And there are some of us that don't have internet that is capable of sustaining streams.
I agree. When I lived in my house the BEST speed I could get was 1.5MB from the Telco (at the time Qwest). When I moved into the apartment a mile down the road I could get 40MB (I settled on 12MB). Now I have it through the cable company because the Telco again could only give me 1.5MB
Honestly now that its been 2 years since I last had FTA (11/29/12...moved out of my house on 12/1) I thought about it. How much do I really miss it? And the answer is "not that much". Reason I say that is I mainly had FTA for sports. The weird games that you couldn't get on the main stations. But now there are other ways.
-North Dakota State football games were on FTA...now they still are but most are on ESPN3. Can watch them that way
-North Dakota Hockey. When they were on the Fighting Sioux Sports Network (which was just a feed) each year they would publish the coordinates. For a few years they (the Sioux) actually sold a system to get the games. It was a Satworks 3618, a 30" dish and LNB. I know folks in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis) who had the system JUST for that. The only channels logged in were the FSSN and whatever "strong" transponder was on that satellite to fine tune the dish. When the season was over the receiver got unplugged til October. A couple years ago they signed with Midco (the cable company) and they scrambled the feed. That was due to other cable companies just taking the game and showing it on their cable system on a public access channel.
-Montana & Montana State football games. The games were on local CBS & ABC stations across the state. Montana games the coordinates were published each week. MSU games used the same coordinates each week. I do miss those games as most are not on the internet (the non Root Sports games are on the internet)
I do miss a couple things
-college hockey games. I am a college hockey nut who loved starting at 6 seeing a game on the east coast, then around 7 flip to a WCHA game, 7:30 a UND game, maybe 8 or 8:30 a game from Colorado and ending it with the 10:00 start in Alaska. Loved my C-Band dish for those games in Alaska
-But the one thing I do miss are those really oddball sporting events. Not necessarily the sport but the station producing it. I always got a laugh at the 2 "homer hillbillies" (thats what they called themselves) doing local high school or Eastern Kentucky college games for WYMT 57 Hazard. Just listening to them was hilarious as the game usually was 2nd. They would just tell stories. Or seeing some D3 football game produced what could only be described as "below public access"
-I also do miss scanning and all of a sudden finding a game that "holy crap you didnt know was televised"
Since I was mainly KU (yeah I had the C-Band dish but it was "fixed") during the spring through early fall was mainly watching RTV (when it was actually good) or some of the stuff on 97W. I do like PBS but they usually carried the same programs across all of them. I loved the days when we had Equity Broadcasting, KUIL (when they were Fox) and even the Puerto Rico/USVI nets on KU. I've discussed that at length. Thats why alot of us had fixed dishes at 123W back then