Billy Mitchell Is Going to Trial

[Tanooki | 4,934]

6 minutes ago, G-type said:

I'd be willing to cut the cord, but my wife isn't. 

Is she hung up on certain channels?   I in that long amount of research did not want to lose some things too both of us cared about and got that answered too, one word: SLING.

They have (had at this rate?) unique contracts with various cable channel providers, one in particular was the A&E family of networks/stations that youtube, pluto, philo, sony, etc could not get.  They were like $30~ month and have all that stuff with a 50hr dvr included (200hr for +5 dollars) and it streams nice and smooth to tvs, fire sticks, mobile devices, computers, etc.

To me it was the up front cost of $50x2 for antennas, and then +30 for Sling, but the alternative was $200 for my tv/phone/net package.  Phone dumped, net, kind of blackmailed my provider into $60/mo net service when If ound out they were leasing the same lines to a local company so I demanded they match, or I'd use them and keep their equipment anyway.

[G-type | 2,482]

Just now, Tanooki said:

Is she hung up on certain channels?   I in that long amount of research did not want to lose some things too both of us cared about and got that answered too, one word: SLING.

yea... she loves true crime, and watches a lot on the Investigative Discovery channel. I just checked and saw that's included on Sling. But beyond that, she is also really attached to the user interface of our cable company. I once tried to switch us to a different cable company for a slightly better price, and she made me switch us back, because she didn't like the interface.

[RH | 4,906]

6 minutes ago, G-type said:

yea... she loves true crime, and watches a lot on the Investigative Discovery channel. I just checked and saw that's included on Sling. But beyond that, she is also really attached to the user interface of our cable company. I once tried to switch us to a different cable company for a slightly better price, and she made me switch us back, because she didn't like the interface.

[Tanooki | 4,934]

8 minutes ago, G-type said:

yea... she loves true crime, and watches a lot on the Investigative Discovery channel. I just checked and saw that's included on Sling. But beyond that, she is also really attached to the user interface of our cable company. I once tried to switch us to a different cable company for a slightly better price, and she made me switch us back, because she didn't like the interface.

I get that, mine was too.  The sling interface is about the same really.  Sure you can do the more panel like Netflix garbage, but it also has the usual cable channel directory setup where it's blocked off like an excel document with each 30min blocked off for shows by the channel, just not numbered now but the channel name/provider instead.

 

See?

[Link | 2,713]

2 hours ago, Tanooki said:

They're basically in principle like old analog era 'rabbit ears' you pop on top of a TV.

Not even, it's exactly the same. The tuning standard now is ATSC rather than NTSC, but you can still use the old rabbit ears, unqualified unmodified I use them myself. Might not work everywhere, though. I'm in a big city, within 3-8 miles of all the stations.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

6 hours ago, AirVillain said:

Am I understanding from this post that you just put up an antennae to get TV channels???? Like it was 1984?

You just put up the antanna and it just GETS channels? One you bought from the DOLLAR STORE? I mean... we've got some radical dollar stores around here, but buying an antenna from one and actually receiving TV channels. That's impressive.

I mean, for the longest time, my wife and I used a passive antenna I built out of a thin board and 4 coat hangers and got great signal out of all the channels available to us until they moved the transmitters for the two stations we watched the most about 40-50 miles further away.  At that point I picked up a ~$20 powered set of rabbit ears and have used those ever since.

OTA TV really hasn't changed much since the digital switchover beyond having to have a digital decoder of some sort and digital signals being a lot more sensitive/finicky than the analog ones were.  In the old days, if you had a big storm come through, a marginal signal that looked strong would go a bit fuzzy, whereas today you'll get a lot of pixelization and skipping audio, if not outright signal dropout until the interference has passed (think of what a skipping/dirty DVD looks and acts like).  If you've got a powered antenna, some of that can be mitigated, but you're still at the mercy of the elements to a large degree.  Still beats paying an arm and a leg and a kidney for cable, though.

5 hours ago, TDIRunner said:

I've been using an antenna mounted in my attic since before either of my kids were born (over 9 years).  Neither of my kids even know what cable or satellite TV is.  Since I'm pretty close to St. Louis, the attic mounted antenna works just fine and I get between 40 and 50 channels crystal clear, and most in HD.  My in-laws have a property out in the middle of nowhere about 50 miles between two large metro areas.  The antenna we use there has to be mounted about 50 feet up in the air to get channels from both directions.  We don't get as many channels up there, but they still come through crystal clear.

My wife and I have never had cable TV from the time we got married and haven't missed it all.  She grew up in a household that always had basic cable, but apparently never got control of the TV enough to really worry about it too much.  My family had cable (including HBO!) when I was very little, up until our big move from where I was born to where I grew up.  Then, we were strictly an OTA family from the time I started grade school through when I was in college.  The only reason my parents' house ended up with basic cable was because I paid to have broadband installed (6th in our city!) and basic cable was included since it couldn't be blocked without blocking the internet service.  Even paying for the service, it was rare for me to sit down and watch anything on it, as I worked a lot and spent most of my spare time playing games of doing things on the internet, so I didn't miss it at all when I moved out and got married.

By the time my kids came along, my mother in law had cut the cord as well, so neither of my kids have any real idea what cable TV is and only semi-recently learned what OTA TV was when I connected our powered antenna back up to our TV.  I'm pretty sure that they just thought that everything had always been random streaming services and hard-copy media (tapes, discs, etc.) until they saw me scanning through the newer stations that we were suddenly getting.

1 hour ago, Link said:

Not even, it's exactly the same. The tuning standard now is ATSC rather than NTSC, but you can still use the old rabbit ears, unqualified unmodified I use them myself. Might not work everywhere, though. I'm in a big city, within 3-8 miles of all the stations.

Generally speaking, basic rabbit ears will work, but I've read that some additional tweaks tend to be done or need to be done to modern versions in order to pick up the digital signals a bit better.  My grandmother's huge, powered, roof mounted antenna from the 60s generally pulls in digital TV great, but there are certain channels that will go in and out at certain times of day like clockwork, apparently due to them playing with the frequency slightly at those times.  My cousins who live next door have no such issue with those channels, but they're using a modern antenna that's specifically built/marketed/etc. for digital signals.  I'd say your proximity to the transmitters alleviates these sorts of issues for you, as both my house and my relatives' houses are all at least 40-50 miles away from their respective transmitters (which is wild in my case, as my house is about a mile from the local TV station, but they beam their signal 40-50 miles out to a mountaintop to broadcast it).

[Link | 2,713]

15 minutes ago, darkchylde28 said:

Generally speaking, basic rabbit ears will work, but I've read that some additional tweaks tend to be done or need to be done to modern versions in order to pick up the digital signals a bit better.  My grandmother's huge, powered, roof mounted antenna from the 60s generally pulls in digital TV great, but there are certain channels that will go in and out at certain times of day like clockwork, apparently due to them playing with the frequency slightly at those times.  My cousins who live next door have no such issue with those channels, but they're using a modern antenna that's specifically built/marketed/etc. for digital signals.  I'd say your proximity to the transmitters alleviates these sorts of issues for you, as both my house and my relatives' houses are all at least 40-50 miles away from their respective transmitters (which is wild in my case, as my house is about a mile from the local TV station, but they beam their signal 40-50 miles out to a mountaintop to broadcast it).

Yeah, my parents are 40 miles from Manhattan and they can't get air signal. With the roof antenna we USED to... until 9/11/01. So they have local-channels-only cable through their ISP now. I tried setting up a big powered 50 mile antenna for their TV in the attic, but couldn't get anything at all to come in. 

[Tanooki | 4,934]

5 hours ago, Link said:

Not even, it's exactly the same. The tuning standard now is ATSC rather than NTSC, but you can still use the old rabbit ears, unqualified unmodified I use them myself. Might not work everywhere, though. I'm in a big city, within 3-8 miles of all the stations.

Same more or less here kind of with the large city and powerful towers in the area up on some high peaks.  19 base feeds either 15 or 19mi out NW and SW of me, they each offer up a few channels in most cases so I've got like I think I said before around 50 choices, some junk like shopping and bible networks I filtered out.  I'm surprised rabbit ears work, guess that's propaganda perhaps to sell those digital converters years ago.  It would be amusing if you could boost say a Game Gear TV Tuner and have it pick up something still as that would be fantastic in its old early 90s ghetto way.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

17 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

Same more or less here kind of with the large city and powerful towers in the area up on some high peaks.  19 base feeds either 15 or 19mi out NW and SW of me, they each offer up a few channels in most cases so I've got like I think I said before around 50 choices, some junk like shopping and bible networks I filtered out.  I'm surprised rabbit ears work, guess that's propaganda perhaps to sell those digital converters years ago.  It would be amusing if you could boost say a Game Gear TV Tuner and have it pick up something still as that would be fantastic in its old early 90s ghetto way.

The digital converter boxes weren't propaganda.  Any piece of metal that you properly connect to your antenna port on your TV will pick up a signal, but your TV still has to have the proper hardware to decode that signal into something you can watch and listen to.  That's what those boxes did.  They took the digital signal from your antenna and decoded it into an analog signal that the analog tuner in your older TV could understand and display.  Some of the newer antennas are tweaked a bit to be able better and more reliably tune in the modern digital signals, but literally any pair of rabbit ears will be able to do it to some degree--it's still all up to your TV as to whether it's able to understand the signal and translate it into intelligible video and sound versus snow and static.  To use something like the Game Gear tuner, you'd have to have a digital converter box hooked into something that would broadcast/rebroadcast an analog signal.

[Tanooki | 4,934]

That makes sense, I was being a bit snarky with that as I know analog != digital.

But hey, more importantly.  We've proven that free over the air TV has more value than billy mitchell as this derailed into something truly interesting with actual value.

[TDIRunner | 2,741]

Who is Billy Mitchell again?

[Link | 2,713]

3 minutes ago, TDIRunner said:

Who is Billy Mitchell again?

The King of Kong

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

1 hour ago, Link said:

The King of Kong

Blasphemy!  He is the moustache twirling villain to Steve Wiebe's claim to that title!

 

[MrWunderful | 2,927]

1 hour ago, TDIRunner said:

Who is Billy Mitchell again?

 Nobody important 

[Tanooki | 4,934]

King of (being a) Dong?  Yup, that works.

 

Woops, probably get sued for that, defamation of (lack of) character.  Oops did it again.

[TDIRunner | 2,741]

I would appreciate it if we could get back on the topic of over the air television programming.  

[Tanooki | 4,934]

Yeah no doubt, though it makes sense it happened.  Both of them have a lot of empty air between point A and B to get the point across whether it's line of sight or from ear to ear.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

@TDIRunner, here's the plans to make that totally functionally sweet, but totally ghetto looking digital antenna I mentioned earlier.  As long as it's high up in a room and near enough to some windows for the signal to get through (i.e. not blocked by studs, wiring, etc.), it'll pick up great with no power amp required!

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

50 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

King of (being a) Dong?  Yup, that works.

Woops, probably get sued for that, defamation of (lack of) character.  Oops did it again.

 

[AirVillain | 490]

On 2/14/2023 at 12:18 PM, docile tapeworm said:

I’ve recorded the bachelor (FOR MY WIFE OK!) this exact way.

Now THAT is love. 

Re: Billy Mitchell...

He was a great villain for King of Kong. Kinda sleezy, fast talker, made you really root for the other guy. The underdog. Where's he at?

I wish he would come out of this as the NEW King of Kong since Billy is going down in a ball of flames. Actually.... I think I've seen there's a few other ppl that are battling for that record? 

Either way.... if it can be proven that he did his records on an "8-way" joystick.... from my understanding, that would definitely be cheating. 

[docile tapeworm | 4,198]

3 hours ago, AirVillain said:

Now THAT is love. 
 

Lol a few years ago I made her play a fantasy football style game with it because if it’s gonna be on the tv I might as well have some fun. So after the first rose ceremony we draft the women and see who ends up picking  the eventual “winner”. I don’t think I’ve lost yet Picking the women. I’m not as good picking the men for the bachelorette but I think she has only beat me once at either show.

Edited February 16, 2023 by docile tapeworm

[JamesRobot | 5,803]

Billy Mitchell wins! TG scores reinstated!*

 

...or he loses!  

 

Honestly, it was just a settlement.  Kinda anticlimactic really. 

*Billy's scores were "reinstated" as part of Twin Galaxies' "historical database." 

[a3quit4s | 4,102]

I’m probably in the minority on this topic especially given this is a video game forum but seriously

who give a flying ass about this guy and his bullshit. Scores fake or real don’t care lmao

Edited January 16 by a3quit4s

[avatar! | 1,813]

25 minutes ago, a3quit4s said:

I’m probably in the minority on this topic especially given this is a video game forum but seriously

who give a flying ass about this guy and his bullshit. Scores fake or real don’t care lmao

Well, he became notorious after King of Kong and people love to hate him. I think the truth is probably somewhere in between -- he's not evil, but he's manipulative and egotistical.

[a3quit4s | 4,102]

6 minutes ago, avatar! said:

Well, he became notorious after King of Kong and people love to hate him. I think the truth is probably somewhere in between -- he's not evil, but he's manipulative and egotistical.

People keep giving him all this press just feeds into the ego, ignore him and hopefully he just goes away