ATSC Worth it? (For tivo)

[Pandamonium]

Looking into buying another TiVo. Presently they sell the Tivo Premiere, which has two tuners that can do either ATSC or NTSC. They also have the Premiere4, which has four tuners that can only do NTSC. We're paying for cable at the moment. Longer term, we may elect to drop cable if one of the startups figures out a way to do a la carte channels. In that case, ATSC would be nice to have as an option.

I don't know anything about the current state or trend of ATSC broadcasting. Is it stable and vibrant? Should I continue to look for two tuner Premieres so that I can fall back on ATSC in the future? Or should I just screw my OTA dreams and just get the 4-tuner cable version, since I'm already paying for it anyway.

 

[Ken g6]

Well, NTSC is pretty much dead. QAM might be nice if you want to keep cable.

As far as ATSC goes, your TV market looks pretty vibrant to me.

 

[Pandamonium]

Errm... so I'm mixing my terminology up.

The Premiere4 has 4 tuners that only support digital cable. The older Premiere has 2 tuners that can do digital cable, OTA, or analog.

But to clarify- you'd advise looking for the older Premieres so that I can go OTA if/when I want, correct?

Edit: I don't know where to begin finding out whether national broadcasting standards are getting squeezed. That's the main thing I want to know- will OTA be abundant in ~3 years or should I expect continued spectrum slashing?

 

[Ken g6]

Ah, so, you want to know about the future of TV.

This feels kind of like asking "will AMD still be around in ~3 years". I don't know. I don't think anyone does. :\

 

[quikah]

If you could hold off I would wait for the next box they come out with which should include the Tivo stream functionality built in.

I can't imagine even thinking about getting a cable only Tivo, ota is great to have.