re: OTA antenna vs cable picture quality.

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You can have two channels at 720p, yet one can have a better picture quality than the other (which is what's probably happening in OPs case).

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I covered that already. Not all 720p is the same. Cable 720p is not as good as OTA 720p.

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(they have 6 MHz per channel)

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Cable TV has the same 6 MHz per channel carrier. They can fit two 720p channels on a block or ten 480 channels on a block.

Get you a HDHomerun and stream it to your firestick. That way you don't need to run any lines and can move the tv wherever you like.

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BallsEleven

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What is the set up for that? Run coax into this then run Ethernet to the router? Anything more than that?

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Just to clarify, I'm not talking about "cable" cable. I'm talking about "TV Cable" (which can also be delivered by fiber or copper).

But since you bring it up, cable has access to more physical bandwidth overall than all TV stations in one area combined.

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Huh? So you’re lumping QAM, IP and Satellite technologies together? Weird.

It’s quite obvious that cable television companies have more bandwidth. Your comparison is 1 station vs 100+.

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.