by ·Comments Off on John Oliver’s Sinclair Segment

Local construction distractions have grown so large that I’m taking a short break. Meanwhile, as the FCC investigates its own chairman to see whether his actions improperly benefitted Sinclair Broadcast Group, here’s John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight story from last July about Sinclair’s hands-on approach to local news. Whenever I hear the NAB talking about the benefits of localism, I think about iHeartMedia’s reportedly impending bankruptcy and Sinclair forcing stories down to all of its already huge station group. So how do we get back to true localism?

by ·Comments Off on AirTV Player Adds OTA DVR
Close-up of icons

OTA recordings show an antenna symbol, while Sling’s show a cloud

Finally finding a use for the second USB port in back, and answering my occasional complaint here, Sling announced yesterday that it has added a DVR for over-the-air TV to its AirTV Player. It’s just a beta for now, but it’s open to all AirTV Player users, at least the ones who hear about it. I first noticed it in a story by Jeff Baumgartner at Multichannel News, although I later found the press release at PR Newswire (registration required). But I never saw an email from Sling or AirTV about it.

As its information page explains, there are still plenty of caveats to this early OTA beta. The USB hard drive has to be fast enough to handle HD recording, which means that most portable hard drives are good but many thumb drives are too slow. Viewers can’t watch a recording until it’s finished. Rescanning for local channels removes any pending recording requests. Buffered viewing, with pausing and rewinding, still isn’t available for live OTA TV. And the the AirTV uses a single OTA tuner, so viewers can’t watch one OTA show while recording another.

One plug in a USB port, showing the other USB port emptySpeaking of that tuner, I was amused by AirTV’s illustration (shown right) of where to plug in the USB hard drive. Looking at the unit from behind, they suggest the leftmost USB port, although mine is working fine in the right port. What’s missing from that picture is AirTV’s OTA tuner, which is a Hauppauge dongle that plugs into the other USB port. If you don’t have them both attached, you don’t have an OTA DVR.

In about 12 hours of testing, I couldn’t find any big problems yet. OTA recordings line up with cloud DVR recordings of Sling programming. They also populate the Continue Watching ribbon as appropriate. The guide appears to be Rovi-based, and shows everything scheduled for about six days forward. I couldn’t find anything through Search, but I can scroll over to any show I already know about, and the AirTV Player will allow series recording like a TiVo Season Pass.

This Local Channels DVR Service is free during the beta period, matching Channel Master’s DVR+ (which still supports Sling at the moment) and Stream+ (which “will be shipping here any day”). Despite the limitations of a single tuner, it’s a big step up for the AirTV Player. We’ll see whether the finished product will be enough to make it the cord-cutters’ favorite.

by ·Comments Off on Where To Watch Free Baseball On Local TV
View of the infield during a baseball game

Philadelphia and Toronto – two of the teams that will appear on WPIX’s Yankees and Mets broadcasts.

Friday’s post was about the excitement of watching some spring training baseball games on free-to-air satellite TV. Once the regular season arrives, FTA satellite dish owners will be just like most other American viewers, with almost no major league baseball games available on free broadcast TV.

Unless you live in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, your free-TV exposure to regular-season games will probably be limited to 10 Saturday games on Fox. WPIX in New York will carry 22 Mets games and 21 Yankees games. KTLA in Los Angeles starts with five Dodgers games, all before May 1. Last year, KTLA belatedly added a few more Dodgers games in September.

The big winner is Chicago. WGN plans 55 regular-season White Sox games while WLS, the ABC affiliate, will show 25 Cubs games. Having the Cubs on a station other than WGN just doesn’t feel right. I’ll get used to it.

Everyone else is pretty much out of luck. As I wrote two years ago, there are a few minor-league baseball teams that show local games, but most big-league teams squeeze every dollar by putting every possible game on a pay-TV regional sports network. Especially with the growth of cord-cutting and cord-nevers, I think they’re taking the short-term cash while blocking a new generation of potential fans. Let’s hope that one day some other teams will see the light.

by ·Comments Off on How ATSC 3.0 Looks Today

ATSC 3.0 logoIf you want to take a peek at the next generation of broadcast TV, you’ll want to read Phil Kurz‘s detailed description of the ATSC 3.0 demonstration hosted this week by WRAL. The story is at TV Technology, which also ran a parallel article by James O’Neal about Sinclair’s state-of-the-art research and testing facility, currently mostly devoted to ATSC 3.0.

At the demonstration, WRAL Director of Engineering and Operations Pete Sockett said that the ATSC 3.0 transmitter was using just 40 kW to cover all of Raleigh, compared to the full million watts that the existing ALSC 1.0 signal uses. Kurz wrote, “ATSC 3.0’s OFDM modulation scheme is so much easier to receive than ATSC 1’s … that the new standard will make it possible for broadcasters to reach viewers over-the-air using smaller home antennas, on the road and even in their basements, (Sockett) said.”

Later, Jim Goodmon Sr., CEO and chairman of the board of Capitol Broadcasting Company, returned to the idea of putting broadcast TV chips in cell phones to handle the (rare) problem of watching TV in a moving vehicle. I’d say that I beat this subject to death years ago, but in retrospect it seems clear that Mobile TV was always DOA. Goodmon apparently doesn’t see it that way, as he said, “Mobile DTV didn’t take off because we couldn’t get the content. If we would have gotten the content out there, the chip makers would have made the chips, and I think people would have put the chips in the phones.” No, if FM broadcasters can’t persuade carriers to allow active FM radio chips in phones, I can’t see how OTA TV chips will be an easier sell.

There’s much more in the article about the positive add-ons, such as targeted emergency information, that ATSC 3.0 enables, but nothing about the scary stuff I still worry about. As a throwaway note, Kurz mentioned that one part the demo featured an ATSC 3.0 gateway taking in the off-air signal and retransmitting it to a tablet via wifi. I’ve got several devices already that take an ATSC 1.0 signal and send it over my local wifi network. Will the folks who run ATSC 3.0 allow such third-party reuse once it launches? We’ll all find out soon enough.

by ·Comments Off on Retransmission Cash Projected To Keep Climbing

American Cable Association logoFor folks who built their business on serving the public for free, TV broadcasters sure are ramping up their work to get more money from viewers. A survey by the American Cable Association projected that retransmission consent fees will rise 88% by 2020 for its members.

Although it’s not automatic (the price of a product is not solely based on the price of its ingredients), cable companies typically pass along those fees as rate increases to their subscribers. Which means that folks who don’t get their local channels for free with an over-the-air antenna will be paying that much more for the privilege of watching those same channels delivered over a wire.

One could argue that local channels have become less valuable, not more, in recent years as viewership has declined. Yet the ACA could point to an operator who saw its retransmission payout rise from $8.53 per subscriber per month in December 2017 to $14.65 in January, a jump of almost 72%.

In a statement, ACA president and CEO Matt Polka said, “The corporate broadcasters are out of control. No other industry operates this way. No other sector would get away with such massive price increases in just three years.”

The subscriber rate hikes that these retransmission fees will cause should accelerate the move to cord-cutting, and some of those viewers might get too busy with Netflix or Amazon Prime to watch as much local TV. By raising the price, broadcasters might be hastening the day when their public service just doesn’t matter. Too many people will stop watching, and they might just take some cable systems down with them.