With over the air HDTV like this, who needs cable?

With Christmas past us now, I thought I'd write a bit about an old technology that is becoming very new in our house: TV. Not video, but real, honest to goodness, over the air TV.

My wife and I gave our two sons somewhat geeky presents for their MacBooks: Pinnacle analog and HDTV USB tuners (I bought Mac versions, but PC versions with different and apparently somewhat poorer software are here). For those of you not familiar with TV alphabet soup, these tuners receive not only ordinary standard definition (abbreviated NTSC) TV stations numbered 2 through 82, but also receive digital television signals using the new digital standard (abbreviated ATSC). These new digital television stations typically have numbers like 5.2 or 44-1 on modern TVs. Woot.com offered these USB tuners on sale during the holiday shopping season for about $80, so I figured it might be fun for them to be able to try receiving television over the air, just as we did when we were growing up. We live on the side of a hill with a nice southern exposure, so I figured we ought to be able to pull in a few stations to watch.

So the boys and I plugged in these little gizmos on Christmas Day. We installed the ElGato EyeTV Lite software that provides a nice online TV guide, allows you to switch channels, and record programs like on a TiVO. And then we hooked up the wimpy little monopole antennas -- not even rabbit ears, but just a single pole -- that came with the tuners. With such lightweight hardware -- just a little USB plug and an indoor antenna, we didn't expect much, but we hoped we could watch and record a few programs.

Boy were we wrong. Because while the analog TV signals we got over these little adapters were just OK -- they were a little snowy with ghosts and color rainbows -- the digital signals were crystal clear, and the HDTV signals were breathtaking. While the tuners picked up only about eight analog TV stations, we had 23 digital stations to choose from, of which most were offering true HDTV programming in the evening.

Admittedly 31 stations isn't the 125 or more stations you get from your local cable TV company. It's only about the number of channels you get from your basic, $14.95 a month cable TV subscription. But instead of the $180 you'd pay each year for basic cable, these over the air stations are free of charge. If you're like me, you actually don't watch the Golf and Home and Garden channels anyway, making most of those 125 channels of additional programming irrelevant. And that basic cable price doesn't include any HDTV channels, which typically are only available as a $3 a month upgrade to a $45 per month digital service, making the annual cost more like $600, or about half the price of a nice, flat screen TV. And what about cable extras like electronic program guides (EPGs)? The EyeTV software provides its own EPG over the Internet through a service called TitanTV.com. And EyeTV further provides you with personal video recorder functions so you can select a show from the EPG and have your computer to record it in all its HDTV glory. Cable companies would charge you about $10 a month additional for those functions, would also charge you about $5 a month for your cable box and another $1 a month for your remote too. Oh, and did I mention that if I bought the full version of ElGato's software (about $75), it would let me put all my recorded TV shows on my iPhone and iPod? No service from the cable TV company lets me do that.

Now I've been thinking about getting a nice big flat panel HDTV for quite a while now, and I had ATSC reception a requirement before we tried out these computer tuners. But given what we saw on my kids computers this Christmas, I'm now thinking more radically. With over-the-air ATSC TV, TiVO HD, and a NetFlix subscription for movies, I could drop cable TV service and never miss it.

The fact of the matter is that the problem that cable TV was created to solve -- that of snowy, ghosting pictures due to weak signals and reflections -- now has been solved by digital technology. The US Federal Communications Commission has mandated that all TV signals will be digital by February 2009, meaning that consumers will have access to crystal clear TV throughout the US in just over a year. ATSC tuners are now standard for all TVs sold in the US. And these trends are bad news for cable TV and telecom companies whose story to Wall Street has been to expect annual price increases and always rising average revenue per customer from their bundled TV services. After all, with free TV like this, who really needs cable TV?

Full disclosure: the author has no positions in any of the companies and categories mentioned in this article at the time of writing.

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