We've got internet, but no cable. So we still watch over-the-air TV, though it's mostly PBS at this point (which is non profit). Also listen to FM radio - mostly NPR, a jazz station and a classical station - all also non-profit.
Fairly wrong/irrelevant metric. Lots of people subscribe to Netflix and watch OTA broadcasts.
Lots of people stick to a Plex membership just because of its DVR capability - that's for broadcast TV.
Lots of DVR and adjacent products out there on the market for people who watch broadcast TV.
I wouldn't dream of getting a cable subscription when I can get so much good content for free. Streaming fills the rest.
It's not that people are literally watching these on over the air digital TV antenna systems, but that if you have a "Broadcast TV" station in a certain market, it becomes carried by default on cable systems, direct to home satellite satellite dish systems, and regional FTTH providers' last-mile cable-tv-equivalent products.
Look at for example how all the Seattle TV stations are carried on Comcast or Astound's networks.
If you plug in an antenna and scan for local channels, what used to be one analog TV channel on colloquially-named "channel 7" in the defined channel 7 frequency range will now be seen as "channel 7-1" which is often (but not always!) actually broadcast on the old frequency. During the ATSC transition, it was important to retain the branding and consumer memory of "channel 7" even when the RF transport frequency changed.
The transition opened the ability to have an arbitrary number of digital subchannels, 7-2, 7-3, etc etc. The total bitrate available on a given ATSC broadcast is fixed, but it can be partitioned among multiple MPEG streams. The typical setup is one (occasional two) HD channels and several SD channels. Obviously there's a balancing act between bitrate and visual quality for each subchannel. It's often used as a way to broadcast older (read: cheaper) syndicated SD content on which they can run more ads while keeping the main HD channel quality reasonably acceptable.
I mean sure, you could pack four streams into one 6MHz channel. They could even be "HD" insofar as the transmitted stream is 720p or 1080i.
The result would have been MPEG-2 program streams of about 4.5Mbit each instead of about 18-19Mbit (assuming no other subchannels). That would make live sports or anything with significant motion look like absolute dogshit.
You might say that you don't care about that, and that is fine for you. However, in that case, I would respectfully submit that opinion to be far from the center of the bell curve of television-viewing American public of that era.
We could do a lot better with ATSC 3.0. So, there might someday be a second round of broadcast frequency reclamation, just as there was with ATSC 1.0.
If you got into a time machine and tried your plan two decades ago, the conversations would have gone something like this:
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Government: "Hey broadcaster, we need you to throw out and upgrade all your broadcast equipment that's working just fine today."
Broadcaster: "Why?"
Government: "So we can auction off some of the broadcast channel bandwidth."
Broadcaster: "Why else?"
Government: "That's really it."
Broadcaster: "How about instead, I take a little bit of that money you're asking me to spend, and give it to your political opponent's campaign?"
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Government: "Hey citizens, we need you to buy a new TV or buy an adapter for your current TV that's currently working just fine."
Citizen: "Why?"
Government: "So we can auction off some of the broadcast channel bandwidth."
Citizen: "Why else?"
Government: "That's really it."
Citizen: "How about instead, I vote for the opposition candidate who says he'll let me keep my TV and my money?"
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We're able to juggle broadcast frequencies more easily after the transition. Not only did we shrink the broadcast frequency range at the time of transition, we did it again about ten years ago with far less pain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_wireless_sp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_wireless_sp...
TL;DR: 480i would have been an absolute non-starter.
The people who watch it vote in numbers far out of proportion to their peers. Nobody would bother to capture the industry if it weren't worthwhile.
Why are you bundling all those things together? The only thing we care about here is cable or satellite TV for your argument.
Broadcast TV today is a stream of bytes. The same stream can be delivered via cable, satellite, a cell phone, or home Internet.