Do you remember what frequencies cell phones were operating at when they had those little antennas? The antennas disappeared in part because the wavelength got shorter, not because their figured out a way around it (although fractal antennas helped).
There needs to be some significant real-world testing before that's authoritatively known. The reason I say that is that most of the experience is based on how things have gone in South Korea which is absolutely not representative of anywhere around here. The land area of South Korea is a bit bigger than that of Indiana and they have only two national networks and about ten regional networks.
The coupon program was $50. Nobody would want those boxes today as they were limited to composite and NTSC outputs.
ATSC 3.0 is likely years away so missing out on everything in the interim in the hopes that the new standard catches on seems like a waste.
You speak as if these chipsets are everywhere and examples are plentiful.
The difference is that the US will use Dolby AC-4 and the rest of the free world (except Canada and US possessions) will use MPEG-H audio.
I've heard this rationalization over and over and I still don't buy it. It isn't as if five or six or 20 stations can put their HD feeds on one DTV channel. The other way works fine for five or six HD feeds but that's not what they're promising.
