Hi there! Welcome to FreeTVBlog.com. This is going to be a fun place to talk about free TV, and I’ll bet you had already guessed that. The rest of this particular post will peel back the layers of this blog’s origin story. You have been warned.

This blog is a direct descendant from FTABlog.com, which I set up a very long time ago. Way back then, there were dozens of amazingly interesting free TV channels available via free-to-air (FTA) satellite, and the blog ran stories about them, from Fashion TV’s coverage of Carnival in Rio to Utah TV station KUEN’s movie night. These days, there are still hundreds of FTA satellite channels available on a medium-sized Ku-band dish, but few are like those general-interest English-language channels.

At the same time those great satellite TV channels were drifting away, similar streaming channels began appearing on the internet. Instead of watching a distant CW station from my dish, I could watch it via ivi.tv or Aereo or FilmOn. These new distribution methods kept changing, often shriveling under legal pressure, so they made great topics of conversation. Yet another development was the growth of local over-the-air digital TV, with plenty of new channels to watch. So the emphasis for this blog has shifted from free satellite TV to reflect the wider array of free TV options.

An important side-note: Although FTA was supposed to signify the perfectly legal viewing of unencrypted satellite signals, some pirates used the term to mean hacking protected commercial satellite TV. It was as if I had a blog about engraving, then counterfeiters started calling making fake $20s “engraving”. FTAList.com and FTABlog.com have always rejected piracy, which is an objectively poor gamble with significant risk and trivial reward. I mention all of this because according to Archive.org, when FreeTVBlog.com was most recently active, around 2007-2009, it wrote about satellite TV “testers”. That’s definitely not what I have in mind now.

You know that you have a bad name when you always have to explain it. Even when I mingled with savvy TV industry types, maybe one person out of 20 would recognize what FTA meant, and another one or two would mistake it for some piracy thing. Instead, this was always meant to be a blog about (legal) free TV, so when this domain finally became available a short time ago, I pounced on it. It’s going to take a little work changing business cards and such, but at least I’ll get to skip the explanations and get right down to business. I hope you enjoy it.