Dish vs. Gray Media: How to Keep Watching Missing Local Channels

By Phillip Swann
The TV Answer Man – Follow me on X.

TV Answer Man, it sucks that we don’t have our local channel here anymore on the Dish. What can we do to watch our local Fox channel? – Bev, Mobile, Alabama.

Bev, I hear you. Dish on Tuesday night lost 226 local stations due to a fee fight with their owner, Gray Media. It’s unclear if and when the two companies will settle their differences but there are some things a Dish owner can do to keep watching your local channels.

Streaming Local Channels
Fox offers a live feed of your local Fox affiliate on the Fox One streaming app. The cost is $19.99 a month but you can get a free seven-day trial. Paramount Plus offers a live feed of the local CBS affiliate feed with its $13.99 a month plan but does not include a free trial as of this morning. (You might be able to get a free trial for Paramount Plus at Amazon Prime.) Peacock offers a live feed of your local NBC affiliate with its $16.99 a month plan. There’s no free trial, however. (Again, Amazon Prime sometimes offers free trials for Peacock.) Finally, ABC does not provide a live feed of its local affiliate via streaming but you can watch most of its programming on Hulu. You also could get a free five-day trial of DIRECTV streaming.

Watching Local Channels With an Antenna
Yes, you could get a TV antenna – if you don’t already have one. Your local channels (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, PBS, Univision, etc.) are available via a TV antenna, and they are free. Even better, they can sometimes deliver an improved HD picture over an antenna compared to cable or satellite. The latter tends to compress the signals of local (and all) channels, which tends to dilute the picture quality.

The TV antenna, whether it’s indoor or outdoor, costs less than $100 with many indoor models under $30. With local channels free, that’s a great deal for consumers looking to cut expenses.

However, before you run off to buy an antenna, you need to know that depending upon the location of your home, your antenna may not be able to pick up the signals of all your local channels. You may live too far away from the channel’s tower to get a decent signal, or you could have a major obstacle in the signal’s path, such as a high-rise office building or mountain. For Dish subscribers who live in rural areas, this could be a big problem.

So how can you tell if an antenna at your home will receive all your local channels?

AntennaWeb.org offers an easy-to-use guide to determining what kind of antenna you would need — and how many channels that antenna will pick up. You type in your address, zip code and whether the antenna will be 30 feet or higher above ground level and then antennaweb.org will display a list of stations that you probably will be able to receive.

I say ‘probably’ because until you actually test it at home, you can’t be 100 percent sure. Antennaweb.org might say your address can pick up all four major broadcast networks, but the site isn’t aware of that group of large trees that surround your home, or that high-rise building that sits all too inconveniently across the way.

The good news here is that antennas are inexpensive so you could buy one to test without spending much.

Bev, I hope that answers your question. Happy viewing and stay safe!

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The TV Answer Man is veteran journalist Phillip Swann who has covered television for more than three decades. He will report on the latest news and answer your questions regarding new devices and services that are changing the way you watch television. See the bio for Phillip Swann here.