I haven't watched TV in about 20 years, primarily due to lack of interest, but also, it's hard to get any reception where I live. Over the years I've tried connecting a couple of indoor antennas a few times (rabbit ears and twin-lead folded dipole), and before the switch to digital, I got only one station like that, and the reception was so weak that it wasn't really watchable. Since the switchover to digital, channel scans have always turned up 0 channels.
Last night I decided to put an antenna outside, thinking maybe the aluminum siding on this house was the problem (
one of the problems anyway; this house is also in a valley). I hastily tacked a twin-lead folded dipole (the kind intended for FM reception that's often included with new tuners/receivers) to the ceiling of my porch, did a channel scan, and it actually found 4 channels, 3 of them being on channel 13 (211.25 MHz for the video carrier) and 1 being on channel 5 (77.25 MHz for the video carrier). The channel 13 ones would only play okay for a minute or so at a time before glitching out, but channel 5 was rock solid. It was broadcasting old TV shows in 480i. The FCC categorizes that station as "Low Power Digital TV," and they are broadcasting from a city that's about 25 miles away (straight line distance).
The first odd thing I noticed was that there were no commercials whatsoever, which made me wonder how the station made any money. Then I saw something bizarre: in between shows they played a short station ID/promo video, and it had music and people dancing. One of the people dancing I recognized as "Rebelindustry" from YouTube, and then I recognized Elena Cruz and Magga Braco, as well as various other dancers from YouTube. I doubt highly that any of them know their videos are being used by a TV station in their station promo videos.
Then Dragnet came on, and it was stretched to 16:9 (wrong aspect ratio), and had heavy compression artifacts (macroblocking, color banding, smearing). At first I thought they were just broadcasting a very low bitrate, but the previous show didn't have any noticeable compression artifacts, and neither did the following show. This, combined with the almost-certainly pirated YouTube videos, got me thinking that maybe the shows they were airing were pirated internet downloads too, but whoever heard of a licensed TV station doing such a thing?
A little while later I got confirmation that that's exactly what they are doing. An episode of Columbo came on, and it had even worse compression artifacts than Dragnet, but the real kicker is that it had a watermark/logo from "The Biography Channel" in the lower right-hand corner, which is a network that has been defunct since 2014, and that version of the logo was last used in 2007. It even had a voiceover at the end of the episode, along with overlaid graphics telling what show was coming up next on The Biography Channel (Murder, She Wrote). Here's the
exact video that they broadcast:
https://youtu.be/K7z6zVn2XaU?t=5330I Googled the station owner's name and it turns out he lives in my town, the next street over from me, and I also found a "Notice of unlicensed operation" FCC Enforcement Bureau document from about 15 years ago, addressed to him, regarding a pirate AM radio station that they had found to be operating from his address. They told him he had ten days to provide proof of his license or authority to operate.