Here & There Column 10-26-10

Outdoor Antenna's Or PC Channels?

With continual fee disputes between television broadcasters and cable or satellite providers the only one getting hit in the pocket is you and me who just wants to see our favorite TV programs.
If the Fox-Cablevision dispute proves anything, is is that consumers are clearly not being protected. Another looming showdown between Fox parent News Corp. and Dish Network could see the channel blacked out for those subscribers too on November 1.
An interesting advertisement we read recently pushed the sale of an outdoor rotating antenna which the ad said would give TV viewers the opportunity to watch your local channels in HD with no fees and no hassles and that this antenna had a 100 mile range.
Remember back so many years ago when everyone had some form of outdoor or indoor rabbit ears and we got none of the present day fee disputes which always results in us paying higher cable or satellite rates fees.
Online Internet advertising is pushing their buttons and urging TV viewers to watch online TV on our PC's with no subscriptions or monthly fees, no hardware to install, no bandwidth limits and that there are over 3,500 channels available.
Some folks have noted that they have connected their PlayStation's HDMI cable from their laptop to their TV's and watched Internet television on their TV sets.....if this is actually a working solution and you could watch those thousands of HD-PC channels on your TV.....then cable and satellite companies could be in big trouble.
But not to worry folks.......our sometimes dysfunctional government and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is being pressured to intervene and politicians are calling for binding arbitration or keeping the TV signal on until the dispute is settled. Legislation may be introduced that would require broadcasters to keep their signals on the air during a stalemate in negotiations....most likely all this will do is provide us with continual television programming but there most likely will still be increased fees coming out of our checkbooks shortly after any settlement is agreed upon.
The bottom line here folks is that television viewers always seem to end up on the wrong end of the stick when broadcasters get greedy.... increase fees to cable or satellite providers always result in continual increases in our cable and satellite fees.