What IS after ATSC

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by mr_rye89

If they scrap OTA TV I'm gonna finally have to pick up hulu..... I think they have 90s sitcoms and anime. I already do netflix, and I can feed that to my old TVs........

I'm sure OTA TV will be around for quite a while yet. ATSC 3.0 is simply a new technical standard for broadcast TV, as I was informed via a post in this forum from VK member Andy in Texas some time ago. The future of OTA television does not concern me one bit, as I no longer have cable, having switched to Roku streaming video over a year ago. The picture quality from video streams is excellent, rivaling that of OTA TV (due to better resolution), and Roku offers other services besides your area's local channels (if your cable operator offers an app for that purpose; not all do--yet), including Hulu, as you mentioned. I watch Hulu and Netflix myself, and am very pleased with both services; I wouldn't give them up at this time.

I'm glad to hear you can feed Netflix to your old TVs, probably by using a modulator to convert the output to a VHF TV channel, as has been done by other VK members. (I see no reason why you couldn't do the same with Hulu, should you decide to subscribe to that service.) This sounds like a great alternative to OTA TV, unless you want to see your area's local news and the networks' national newscasts, in which case you would still need an antenna; however, if you use a streaming video player such as Roku and your cable company offers the app for local TV, you can use that player and leave OTA behind for good. I did just that over a year ago and did not look back.

Switching to IPTV is, without a doubt in my mind, one of the best things I ever did to improve my television viewing experience; it is the wave of the future of TV. I am enjoying television more now than I ever did at any other time, and I can remember as a kid just having three NTSC channels from Cleveland to watch, in 525-line b&w of course. My 19" HDTV delivers a picture that runs rings around the NTSC CRT TVs I grew up with, but that is to be expected since 16:9 HDTV operates at a much higher resolution (720 or 1080p, to say nothing of 4K which is 2160p, IIRC) than NTSC ever did.