Educate me on old style televisions

[Paul Sandhu]

23 separate STRs with about 75 televisions.  Every living room has a smart HDTV, every bedroom has an old style television.  There is cable and wifi at every address, it is a bundled service from Cox.  Right now I have 3 of them occupied.  The other 20 are sitting vacant.  I'm considering dropping Cox altogether and saving about $2500 a month.  I can get wifi from my city:

3 mbps is $25 a month for each address.

5 mbps is $40 a month for each address.

Every living room HDTV can do Netflix along with all the other streaming services.

I'd like for some channels to work in the bedrooms.  Do they even make antenna's for old style televisions that pick up free signals over the air?  Television is not that important to my renters.  They work 10-12 hours a day in a refinery.  When they get back to my places they just want to drink beer, cook dinner, and go to bed.

[Joe Splitrock]

Originally posted by @Account Closed:

@Joe Splitrock

It has been 7 years since I did so, but I believe the newest rabbit ears have this built in. I went without anything that wasn’t over the air free for over a decade through school and when I was getting going in my career.... wasn’t till my wife showed up that tv came back and even now it’s just Netflix and amazon. If I can’t find a stream for sports, just don’t happen.

 Tuners are inside the TV and they are either analog or digital (TV supported both if manufactured during the transition). Broadcaster were broadcasting both analog and digital until February of 2009, so even old TV were working up until 11 years ago. You only required a digital tuner or converter box after that point, when they started only broadcasting digital. As far as antennae, there is no analog or digital antennae (even thought they market them as HDTV or DTV). If you have a 30 year old antennae, it will pick up digital TV channels assuming you have a tuner or converter box. An antennae is basically just a piece of wire/metal. As far as whether indoor antennae work very well, it depends on location. DTV broadcast signals do not travel as far as older analog signals. If you are far from the towers, then an outside or attic antennae is probably better.

I am in electronics by trade so know a fair amount about this subject.