The dual to it: there is absolutely no advertising or public-awareness effort for local OTA programming (whether radio or television.) The OTA broadcast stations for a given place aren&#x27;t given as part of &quot;considering moving to [city]&quot; guides, &quot;local free resources&quot; lists, etc. Ask the average city-dweller and they&#x27;ll likely have never seen a digital antenna, and won&#x27;t be able to tell you whether there <i>is</i> any local OTA content to pick up.<p>With OTA television especially, if the relevant stations <i>also</i> exist over cable&#x2F;satellite&#x2F;telco-fiber&#x2F;etc. then those stations don&#x27;t bother to announce the fact that they broadcast OTA.<p>For example, here in Canada, you can get CBC (i.e. government-sponsored) television programming OTA pretty much anywhere, but there&#x27;s nothing to even suggest that possibility; I just found out because I went and bought a DTV antenna on a whim. Meanwhile, the CBC emphasizes the multi-channel accessibility of its <i>radio</i> programming (OTA, web streaming, podcasts, etc.) at every opportunity, doing heavy cross-channel advertising. It truly feels like &quot;CBC Radio&quot; is a public service they&#x27;re trying to bring to as many people as possible, but &quot;CBC Television&quot; is, for all intents and purposes, just some cable channel.<p>A lot of the problem comes down to low-level discoverability, though. OTA DTV is broken for discoverability purposes, in that a degraded signal may as well not exist. With analogue OTA TV, you could buy a TV and turn it on without any wires connected to it, and it would still scan for channels and display a few fuzzy pictures peaking out of the static, and it&#x27;d maybe occur to you that with the help of an antenna those could be cleaned up. With a digital television, you just get a &quot;No signal&quot; infobox.<p>The &quot;fix&quot; would be to make televisions somehow able to &quot;see&quot; the weak DTV signals around them again with no wires plugged in. We&#x27;d have to re-think OTA digital broadcasting completely to enable this: either to attach to each digital channel a sister &quot;wideband, low-data-rate, fountain-encoded&quot; channel (to let the TV pull a 240p signal out of noisy 1080p-equivalent bandwidth, with the implication that an antenna would &quot;upgrade&quot; the picture); or to do away with live-format OTA broadcasting altogether, in favor of heavily-redundant packet-based transmission, such that a 30min program could be buffered in advance over several hours, and then &quot;scheduled&quot; at the client-side onto the channel.