Why TV Antennas Are Sexy Again

Richard Schneider is no broadcaster, but he may be the most ardent champion of over-the-air TV in the country.

And it shouldn’t come as a surprise. He makes and sells TV antennas. For broadcasters, the ability to beam TV directly to viewers without wires is an edge. For Schneider, it’s everything.

Seven years ago, his hobby of building TV antennas “spun out of control” and into a business. Today, he says, his St. Louis-based Antennas Direct, has $10 million in annual revenue and is growing fast, thanks to America’s rediscovery of over-the-air broadcasting and what a bargain it is.

In this interview with TVNewsCheck, Schneider explains why the TV antenna is the “hottest selling device” for digital video and wonders why the FCC is bent on “committing infanticide” by taking spectrum away from broadcasters.

An edited transcript:

How are sales going?

It’s actually accelerating. In fact, November was the best month in the history of our company. We topped the amount of units shipped in June of 2009 running up to the digital transition.

How many units do you expect to sell this year?

We will probably be just around the half-million mark. We started online, but now sell mostly through retailers, including big box stories like Best Buy and CostCo.

That’s a lot of antennas.

My goal when I started this was to sell maybe 20 units a month so I could pay for my home theatre hobby. It would be a self-funding hobby and my wife wouldn’t find out how much I was spending on an HDTV projector.

And what do you think is going to happen next year?

We have some other large nationally known retailers that are evaluating our products. If even a percentage of those come through, we think we can grow another 30% for next year.

That’s another 150,000 units.

At least.

What’s the overall market for antennas?

We think the antenna market is anywhere from about four-and-a-half million to six million units a year and we believe that’s growing around 20%-25% percent annually. In dollars, we estimate the market to be roughly $250 million in annual sales in the U.S. We’ll do around $10 million.

And you think that that will continue.

Yes, because here’s where our opportunity is: 80% of the population doesn’t even know you can get over-the-air HDTV. You tell people and they look at you like you’re crazy: "You’re saying I can actually get free HDTV from an antenna?" It’s shocking to a lot of people. So we see this as a great opportunity. Our biggest obstacle isn’t other antenna manufacturers. It’s the fact that most people aren’t even aware that this is an option.

Who is the biggest player in this space?

Well, probably in terms of unit volume, I would say Audiovox . It sells under the names of RCA and Terk. They have a fairly good selection of indoor antennas.

Are there places where antennas are selling faster than the average?

Areas where there’s lots of multicasting are helping to drive a lot of the sales. That’s mostly large markets on the coasts, Los Angeles and the Northeast. As much as I hate to say this, HDTV is secondary to multicasting in driving sales. And in these areas, you can not only get a lot from your market, but potentially from neighboring markets.

What can you tell me about the people buying these antennas?

There’s a perception that it’s the elderly or the indigent that are buying them. But we’re seeing quite a big growth over the last 18 months among younger people, meaning people in their 20s or 30s. They’re using it as a supplement to pay TV or, more frequently lately, as a supplement to broadband.

What they call over-the-top TV?

Yes. We were actually nervous when the Hulu service started, thinking, oh, this is going to be another kind of competitor for us. But what’s funny is, as soon as that service started coming into its own, our phone lines started ringing with a decidedly younger group of people saying, hey, I have decided to cancel my pay television, I am getting what I want from Hulu or Netflix in terms of premium content and I want to get my local live content from an antenna. We noticed this about 18 months ago. People see digital TV as a new technology, a new service. It’s really now becoming a viable supplement to the broadband offerings. It’s given people the rationale they need to cancel pay television.

Let’s talk about the technology a little. Is there anything really new in this space or are we just marketing different sizes for different places?

Antenna design has been a lost art. There really hadn’t been much done in over-the-air antenna design in 35 years. But what we now have is new testing and simulation tools and analytic devices that didn’t exist even three years ago. So we can actually now run through thousands and thousands of iterations of geometries fairly quickly, a process that would have taken months, if not years, 25 years ago. A lot of this has come out of the defense industry.