OTA antenna vs cable picture quality.

I noticed the same. OTA probably uses less compression than many of the cable/satellite/streaming services. PSVue had great picture quality before they went belly up. Anyhow, I agree with you. I leave an antenna connected to my TVs for games of interest for that very reason.

I’ve noticed the same thing. It’s a very crisp picture OTA.

OTA TV can be better because you get the full resolution that the TV station is providing in older MPEG 2 compression at either 1080i, 720p, 480p, and 480i. With the current TV standard, TV stations can broadcast 19.44 Mbps of data on a 6 MHz channel which can be a mix of any of those formats.

Where TV stations have started to stray is that they are squeezing more and more channels in that 19.44 Mbps stream. For example, Fox 8 in New Orleans has 4 SD sub channels, one main HD 720p channel.

Where cable systems go wrong is that they will take those older MPEG streams and reconvert and or recompress them into new MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 streams. So that they can provide streaming access and other nonTV services. Also some systems because of consolidation have headends that will receive local stations and then route them to regional hubs to then send them back to the local virtual headend for redistribution. This can also lead to problems. I can recall Comcast having a 96 count fiber cable in Shreveport or Laplace get cut and there was no TV and internet in some areas for over 24 hours.

Long term the next generation of broadcasting will be ASTC 3.0 which will allow for more bandwidth and 4K broadcasts, and even spot directed content. So that way an EAS message that is for one area only is seen in the area that it is directed to. There are many other things that will help even with reception.