I have been living without cable/satellite TV since March.

At first, it was an experiment; With the video available on the internet and digital broadcast, could I live without paid TV services?

9 months later, the answer is yes, absolutely!

I think one of the biggest revelation for people that do visit is not so much what you can find as video content on the Internet, but rather what you can find on terrestrial digital broadcast.

A little context first: I live in Montreal and the terrain here has never been kind to analog terrestrial transmission. A few mountains around, a lot of buildings and area where reflections have always meant that the quality of television was bad. Basically, the whole city has been subscribing to cable television since the 70s primarily to have good reception of the local TV channel. Sure, it was nice to have additional choices, but broadcast channels were the main reason. When you receive TV through cable almost exclusively in a city for 40 years, terrestrial antenna becomes quaint and people can’t really conceive the possibility of good TV receive on one of those.

Montreal is about 30 miles (50 km) from the US border. The US stations in northern New York state and  Vermont have always been targeting Montreal as the market there is many times bigger than in their US foot print. Those stations with affiliations to all the major networks (ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, CW, PBS) are carried on cable here. I had a feeling that I could get a signal with an outside antenna.

In October, on an impulse, I went to “The Source” (formally Radio Shack) and bought their only outdoor antenna in stock. A small, slick antenna that look a bit like a flying saucer, the kind they use on RV vehicles. I installed it on the roof of our three stories house. The directional antenna is equipped with an internal mechanism to tune a specific region. I did tune it towards the NY/Vermont direction.

Without much costs and efforts, I was able to get a perfect HD signal without any drops or artifacts for all the channel except for the ABC affiliate in Burlington (it seem they fell down to a bad signal allocation on VHF and that will change eventually). I can get also the local Montreal digital channel without changing the antenna’s direction since I am about 5 km from the transmitters.

Counting the primary and secondary channel, I do receive about 25 digital channel, most in HD with strong stable and clean signals. When I show that to people that visit me, they really have a shock. It’s hard for them to imagine that you can have such choice and quality over free terrestrial broadcast.

Based on my microscopic de-facto market research, I feel that people in North America don’t really know yet how good terrestrial digital broadcast is. I think that the broadcasters have a lot of work to do to make people realize that it is that good. I also feel that it can change fundamentally the relation between the broadcasters and the cable/satellite distributors.

What do you think? Have you tried digital terrestrial television in your are? Share your comments and experiences!