My vision of Dyle’s target audience.
© Depositphotos.com / mindof

When I recently wrote about the welcome proliferation of over-the-air TV digital subchannels, or “dot-twos,” I overlooked an important part of that story: It proves that one of my predictions was right. In this case, it was my prediction and contention that dot-twos are a much better use of broadcasters’ finite bandwidth than mobile TV, especially Dyle TV.

With the current version of ATSC, North America’s digital TV standard, you can’t watch if your antenna is in motion. That’s a real limitation, and engineering groups went right to work on a version that could handle movement. Long story short, many of the broadcasters formed the Mobile 500 Alliance, while others backed an offshoot, Dyle, which required user authentication.

From a techie perspective, mobile TV sounded like a good idea, but as I pointed out, there’s no real market for it. Mobile TV’s target audience would be passengers within a metropolitan area who want live TV, but who aren’t in a subway tunnel. Did broadcasters really believe there were enough gadget-packing bus riders to make that work? Worse, each mobile TV channel took bandwidth away from another possible dot-two for stationary viewers.

Yet another hurdle was getting enough stations to broadcast mobile TV channels so viewers might want to buy mobile TV devices. As I wrote about Dyle in particular, “Any new service is going to have a chicken-egg problem, but Dyle has few chickens or eggs.” The best TV markets had only five or six mobile channels available; Denver has exactly one. It’s hard to convince a bus commuter to spend $50 or more for a phone dongle if that’s all it’s going to provide.

How bad is it now? When I scrolled to the bottom of Dyle’s FAQ page, I saw that the Belkin Mobile TV receiver, which had been on the market for less than two years, stopped working on January 1, 2015 because Dyle no longer supports its iOS app. Ditto for mobile TV reception on the RCA Mobile TV Tablet, which Dyle had announced and promoted at the International CES 2013. Sure hope you didn’t buy one of those.

On the other hand, I’ve still got the mobile TV dongle that Escort was kind enough to send me in June 2013. As I said in my review, it really worked. And it still works, bringing in that lone Denver channel whenever I test it. (I wonder how much of the iPhone dongle problem came from mistiming Apple’s transition from 30-pin connectors, which the Escort relies on, to that little Lightning thing. But I digress.)

I know for sure that the Denver station is still broadcasting, and Dyle’s site still shows lots of other active markets. On the other hand, Dyle’s news page shows no press releases since June 2014, and there’s that unceremonious New Year’s dumping of its Belkin and RCA receivers. The Mobile 500 Alliance was still alive as of April 2014, but you’d never know by its web site.

Broadcasters are currently negotiating and working out details for what will become ATSC 3.0, which should support 4K screens and mobile devices. I predict that by 2025, a bus rider will be more likely to be watching a dot-two on his cell phone than anything based on Mobile 500 Alliance technology. By then, Dyle will be known as the broadcast version of Microsoft Bob.

© Depositphotos.com / scyther5

The last couple of weeks, a few TV trade magazines have been abuzz about something that’s old news to us free-TV enthusiasts: There are a growing number of digital subchannels available in markets all over the country. For over-the-air TV viewers, it’s like having a virtual pay-TV system except without the paying. The most remarkable thing about this burgeoning free entertainment menu is that few people seem to know about it.

A side note: What’s the best name for these digital TV subchannels? Michael Malone tackled that question in Broadcasting & Cable. “The channels are alternately referred to as diginets or multicast nets or dot-two channels or subchannels, creating confusion among viewers, and even industry types,” he wrote. Katz Broadcasting promotes the term “emerging broadcast networks,” but I think that’s an unwieldy mess. Headline writers seem to prefer “diginets,” but I like “dot-twos” because it describes how to find these networks, even those that are really at dot-three or dot-seven.

I’ve been watching dot-twos since The Tube and Universal Sports were on. (The Tube faded to black in 2007 and Universal Sports shifted to pay-TV distribution in 2012.) This happy by-product of the digital TV conversion has exploded since then. Of the 70 channels I can pick up here in Denver, 42 are dot-twos, and they include channels devoted to movies, classic TV, news and weather. Sure they also include a solid chunk of stuff I can do without – religion, shopping, and Spanish-language programming – but it’s nice to have something for everybody.

What hasn’t changed since the dot-twos’ early days is that few viewers are aware of them. (I couldn’t find any dot-two surveys, but almost no one I talk to knows about them.) You might say that you can’t pay for this stuff; only a handful of dot-twos are on cable systems, and none are on Dish Network or DirecTV. The only way to watch is over the air, which is great for cord-cutters and a little inconvenient for everyone else.

So why not put together some advertising to let viewers know what they might be missing? This could be a great way for broadcasters as a group to boast about another facet of their public service. At a time when it’s hard to find a movie on the major broadcast TV channels, wouldn’t it be a good idea to mention that there are over 100 movies available every week on these dot-twos? As wireless companies clamor for TV’s bandwidth, wouldn’t it be smart to show America that it’s already being put to good use?

The Cable Cutter antenna on my roof, with the Radio Shack yagi that it vanquished.

There’s been a major change at FTABlog World Headquarters in Denver. My decade-old yagi-style antenna (I always call it the old-school, pointy kind of antenna), featured in my brief burst of international almost-celebrity, finally met its match. It was defeated by HD Frequency’s Cable Cutter antenna, which now provides a wider selection of over-the-air TV channels to my OTA device test bed.

That yagi had a lot of history behind it. I bought it from Radio Shack way back in 2004 when Dish Network had its first major retransmission tussle with CBS. Since then, it survived a new roof and a growing list of new OTA antennas. Some of the contenders came close to the yagi’s performance, but none ever beat it.

One major factor in the yagi’s longevity was its emphasis on VHF signals. With the switch to HD, most stations moved to UHF, but two Denver channels stayed on the VHF band. The most magnificent, impressive UHF antenna isn’t any good to me if it can’t somehow deliver my ABC and NBC affiliates.

Then at the International CES last month, Theodore Head, CEO of SiliconDust, maker of the amazingly useful HDHomeRun tuners, told me about HD Frequency’s antennas. Head said that they were simply the best, and he referred me to HD Frequency founder Josh McDonnell, who sent along his top-of-the-line Cable Cutter for me to test.

One of the really nice things about the HDHomeRun is the number of tools available for it, both in-house and third-party. To measure the signal quality for various channels, I started out with Signal GH for iOS, but later switched to HDhomerun (sic) Signal Meter for Android. The Android app was a little easier for me to read, and it’s free. I’d recommend the Signal Meter app to help point or position an OTA antenna, but your mobile device OS will probably determine which one is better for you.

The great thing about either signal measurement app is that it provides a good, solid number for signal quality, which makes it a lot easier to compare one antenna to another. When I got my Cable Cutter last week, the first thing I tried was sticking it in my ground-floor window. I was amazed to see that from there it matched or beat my yagi’s numbers for every channel except that VHF pair, which were weak but usable. I could recommend the Cable Cuter right there as an excellent indoor antenna, but when I later moved it to the roof, it kept its strong UHF signal and matched my yagi’s VHF reception.

(I’ve got a whole page full of numbers for all of the channels and all of the antenna position experiments I tried, but I’ll spare you the details. I’ll only mention one fact, verified during this process: Signal quality can change from minute to minute even when everything else stays the same. It takes more than one pair of readings to verify that Antenna A picks up a channel better than Antenna B.)

One more disadvantage of the yagi is that it’s very directional. Most of the channels in Denver come from Lookout Mountain, about 12 miles east of downtown, so that’s where the yagi pointed. There are a couple of other channel clusters that are broadcast from a point over 20 miles north of downtown. From my roof, those two towers are about 80 degrees apart, and my carefully aimed Cable Cutter can just see them both.

Thanks to the Cable Cutter, for the first time I can actually receive all the channels that TVFool.com says I ought to be able to get. For anyone who needs an OTA antenna, I can’t imagine a better choice.