Quote:
Originally Posted by Hack&Lube
Yeah, basically the best quality HDTV you can get is actually over the air because it's not compressed like on Cable or Satellite. The best thing is that it's also free. Analog OTA is ending but by law, the U.S. stations are switching to digital OTA.
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There's truth to that statement, but in practice it seems to be a bit of a myth. Most of the OTA stations around here have at least 1 or 2 subchannels, so it means that they are not utilizing anywhere close to their full bandwidth, and tend to show quite a few compression artifacts. Also some signals the networks send out to the affiliates are pretty bit starved as well. OTA does have the benefit that there is one less step to add compression, but it is not perfect in practice. Many cable stations are much better than the network affiliates, and if you have a good carrier (ie Verizon in the US), you will get better pictures on these channels than you could ota.
Also, in my experience, getting the antenna pointed right to receive all your local channels is a huge pita. I remember spending months buying new antennas, figuring out how to get them higher and higher off my house, re-pointing etc, and still not being able to find a direction to get all the channels available. That was when OTA was the only choice for getting local HD.