Retransmission: When antennas help and when they don't

When it comes to retransmission consent disputes, over-the-air antennas may not be the perfect solution, but they have gotten better.

In the days of analog TV, antennas generally were not a good solution for customers impacted by a blackout such as the CBS channel blackout for Time Warner Cable subscribers in select markets. The digital TV transition helped to solve some issues with bad or disrupted reception in places like New York City due to high-rise buildings, and helped alleviate some of the hassles with switching between cable video input and over-the-air (OTA) service. Of course, one risk of encouraging customers to use OTA antennas is that some viewers may opt to drop their pay TV subscription altogether. "Some people may come to realize that if they want good, quality HD ... then the best way to get it is over the air," said Merrill Weiss, head of the consulting firm Merrill Weiss Group. "The best quality you'll see is over the air. The broadcasters have to compress it to make it fit into their channels. The cable operators compress it even more to fit more programming into their cable systems. So every time it's compressed, it's degraded. So the best you can get normally is over-the-air, the next best is satellite or cable, and then after that is probably what comes over the Internet." Moreover, customers that drop their pay TV service and become OTA households would not have to worry about switching inputs or future retransmission consent battles. "Unfortunately, a lot of people don't realize you can get television for free," said National Association of Broadcasters spokesman Dennis Wharton. But by encouraging customers to use antennas, Time Warner Cable is actually helping to get the word out.