Comment by MisterBastahrd
2 years ago
The quality of OTA TV is certainly superior to anything you're gonna get over fiber or coax.
If you're in the US and you have an online provider for cable channels, try swapping an NFL game between the online broadcast and the OTA broadcast. There's a night and day difference in terms of picture quality.
Yes, the bandwidth argument. OTA TV uses MPEG-2 for ATSC-1 as the OP's video describes. If the content is available in higher-res but the streamers aren't sending that, sounds like a marketing reason. Netflix will sell you 'premium' 4K for $ 22.99/mo
There's no good reason the NFL is better OTA than streaming except streamers aren't complaining enough, I would guess. Note this last season, there was one game that was not available on regular TV, only on streaming. That was a 'test run' but clearly, the NFL is there to make money, and if they can make more streaming... well, there's your answer.
There were a number of regular season games on Thursday night carried exclusively by Amazon Prime. I watched them through my Roku devices and the quality was not great but then there can be up to three TVs streaming through their respective Roku devices at once here and our download bandwidth is limited to 25Mbps.
The one playoff game that was carried exclusively via Peacock was the wildcard game between the Dolphins and Chiefs. I also watched it through the Roku devices and I thought the picture quality was fine, better than Amazon Prime had been.
Would I have ponied up $5.99 if it weren't the Chiefs as they're the local team? I don't know. Perhaps next year I'll have to make that decision if they carry another playoff game that has teams I don't care that much about.