said by dishrich:said by fifty nine:said by bartolo5:Always wondered why does the USA bother about terrestrial TV broadcasting so much when most people get their local channels through cable.
Because a significant number do depend on over the air TV and that number is actually going up by all indications.
You also might add re: bartolo's incorrect statement, that MANY CATV headends, as well as BOTH DirecTV & DISH DBS, still pull all those signals OTA in many markets. This is particularly true in many rural areas, where it is simply too costly, or not even practical, to have direct feeds from all those stations to the headend.
In our market alone, both DBS providers get the majority of our locals via OTA pickup, as do many of our surrounding CATV systems.
Our cableco's headend gets the HD signal OTA but the SD signal for a few channels via fiber. The tower is line of sight from my house in fact.
