My own feeling on the original poster's idea is I really don't care about getting local channels from other areas of the country. However, I would like to receive the New York and Los Angeles broadcast network feeds.
Distant network access would be convenient for cases like one of our local TV stations preempting the entire prime time programming lineup in an evening with drawn out cut-ins to cover some thunderstorms in the area. It would be nice to be able to press a button and see the originally scheduled program in HD without the weatherman yammering away over it endlessly. If you're recording a TV show to a DVR, who wants all the weather cut in stuff and weather radar images and text crawls spammed all over it?
Networks are providing streaming versions of their TV shows via the Internet, but the video quality isn't very good. Watching TV shows in a low resolution window loses its novelty pretty fast. With too much of this shifting around it would just be easier to rent the Blu-ray box set of a TV show months later and be able to watch it without interruption, with great video quality and without all the visual spam blocking out parts of the picture.
HDRoberts said:
Like I said, people want local programming as much as the national stuff. They want the 6AM, 6PM, and 11PM newscasts. They want the local yokels giving them info.
Local newspapers and local TV stations do offer news coverage that national outlets are not able to provide. At best national media can make no more than a basic, cursory effort -like maybe covering a murder case if enough people get killed in bloody enough fashion to be news worthy. I'm certainly not going to find any coverage of local city government rulings and whatnot through any national outlet at all and boring sounding news items like that affect my life much more directly than street crime.
Scott Greczkowski said:
With many of the networks now showing their programming on the web, sometime in future the local broadcasters will not be needed except for local news and weather.
The drawback is the cost overhead on a local TV station is too high for a station to merely provide local news, weather and little else. TV stations have to sell enough advertising running throughout the entire day in order to pay the bills. If the station only has significant viewing numbers during its early and late evening newscasts the TV station will go broke.
Scott Greczkowski said:
Look at whats happening to newspapers today. I feel that off air broadcasting will go the same way.
I agree, unfortunately. The funny thing is the general public will cry foul when TV stations in their towns fold, but those same people will largely have only themselves to blame for the loss. I haven't subscribed to my city's local newspaper in years. So I'm certainly not going to have any right complain about it if that paper goes out of business. I'm not doing my part to support it.
I try watching my market's local channels when I can. But I have very little tolerance for "unscripted" TV programs, so-called reality TV shows, etc. I'm not going to carve out the time it takes to watch 5 flavors of
CSI either. Marathon weather warning cut-ins do even more to drive me away from watching local channels and seeing local ads that pay for that TV station's operations.
What really stinks is the "blogosphere" will probably have to fill much of the void when hundreds of local TV stations and newspapers finally go out of business.