dwinth's profile
ACE - Professor

ACE - Professor

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2.5K Messages

Thursday, June 1st, 2017 2:31 AM

What Is So Great About The Subchannels?

I was in a situation for a week where I could only watch Over The Air television with a rabbit ear antenna. I wanted to check out the subchannels in St. Louis. From what I saw, I do not understand why people get all upset about U-verse not carrying them.

 

The only subchannel that I saw anything of interest was MeTV which is also carried here in St. Louis by U-verse. Everyone has his or her own interests. I found nothing interesting on the subchannels.

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Expert

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15K Messages

7 years ago

That may be because you are using a "a rabbit ear antenna" and/or probably pointing it the wrong way!  So you probably have a small sample set to check.  If you go to tvfool.com, fill out the requested info as best you can, it will show you how many potential stations you could receive with various grades of antennas and where those stations are.

 

In my San Francisco bay area I can receive over 100 sub-channels (on my home-built antennas).  Of course after you strip out the religious, foreign, music, and shopping channels that number drops to less than 50 (didn't count 'em).  Sometimes there's good stuff on those sub-channels, particularity the PBS channels.  But different people have different tastes.  And at the very least the antenna is good for getting the local channels with much better quality than any cable company can provide (i.e., there's less compression).  That's what I mainly use them for these days.

 

And, FWIW, the antenna sometimes is a good diagnostic tool to compare with what you are receiving from your uverse connection.  For example, is your local station breaking up on your uverse?  Check it OTA to compare.

 

Guru

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622 Messages

7 years ago

Some "specialty" channels, such as Buzzr (a game show channel that competes with GSN), are only available as subchannels.

 

Also, there are a few cities where the CW Network is available only on a subchannel, and there appears to be a policy where U-Verse will not provide those, even though it does provide the subchannels that air ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox shows.

 

On top of that, some stations that are major network affiliates move their network programming to one of their subchannels if the station is showing, say, the local team's baseball game.

Expert

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15K Messages

7 years ago

I thought of one more advantage of OTA and receiving local channels. When local affiliates go through their annual negations with cable companies and black out their cable feeds to those cable companies you can still always watch those locals OTA.

 

And @That Don Guy brings up a good point about sub-channels.  It reminded me that between now and 2020 as the FCC channel repacking (google links) takes place we may find some favorite channels moving or going off the air.  The cable companies then will then have to decide whether to continue carrying those new sub-channels.  And there is no guarantee how long that will take for them to switch if they do.

 

In case you don't want to look at any of the links that google search I link to above, basically the channel repacking is a result of the FCC selling off the upper half of the TV frequency spectrum to the wireless companies (completed in April).  Any stations in that frequency range have to elect to either go off the air, move down to a vacant channel if possible (interference may prohibit where to move down to), or a lower channel can elect to allow a upper channel share their bandwidth.  Of course no station is doing this for free.  The wireless companies put up billions to pay these stations to do this (FCC gets their cut too).

 

So it's going to be "interesting" over the next few years what happens to these stations.  At least with a OTA antenna (and doing frequent re-scans) people who watch some of these sub-channels will not be too inconvenienced by these changes (unless the station goes off the air or moves down to VHF - yes some are moving back there too and after we were all told we only needed UHF antennas for OTA).

ACE - Expert

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27.6K Messages

7 years ago

I keep an OTA antenna hooked up to our main TV in case our Uverse service goes out.  Granted, we've been lucky that our service rarely goes out but if it does, I can't be sittin' around staring at DH!

Guru

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622 Messages

7 years ago

I thought of one more advantage of OTA and receiving local channels. When local affiliates go through their annual negations with cable companies and black out their cable feeds to those cable companies you can still always watch those locals OTA.

You can.  I, on the other hand, live about 50 miles from both the San Francisco and Sacramento transmitters, and am surrounded by hills on top of that, so none of the stations come in OTA.

 

Teacher

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22 Messages

7 years ago

I would like to see UVerse put the sub channels or "over the air digital" onto the Uverse system.

There are plenty of times a channel from the major broadcasters is preempted either for Sports

or Weather related broadcasts and the channel says you can see the normal program on their

Digital Station. That is fine, but I do not have an over the air antenna and Uverse does not carry

these signals. They should or if programming is preempted, the program removed should be

moved to an used channel (most stations are also in the 16xx channel group (sports area)

New Member

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25.7K Messages

7 years ago

You can find most of the programs on other channels.  Most networks have their own streaming service which you can see your missed program.  Also Hulu puts all of the prime time shows on their station the next day..  If you want to see a program on the sub channels.  Just google the name of the program you want to watch and it will give you a list of what services the program is on.

ACE - Professor

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7.6K Messages

7 years ago

In my case, a local sports team has maybe 4-5 games per year (out of 36) on a local subchannel. I pay for the league package which does not have blackouts for my local team and generally don't care about home games, as I'm usually there. This translates to maybe 1-2 away games when I have to watch the opposing team's broadcast on the PPV package.

 

The kitchen TV is OTA with subchannels in the rare case a subchannel is needed.

 

One of the local subchannels used to be local weather 24/7, but was stopped about four years ago in favor of another subchannel.

 

Back in the days of "multi-plexing" or whatever it was called, our local CBS channel would show additional NCAA basketball tournament games on the digital subchannels. THANKFULLY, the current situation is a million times better than "every game on CBS" but that's another story.

Master

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9.8K Messages

7 years ago


@That Don Guy wrote:

I thought of one more advantage of OTA and receiving local channels. When local affiliates go through their annual negations with cable companies and black out their cable feeds to those cable companies you can still always watch those locals OTA.

You can.  I, on the other hand, live about 50 miles from both the San Francisco and Sacramento transmitters, and am surrounded by hills on top of that, so none of the stations come in OTA.

 


@That Don Guy Google knife edge effect and/or diffraction.  I have a feeling that there is somewhere on your property that has a sweet spot to get something.  Move twenty feet and it's gone.  Sucks to have hills as even low ones can impact reception but there may be a knife edge sweet spot that might get you solid signals, reliably.  In fact, some knife edge scenarios allow stupendous reliable reception in the 300-500 mile range!

Master

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9.8K Messages

7 years ago

The FCC repack that @_xyzzy_mentioned will be a game changer but I bet AT&T will carry those when, say, NBC is on a 14.2 or something.  TV broadcasters are finding the subs to be more of a revenue generator than in the past, so better programming will be moving there.

 

@dwinth how many channels did you get when you scanned?  Depending on RF levels (either too far OR overload), you may get less.   I lived on the East side of Indy, surrounded by FM transmitters and only got 15, due to the overload from FM radio.  I  moved 20 miles NNE and now I can get 30-35.

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