re: Not getting NBC on U-Verse…

quote:

---

Our local news on NBC is one of our go to channels, especially for weather. And me in the fall for SNF. What a bummer. I’m almost 40 and perhaps late to the game, but I’ve avoided going the streaming route. But I’m told that will be the future.

---

Of course antenna helps out a lot for the additional Subchannels and extra channels not carried on those streaming services, but carried on cable.

It just depends on your location and where you are in relation to your stations. Baton Rouge though is horrible for local TV reception, the two main stations are in wasteland of VHF in digital, and the Fox and NBC stations are owned by Nexstar who are more than happy to gouge you through your cable provider for retransmission fees. They would prefer you to pick up their station via cable which are sometimes directly fed to so over the air signal suffers.

Over the Air TV does have one last gasp, but it is coming out slowly though is ATSC 3.0. It is an upgraded standard that will allow 4K broadcasts and more bandwidth. Right now many stations are sharing resources to put on nightlight ATSC broadcasts.

For example, New Orleans has 6 of its big stations on one 3.0 channel. Using newer compression, each station uses only about 2-4 Mbps for an HD signal while most stations use double or triple that to get a decent HD signal. The big issue now is encryption, some station groups don’t want just any one being able to decode the stations. There are certain boxes and TVs that have the right encryption key and can tune those stations fine despite the encryption.