Happy Camper,
I doubt 90% of folks can get them OTA with the reliability they get from cable/DBS. I have spent hundreds of dollars, and many hours tweeking my OTA setup, and I still have issues. Last night I could not watch LOST in HD. If the wind blows hard, and it did last night, the trees cause big time multi-path issues, and my OTA reception goes to hell. Most folks would not put up with either the large (CM 4228) antenna, or the reception issues, when they can get cable instead. D* would not be using a billion dollars in new sats for local HD if they didn't need to.