One Sunday morning while taking a breather from raking leaves at my grandma’s house in Evergreen Park, I watched my Uncle Eddie, her son, kneeling on their slippery roof in a light green jacket and gray “Mad Men”-type hat as he struggled to turn the TV antenna so that he might be able to watch the Chicago Bears.
No dice.
Hypothetically, Ed believed he could capture a broadcast signal from Indiana where the Bears game was being shown on TV. The NFL policy back in the late 1960s was to black out local games within a 75-mile radius to compel local fans to buy tickets to home games; whereas, the South Bend, Indiana, network station was more than 85 miles away. But there were too many buildings, trees, silos and hills between here and there for Uncle Ed to have any luck.
Later on, in the 1980s, folks more tech-savvy and nerdier than my uncle built giant satellite dishes with 10-foot diameters to beat the NFL at its own game. With an electric rotor installed on the staff, a person could position the antenna and get broadcasts not only from South Bend but also from as far away as Canada or Bermuda. However, antenna price tags ranging from $1,500 to $5,000 restricted widespread use. And then cable companies started scrambling or encrypting satellite signals, rendering the monstrosities useless altogether, except as bird baths and goldfish ponds.
These days, as DirecTV, Dish, streaming services and other providers keep jacking up monthly bills, the tech nerds have already come up with alternative versions of the giant satellite dish, generically known as set-top boxes — for example, Android TV box, Amazon’s Fire TV stick and Superbox.
About the size of a small paperback novel, Superbox, for example, nestles near your TV and uses your Wi-Fi signal to stream major cities’ local TV stations, which are freely available to residents there, from Baltimore to Seattle, featuring news, sports, TV series and movies, same as the local stations in your own hometown.
Purchasing the device for a one-time cost of around $300 enables you, potentially, to cut the cord with your cable or satellite service and watch Fox, CBS, PBS, ABC and the CW, among approximately 1,300 other local stations, free of charge.
Yes, it sounded too good to be true, so I decided to test it out, purchasing Superbox through Amazon.
Besides, the new device promised to be exactly what I wanted. I’ve been an avid football fan long enough to remember watching the late Hall of Famer Jim Brown blasting through tacklers like so many bowling pins. And Superbox promises to indulge my pigskin fix, allowing me to watch the Browns on WKYC-Ch. 3 in Cleveland or, say, the Bills on WGRZ-Ch. 2 in Buffalo, New York, even if they’re not on where I live.
It arrived a couple of months ago and was an easy hookup with an HDMI cable that’s supplied. The jury is still out while I wade through all the channels and categorical options such as video on demand and master the remote control, which enables you to request programs by talking to it out loud.
The first thing I tried was tuning into various channels I would watch: Fox Chicago 32? Check. Local stations in other cities that broadcast NFL games, such as Tampa, Florida; Las Vegas; and, yes, South Bend? Check, check, check.
This, of course, means I should be able to watch any game, movie or news program being broadcast by a distant city’s local station — without having to climb onto my roof.
When I press the microphone icon on the remote and say, “New York,” 13 stations from the Big Apple are immediately displayed with programing descriptions, allowing me to click on a tennis match, a quiz show, a news program or whatever else is currently being broadcast.
Chicago Tribune Opinion
If I switch to video on demand and say, “Clint Eastwood,” a couple of dozen of his movies for the choosing flash on the display.
My friend Bobo, a baseball aficionado, turned me on to Superbox, which he’s been using to watch MLB games night and day for the past two years.
So far, so good, about half the time. While I tried to watch the magnificent Jimmy Butler in the NBA playoffs on a local Miami station, for example, the screen froze up every 15 minutes or so, taking 10 seconds to a full minute before returning to normal. Notably, you can’t record with Superbox to watch something later and fast-forward through the freeze-ups and commercials.
The other complication seems to be that, like TikTok, Superbox is run by a Chinese corporation. It is licensed and insists on its website, therefore, that it is legal. Nonetheless, I must accept that my TV reception may be jeopardized at any moment if another Shenyang J-6 were to fly too close to an F-16 or if a Chinese warship were to cut off another of our destroyers.
David McGrath is an emeritus English professor at the College of DuPage and author of “South Siders.” He can be reached at mcgrathd@dupage.edu.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.