I know it’s probably because there’s money to be made.
I just wish there was a good place to discuss IPTV providers that wasn’t full of sketchy resellers over promising and under delivering. You’d think they could at least sort out their EPGs as most I have used are like 80% complete at best.
Not asking for provider recommendations, not sure if that’s allowed here. Just wondering if y’all know of a place where that shit can be discussed in a neutral and honest environment?
Lots of TV stations in the US are moving to the new broadcast standard, ATSC 3.0, encrypting the channel, and stopping their ATSC 1.0 broadcasts. This makes an antenna useless. And the only digital boxes that are allowed are ones that have to be plugged into the TV directly with HDMI. This means you’d have to have an antenna and expensive converter box for EACH TV.
Basically, broadcast TV is an unreliable mess now.
ATSC 3.0 is usable. I have a HDHomerun sitting on my LAN with a couple 3.0 tuners.
The big problem is:
the 3.0 broadcasts are still mostly tests, so you get mostly a respin of a 1.0 channel
the audio is AC-4 and a lot of software doesn’t support it. There was stuff for Windows but when I looked, the usual suspects (VLC, mpv) on Linux didn’t support it
It’s usable until your local stations decide to encrypt. Then HDHomerun will not work.