OTA Failover?

Decent idea... but there are several variables that I can think of off the top of my head that just wouldn't justify the time that would have to be put into the programming for this type of feature...

1. The % of people that even have OTA
2. The % of programs those people record off of local channels
3. The % of time those people have signal loss

The scenario of that group of people that have OTA to happen to be recording something off of a local channel and it happen to be raining very hard probably doesn't come up very often... But like I said, decent idea for sure... but probably won't see it anytime soon.

dervari said:

Has anyone ever thought about a feature that would allow an automatic "failover" to an OTA signal if the DTV signal goes out? We had a heavy rainstorm tonight and lost signal for about 30 mins. I wound up settting 9pm recordings to record off OTA. I prefer to record off LIL because my OTA setup isn't the best in the world. I wonder how hard it would be for the DVR to attempt to record OTA if the sat signal was lost?

Click to expand...

I also agree that it's a good idea in principle, but in my case for the opposite reason: I don't get HD locals on DirecTV so have to use OTA to get, for example PBS-HD. Unfortunately its signal is far from stable - due to the poor choice of modulation used by ATSC - and it often pixellates badly or drops out completely. So when I set up to record a 'must see' program (e.g. "Inspector Lewis" on Masterpiece Theater) on 39-2, I also set up my other DVR to record channel 39 from DirecTV. That picture quality isn't up to much - obviously not, it's only a crummy SD feed - but I can pretty much count on it being there as I hardly ever get loss-of-signal, except during extreme storms.

Whenever i set up for recording locals i use sat to save space or ota for reliability.

Yea, I didn't figure it would every come to fruition. It's just the Network Engineer in me thinking "Redundancy!"

Whenever my SAT locals go out I get a message on the screen from DirecTv telling me that the local broadcaster is having problems and not to call DirecTv. That being the case OTA would have a problem too. But wait - OTA has always been perfect in these situations. Hmmm, what could that mean.