I suspect the appeal of YouTube TV is the built-in cloud DVR, mostly so you can skip commercials. I had YouTube TV for a while, mostly for local news. I switched to a local tuner/antenna with a DVR. I picked the Tablo product. The app could be better, but it does reliably record my local news and playback works fine. And it's quite a lot cheaper than YouTube TV, Sling, etc.

Though, of course, you have to be somewhere where an antenna can pick up what you want to watch.

Also https://www.xumo.tv.

And a lot of people forget, there is OTA TV too. In the days of streaming everything media, there are still OTA sources just in case. Especially during a power outage, where AM/FM and broadcast TV still work to receive info.

It's less about forgetfulness and more about convenience. The whole "setup an OTA antenna somewhere in/on your house/attic/roof, wire it up to your tuner, scan for channels, learn what direction to point the antenna for which stations, find a DVR that supports OTA", vs load an app, sign in and boom.

I'm a geek so, I'd LOVE to take this step. Unfortunately, I live in the part of the country that has too many mountains to make OTA reception an easy task. I personally live down between two ridges that make it so I'd have to have an antenna 150 feet in the air.

And, assuming you haven't personally experienced OTA post-digital transition in your house in the past (assuming you own a house) or have neighbors with an antenna, spend some money and a fair bit of effort to discover that reception is non-existent/bad.

I was SUPER into OTA and FTA satellite reception a little over 10 years ago. I was all over antennaweb and tvfool right before I moved out West. I went from a very flat Southeastern geography to mountains and ridges everywhere. But even then, that was a "in the know" thing. I'd hate to be one of those people who pours money into this just to discover bad reception.

I was using Justwatch[0] for a 2017 series and saw I could stream it for free on the Roku Channel[1]. That was a surprise to me, and Roku Channel has some quality stuff, rotating through month by month. In addition, they show some commercials, but with a nice UI feature: a timer in the upper left that shows exactly how long the ads will play. That is a new feature to me. I wish all commercials came with a countdown timer like that.

[0] https://www.justwatch.com/us

[1] https://www.justwatch.com/us/provider/the-roku-channel

I would recommend plex ( https://plex.tv) over both of these, since you can watch movies/tv you and your friends download in addition to free tv

I guess buying a TV antenna isn't completely free but it gives you the same benefit as these online channels, doesn't consume your data cap, and lets you watch sports and local news.

I bought a $10 antenna from channel master and it's been a great investment.

To be fair, there's plenty of places, even in suburbs, where you need a $100-$200 antenna, and maybe $200 worth of parts, labor and stuff to put it somewhere where it works.

Got perfect reception with a $40 antenna strapped to beams in the attic using bungee cords. The towers are only 50 miles from the house so ymmv

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0024R4B5C/

How is this legal? Do Pluto and Tubitv have some contract with providers that allows this?

I remember a company named Aereo being sued out of existence because they were offering OTA TV to their subscribers by allocating an micro antenna to each user. The excuse did fly in court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo

BTW, thanks for sharing!

Pluto TV is owned by ViacomCBS and Tubi is owned by the Fox Corporation (the non-Disney one), and as others have pointed out, all their content is licensed. There's also Xumo, owned by Comcast. Pluto TV has partnership deals with Roku, Vizio and others to provide them with content for their branded apps. Amazon has a somewhat similar service with IMDb TV, although it has a crappy interface modeled off Amazon Prime's. And of course even Plex has now (sadly) entered the game with their "Live TV" section.

What annoys me about these free offerings is that they have cannibalized their content from paid streaming services. Before, services like Hulu and Amazon Prime would stock their catalog with tons of old "classic" TV shows that you could binge commercial free. Now, the only way to stream many of those shows is with commercials, they are no longer available as part of any paid commercial-free packages, unless you are willing to purchase the individual episodes.

Pluto operates a model called FAST (free ad supported television). Because the content is still aired in a linear fashion (as opposed to on demand) the licensing costs are lower than it would be for VOD and there’s no infrastructure costs to support like traditional cable tv, they can support it with ads easily enough.

They don’t have regular channels and instead do all their own programming. You get things like “The Bob Vila Channel” and other channels that focus on library/long tail content.

Pluto has both "live" TV and on demand. The on demand material is essentially the libraries for specific channels.

They don’t run the channels you would get on cable. They are special OTT chanels and are ad supported.

You won’t get live sports or networks, but you will get a lot of reruns shows, second run movies, and news coverage that is a few hours old.

Yes they own license to broadcast, formed by legacy media companies.

Pluto TV is a godsend. So much stuff on there. I've been recommending it to people for a while now. You can also get it on Kodi[0].

[0]: https://kodi.tv/addons/matrix/plugin.video.plutotv

No kidding. My wife lamented that she couldn't see the original (modulo dubbing) Iron Chef... and poof, now there's a Pluto TV channel running nothing but that.

Those are free alright but alllow me to recommend

magistv

It offers everything that's on star/hbo/netflix/hulu/disney plus/amazon/etc plus live sports plus a lot of live hd channels for just 9 a month.

So... paid piracy...

> We’re sorry, but Pluto TV is currently unavailable in your location. We’re working hard to bring Pluto TV to this area, so stay tuned to find out when.

Wow, these look great. Don't need to sign up, and they don't even use EME. Have they been around for awhile?

Does OTA not work where you're at?

A surprisingly decent US government provided resource to check that: https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps

Edit: One thing to double check that surprised me is that the channel number these days doesn't reliably tell you if the channel is VHF or UHF. That is, a low-numbered channel like "3" or "8" could really be a UHF channel. I guess they let them keep long-established channel numbers for marketing purposes. So check what you really need before buying an antenna. The website above does provide the needed detail under "RF Channel".

Yeah, OTA doesn't really work anywhere except cities. I used to sell "big screens" at Sears and I was asked that question so frequently, especially back when cable was switching from analog to digital. Years 2004-2006.

I live 40 miles outside of a major city. Even back in analog days with a big antenna I couldn't pick anything up; there's a hill that blocks all the signals between me and the city.

Eventually I got cable but dropped it a couple years ago.