they just have some weird hangup about buying a $10 antenna and connecting it to their television.
I think this hang up could be the installation. Where I live you need to mount the antenna at least on an exterior wall, if not the roof to get a clear signal. Then you have to run coax to your TV, through walls, perhaps multiple locations or you can only watch broadcast on that one TV. It’s easily hours of work, including trip to the hardware store, and having the tools. Still worth the one time effort from some, but the barrier is a lot higher than a one time $10 expense.
> Then you have to run coax to your TV, through walls
You can also try under, over, or around the side of a door, or through a window, using a small section of flat coax like this [1].
An alternative I've considered is an Amazon Fire TV Recast [2]. That's an OTA DVR that physically connects to an antenna and power, and then can stream live or recorded content over your Wifi to an Amazon Fire TV Stick plugged into your TV.
With that you only need to get the antenna to wherever you put the Recast. If your antenna was on the roof, for example, you could place the Recast in your attic. Then you only need to go trough one wall or through an attic vent.
I've been wondering if a Recast could reasonably be powered by a battery and put in a waterproof box outside, so that (1) there would be no need to run the antenna wire into the house, and (2) you might not need to tie the antenna ground to the house ground (which can be a real pain if you want to follow code and the places where you can get good reception are nowhere near your house's grounding rod).
So many homes these days had at one point been wired for cable or satellite. The antenna uses the same cabling and often has one or two big splitters to run to each room. Its pretty trivial to change the "source" side of that to the antenna and disconnect unused rooms.
It's really not that much work. I have a cheap $20 antenna hanging in a window (you could use a suction cup) and I can get almost 40 TV channels.
As far as distribution, I connect my antenna to an HDHomeRun device. I can either stream directly from the device, use a DLNA client on my LAN, or I also have it hooked into Plex server for DVR and live remote viewing.
A basic HDHomeRun device goes for around $100 but I'm sure you can pick up an older model on eBay for less. You could even bridge it into a raspberry pi or some other wifi device so that you don't need to run Ethernet cables around.
> I have a cheap $20 antenna hanging in a window (you could use a suction cup) and I can get almost 40 TV channels
This doesn't work for everyone. When I put one up, I had to get a $100 directional antenna, a signal booster and mount it in the attic. Even then we had difficulty picking up some stations. Granted our neighborhood is in a big region, a good ways out and in a large depression.
