A blurry photo of the Mantis from the FCC report

This latest news comes from the invaluable site Zatz Not Funny: the FCC has approved TiVo’s application for a new over-the-air TV DVR called the Mantis. Zatz has a great diagram showing just four inputs: power, antenna, USB and Ethernet, and he says it’s just 5 inches square and an inch and a half deep. That matches the blurry corner of a photo from the report to the FCC about how interference testing was performed.

A box that size sounds a lot different than the TiVo Roamio OTA or its Bolt which includes OTA. It sounds just like a SimpleTV without a TV output jack, or a Tablo without a second USB port, or a slightly larger HDHomeRun. And it can sit on its side.

Zatz quotes a TiVo Community thread where the company says it’s planning to “break the trajectory of traditional DVR” around the time of the January 2017 CES. Just one more reason to drop by the show and see what’s new.

The reasons are a little sad. A baseball team leverages its value on a TV network that’s too expensive for most cable systems. A Hall-of-Fame announcer approaches retirement. A huge metropolis has no good way to watch the final games of a local celebrity.

But I’m really happy with the results. For the first time since 2001, Los Angeles TV station KTLA will broadcast Dodgers games, six from their final month of the season, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. The first will be September 23, “Vin Scully Appreciation Day” at Dodger Stadium.

As I’ve often written, baseball teams are losing future fans by blacking out entire seasons from over-the-air TV. Some folks can’t or don’t want to pay for TV, and the number of cord-cutters seems to be growing. Putting a few games on OTA is a good first step. Now let’s see if they can find a half-dozen games to broadcast free every month in 2017.

And this is one extra perk for us few Dish subscribers who are grandfathered in to the KTLA and the other four FCC-defined Superstations. Baseball was once a big reason to watch them (and still is for WPIX), so it’s nice to see it return, even for just a month.

An auction sign that’s not so depressing. Photo by b_schmidt

I haven’t been writing about this much because, frankly, I find it too depressing. The federal government is auctioning chunks of the spectrum that broadcast TV is using to serve the public today so that wireless services can use them for their subscribers tomorrow. Some of that money goes to the broadcasters who have been using it essentially free for all these years. The rest goes to pay down the national debt, a one-time payment so Congress will buy more time to not balance the budget. Viewers will probably have fewer free channels to watch, and wireless subscribers will keep on paying for wireless. If you want more details, there’s a pretty good explainer here.

The process is complicated. Basically the FCC will try to auction a very large band of TV spectrum, and if that fails, it will try again with a slightly smaller band. As TV Technology reports, that first round failed, and the FCC is reloading for Round Two.

To say that the first round failed is an understatement. The target was $88 billion, but bidders offered less than $23 billion. The second round will include less spectrum for a local target, yet to be determined. For more information, including a great chart to show the round-by-round possibilities, go check out that TV Technology article.

Looking at that grid of possibilities, it looks like each new round of the auction saves one or two UHF TV slots. I sure hope that the auction continues for a very long time so we can keep as much free TV as we can.