This week in “corporate mom & dad are fighting”: Disney & AT&T are having a disagreement which means we can’t watch ABC or ESPN anymore, I guess? It also means getting targeted ads on every platform that feel like they’re part of a public safety scare campaign from the 70s^[1]:

All this just in time for the start of fall sports and the finale of The Bachelorette, so I had to frantically come up with a backup plan. It was finally enough frustration to blow through the separation energy and get a $20 paper antenna.

I have known for a while that the story around OTA channels was pretty good now, but really wasn’t prepared to pull in over 100 of them from the basement with basically zero effort.

Side benefit: all the streaming TV providers are minimum 30 seconds behind live (usually closer to 90 seconds), which is pretty brutal for a nail-biter of a game or when you’re chatting about some live event. Nice to be living in the now.

Given a few days to overengineer things, here’s where we ended up: there’s an HDHomeRun tuner hooked up to that antenna in the network closet under the stairs. That’s paired with Channels DVR running on my Synology. So now we can watch and record four different things from local TV and stream it to any of our devices anywhere in the world. Neat.

Recommended reading: Jaya’s When Did All the Recipes Get ‘Garlicky’? over at Eater. May we someday be brave enough to retvrn to the “Eggs Obstaculos” era.