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TV Execs Warn FCC: NextGen TV DRM Could Turn Free TV Into Gambling and Pay-TV Platforms
(www.antennaland.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Also, depending on where you live its a pointless exercise. I ended up throwing mine away not because I didn't want access to OTA television, but because I lived in a valley on the other side of mountains where all the broadcast antennae in Seattle are. So even being on the top floor of a building with my antenna as high as I could possibly mount it I still got exactly one channel total that came through and it was still glitchy a lot of the time. God the digital changeover ruined OTA broadcasts, because at least when you used to have weak signal you could tweak the antenna until the picture looked halfway decent, but no amount of tweaking fixes the digital glitching that happens from dropped packets.
Anyway, yeah, if you live in an unfortunately placed area, you need a 30 foot tall antennae pole on top of your building to even maybe have the opportunity to catch some broadcast channels. Stupid.
5 channels here!
Well, technically. They drop out more often than not so its essentially worthless. To get decent reception, I'd need to go to a motorized high gain directional.
Its been quite a few years since OTA has been a realistic option for me, and why I have had a media server since Netflix only offered DVDs by mail.
This is almost my exact problem. I am at the bottom of the hill of my neighborhood with terrible signal. It's bad enough that Verizon and AT&T mobile carriers do not get signal at my house. I had to spin up a guest wifi ssid for visitors to have access on their mobile phones.
I think when I tried the OTA antenna I get maybe 3 channels.
I don't know if Verizon of AT&T offer these but T-Mobile used to have small cellular sites you could basically rent them to plug into your wired internet and it would piggyback off your internet to make a small cellular hotspot to give you good cell signal. I had one when I lived out in the boonies for a while.
EDIT: Looks like the ones T-Mobile used to offer are all End-of-Life and they don't even want them back from customers because they were for 3G/4G and they're moving all services to 5G.
https://tmo.report/2025/04/t-mobiles-infamous-cellspot-coverage-devices-are-now-end-of-life/
EDIT II: Looks like AT&T may offer some still though:
https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1452148/
Yea, I'm aware of those from working in telephony but cannot justify a DAS in my house, for visitors, when T-Mobile has perfect signal for us all through the house as well as the woods behind my house.
It's just easier to have people log in to my guest wifi ssid since modern smartphones have moved to SMS/Voice allowed to go over a data network that isn't cellular.
It never occurred to me this use case for VoWiFi, I thought it was for voice quality.