costly combined antenna to all customers.
Ever since TV started using the UHF band channels, here in Melbourne in 1980 with SBS on Ch28, antennas have been combination VHF/UHF.
I have never bought an antenna that was not designed for frequencies to cover both.
But there are antennas around that are specifically UHF which would be useless in a major city. Beware.
Now that the lower VHF bands 0 through 5a are no longer used since analog switch off, the major networks use 6 through 12 in major broadcast areas. You can see these channels on your TV tuning. Not to be confused with logical channel number.
There are also plenty of antennas that are VHF only, and for many consumers in major cities, these would be all that they need. For example, one local manufacturer that comes to mind is bitek.com.au that makes the Digitech and Hills brands.
It is not a simple case of VHF vs UHF antenna.
Here in Melbourne the major broadcasting is done in VHF from Mt Dandenong.
However, some areas that are shadowed, like at the foothills, and inner city areas with tall buildings are serviced by UHF transmitters. Some outer suburbs are getting beyond the range of VHF transmissions from MD and have repeater stations in UHF.
Also, the community station CH31 is UHF. It keeps on going somehow.
My smart TV (getting old now, but still works) also has a browser. Used to drive me nuts trying to load webpages. Watching a conference live was painful, as the page was often freeze & need to reload - thereby missing part of what was happening.
I bought an Apple TV device and was able to download all the FTA apps, including the one for the US station that broadcasts the conference I watch⊠and by watching via the Apple TV, I never have an issue with freezing, buffering or needing to reload pages.
Also, by using the apps via the Apple TV, it saves my user name & passwords for the various apps. So I rarely need to reenter the passwords. It might happen occasionally, if I havenât been in the app for a long time & if there have been multiple updates to the app. But that is not a common occurrence.
I have tried the ABC and SBS catchup / streaming on a few occasions and have found that the content just becomes unavailable after a week or two.
Havenât tried the 7,9,10 network offerings as yet because I pretty much suspect that there is nothing there that couldnât have been recorded on my trusty dual HD disk recorder, and I also suspect that the content streamed would be infested with ads that I could do nothing to skip or indeed edit out of saved programs. As I can with a FTA recorder.
And thereâs another downside with the FTA catch-ups: the quality and formatting can be quite different to the off-air original. ABC for one has much softer coding on catch-up than on 2-HD, even though both services are technically high-def 1080i.
The ABC also changes the audio coding for iView, such that an LtRt original MPEG audio (which would decode into 5.1 via ProLogic) is turned into a 2.0 track that will only decode as 2.0 on many amps. An impact of that change: dialogue no longer comes from the centre speaker. Itâs a nit and an annoyance, and it doesnât have to be done like that⊠someone has made workflow and technical decisions and 2.0 is the result.
If you know you want to watch a program later and you want the best quality, your best bet is to record the program when itâs broadcast. Bonus: you probably have a better chance of skipping the ads that way.
Nice points @themaiz
I too have noticed that.
But I have a pretty good surround sound audio system that is capable of getting good left, right, center, and back out of almost any garbage that is delivered by free to air or streaming. Donât need to worry about the â.1â subwoofer stream as I have big speakers left and right as I do like my stereo music too from normal audio sources.
TV technology continues to change rapidly. I expect that TV antennas will soon join crystal sets in the junk room and all transmissions will be by wifi so make sure you have a good internet connection.
will it be cheaper for the FTA providers to deliver over the internet?
will it enhance the media providers ability to capture greater consumer involvement and hence revenues?
will the TV manufacturers dance around May Poles in glee at another excuse to ensure obsolescence. Given consumers are offered services needing more computing autonomy than the average 3 year old TV can manage?
There are some interesting and useful thoughts in prior posts about ways to decouple from that outcome.
What about areas where the internet is not viable for FTA?
including of course greater surveillance of the consumer by the media provider. It would make FTA more like social media i.e. not a direction that I would want to go in.
