With all of the advance's in television entertainment industry ,
I think by now , television owners should be able to choose any station in America to watch.

Especially for those paying money monthly.

Regardless of where one reside's .
The ability to watch 36 or 48 or 65 stations should be common place by now.

Why , with today's communication abilities are we limited the way we are?

Channel 6 in Davenport would still be KWQC , the NBC affiliate , but for Velma and Glenn , wintering in MESA
It could be channel 1548 on their Tv .

For watching local programing , where ever, when ever.

There are streaming apps where you can do just this, they have access to just about every tv source/station, many worldwide.

You select the stations you like and put into favorites and watch away.

Justwatch is one that lets you find and stream legally another is Realgood.

Link Justwatch

Realgood lets you load all your streaming services into one app making it easier to find shows across multiple platforms.

Link Realgood


There are of course plenty that will find anything you want, Local, out of town, pay per view, HBO, Netflix.

How about satellite, cable, and OTA, lets get to 1080p, or better yet, just skip 1080p (currently most of it is 1080i) and go directly to 4k. Shit is ridiculous.

Oh and the vast array of streaming app providers, how about uncompressed audio? It is so compressed that it’s just shit. That goes for satellite and cable as well. All compressed to shit.

It is my understanding that your local broadcast stations agree to a specific service area of transmission, to include antenna patterns by their network operating agreement. In this day and age, I suspect these agreement have language added that precludes streaming content out of their designated area. Professional sports associations require similar restrictions before they allow stations broadcast rights.

I don't know how this reconciles with those TV stations that show clips on their websites, but I think it is these agreements that restrict your local cable company from showing every station in the country.

I will agree that the whole industry of broadcast/streaming video needs fundamental change. Competition, within the limits of applicable legislation, appears to be resulting in many more options for consumers. Perhaps with fewer legal and contractual limitations, this progress might be accelerated?

But the TV's won't do the above w/o a computer and www service

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
But the TV's won't do the above w/o a computer and www service

Just to be clear, you want access to every channel every where at a flat fee over the air on a non-internet connected $500 or less device?

Yeah, nah.

It could come through the cell service.

Cell service has bandwidth limitations. This is greatly eased with 5G, but 5G is only available in more populated areas. That will improve with time but we're not there yet. You also add that change does not occur in a vacuum. As bandwidth increases, so does the potential for quality. As quality increases, so does the need for bandwidth. You would think that with 4K we would be nearing the limit of what people "need", but I think 1080P was seem much the same way.

The legacy broadcast TV (and honestly cable and satellite) systems are going to die off the way the wired phone system did. How many homes have a land line now? How many people have never thought about the cost of a long distance call? How many have never made a collect call? The downside is that what seems to be replacing it is a patchwork of disparate apps and subscriptions. It is cheaper today to make a phone call than it has ever been but I'd wager that it's more expensive to watch TV than it's ever been.

The way people consume TV has changed massively as well. I would wager that between on demand, DVRs, streaming services, etc. that the percentage of people that drop what they're doing to watch their favorite show during its scheduled time slot is very, very low.