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Local stations without FiOS TV service

bwallen

Right now I'm a FiOS TV & Internet subscriber. I know I can get my local stations by hooking my tv right into the cable jack and not using a cable box. However, I want to cancel my TV service and keep internet. Will I still be able to get the local stations this way, or will I need an antenna?

Comments

lasagna

Those stations are coming clear-QAM across the FiOS cable. You cancel TV service and those will disappear as well. You will need to either connect an antenna to the TV for OTA reception or downgrade your FiOS TV service to their "Local Channel Package" which runs around $13/month.

pl626

If you cancel your FIOS TV and opt out of the basic, you're going to need a digital antenna if you don't already have one. If you don't have an HDTV or SDTV, you'll also need a digital to analog converter box in order to view OTA.

Keyboards

@pl626 wrote:
If you cancel your FIOS TV and opt out of the basic, you're going to need a digital antenna if you don't already have one. If you don't have an HDTV or SDTV, you'll also need a digital to analog converter box in order to view OTA.

Please, there is no such thing as a "DIGITAL ANTENNA"!!!!! While the signal encoding is digital, the RF itself is still VHF or UHF ANALOG. The labeling of an antenna as "digital" is pure B-S marketing crap.

Also, if the OP has a QAM tuner in their TV they also most likely have an ATSC tuner for OTA so don't require any converter box.

lasagna

Keyhoards is right ... if the TV presently is able to get the QAM channels across the coax from FiOS, I would be highly surprised if it didn't have an ATSC tuner which would be good for receiving the digital channels. The key piece here being that if your drop FiOS TV altogether, you will need to get them over the air -- there won't be anything coming in on the coax.

As for the digital antenna thing ... the only real difference that really plays into it, in my opinion, is the directional nature of some antennas which can help focus the reception capability of the antenna which improves the ability to deal with the nature of digital signal encoding vs a traditional omni-directional antenna. There are a number of EE's on the boards here, so maybe one of them happens to be an antenna engineer (hopefully, not one who designed the Apple iPhone 4 antenna however) who can explain what's really important.