The percentage of U.S. homes with receiving local broadcast channels through over-the-air antennas has increased nearly 50% over the past eight years to around 16 million, according to Nielsen.

The research company found that nearly 14% of U.S. homes are watching TV over the air.

Nielsen found that OTA users broke down into roughly two groups.

One has a median age of around 55 and doesn’t compliment OTA programming with streaming services. OTA is primarily a cost-savings tool for these nearly 6.6. million homes.

The other 9.4 million homes does compliment OTA with subscription streamings services including Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu. This group’s median household age is 36. The group also tends to be more affluent.

Notably, the older group tends to watch six hours of television a day, on average—that’s two full hours more than the younger group, which has a more diverse selection of programming services. 

Roku took the wraps off a new over-the-air/over-the-top hybrid device for its pay TV and telco operator partners worldwide, with Australia’s Telstra being the first to sign on for a deployment.

In addition to being equipped with a terrestrial TV tuner, the new box also supports 4K and High Dynamic Range (HDR) video formats.

Roku has added the device to a “Roku Powered” license program for pay TV partners, enabling them to use Roku’s TV-connected hardware with customized interfaces.

RELATED: Roku Amps Up Pay TV Partnership Play

Telstra, which joined Roku’s program in 2015, plans to introduce the new 4K HDR hybrid streaming player for its TV service later this month.

“Our new 4K HDR hybrid streaming player is ideal for countries where over the air TV is available. It really brings together entertainment sources in a clever way, so consumers can watch live and on demand entertainment with one single remote control,” Andrew Ferrone, vice president pay TV at Roku, said in a statement.

Others on board with Roku Powered include Sky (in the U.K., Republic of Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain), Econet/Kwese TV (South Africa); PLDT and Globe Telecom (Philippines).

Digital antenna maker Mohu has launched Untangle.TV, an online application it says will show consumers how to cut the pay TV cord and perhaps sell a few products in the meantime.

Available for free at untangle.tv, the tool analyzes cord cutters’ viewing behaviors to recommend a mix of over-the-top and over-the-air devices and services needed to watch TV they want to watch at a price they can control.

Mohu estimates that 54% of consumers have considered cutting the pay TV cord. The Untangle.TV tool helps make that decision easier, the company said, pairing various OTT services like Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, SVOD services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, with the appropriate Mohu antenna to capture over-the air services.

“Cord cutting should be easy, and our mission has always focused on giving consumers choice, simplicity and the best entertainment experience possible,” said Mohu founder and CEO Mark Buff in a statement. “However, in the current cord cutting landscape, we know consumers have dozens of products and services to choose from, which can be overwhelming to evaluate all options available. To alleviate the burden of choice and simplify the cord cutting selection process, we created Untangle.TV to be the ultimate cord cutting shopping wizard. The tool objectively guides and supports consumers throughout their cord cutting journey.”

In order to determine customer preferences, Untangle TV asks users a series of questions, including, how tech savvy they are, what TV shos they watch, and how much they currently spend on pay-TV. Once the user answers those questions, Untangle.TV provides a list of products that a user should purchase by analyzing performance capabilities and costs of Mohu OTA antennas and major OTT devices, services and applications.

“Untangle.TV is the most complete application available to help consumers navigate their cord cutting journey, and we hope this tool takes the complexity out of making informed television decisions,” Buff said in the statement. “We want to continue supporting the cord cutting movement and believe Untangle.TV will help alleviate many consumers’ questions about choosing the right products to help them cut the cord on cable and satellite TV.”

Billing it as “antenna TV for the mobile age,” Didja Inc. is testing a service in the Phoenix area that captures the over-the-air TV signals of select local broadcasters and streams them to Web browsers as well as market-branded apps for Android and iOS smartphones and tablets.

The offering, called PhoenixBTV, is starting as a free, consumer beta that streams in more than 20 channels. Didja, which has a cloud DVR feature on its product roadmap, said it also has plans to offer a paid premium version of the service that will deliver more than 50 channels of local TV.

Users will also be able to watch the service on TVs using a Google Chromecast streaming adapter or via the Apple TV using AirPlay.  PhoenixBTV’s apps for iOS and Android went live over the weekend.

The service is only for Phoenix metro residents and won’t work for people outside that TV market, the company said.

Per the FAQ, PhoenixBTV currently offers a mix of local stations and broadcast diginets such as AZTV, MeTV, TuffTV, This TV, Retro TV, Rev’n, Azteca and Estrella, among others. However, it does not yet offer access to local feeds of majors such as ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox.

The beta launch follows an alpha version of the service that’s been live for a couple of months, according to Jim Long, Didja’s CEO, who said his company is also trying to negotiate for more channels to be part of PhoenixBTV. Also on board for the initiative is TV industry vet and former co-founder of Net2TV Jim Monroe, who is serving as GM of broadcast at Didja.

RELATED: Net2TV Seeks Buyer

Didja’s offering may remind some of Aereo, the now-defunct OTT TV service for cord-cutters that captured and redistributed local broadcast TV channels to broadband-connected devices that lost big in the courts in its battle against several broadcasters, which argued that Aereo violated copyright laws by delivering TV station signals remotely over the Internet without compensating content providers.

RELATED: Supremes Rule Against Aereo

Didja, a company that also developed Clippit, a mobile phone app that lets users create and share digital clips of live TV shows, says PhoenixBTV is different (and legal), as it has obtained approval to offer its channels for the beta offering, and intends to secure similar blessings for any additional channels that are added for the service’s eventual commercial debut.

Though Didja’s technical approach does involve the capturing of local over-the-air TV signals, Long declined to discuss the architecture of PhoenixBTV in much detail. Long also would not get into the business relationship his company has with local broadcasters.

“We have a philosophy that we want a service that is simple, fast and of high quality,” he said, noting that “fast channel-change” is one area of technical focus.

As for the beta trial, Long said it will be available to anyone locally who qualifies to receive it, though the company might decide to pause and un-pause how many people it allows access to the app during the test period.

“We’re prepared to do the test for as long as it takes, Long said, noting that the hope is that PhoenixBTV will offer a commercial product sometime in 2017.

In addition to the technology, PhoenixBTV will also use the trials to help it determine its audience.

But PhoenixBTV will largely target cord-cutters and cord-nevers, people who want broadcast TV while they are on the go in the market, or simply can’t get local broadcast TV with a regular digital antenna. It also views itself differently than a virtual MVPD skinny-bundle service like Sling TV, because Didja’s focus is on local broadcast.

Long said Didja is also hopeful that its product will also be attractive to millennial audiences and perhaps get them to watch more local broadcast TV. 

“We think people are more interested in local TV than some people realize,” Long said.

PhoenixBTV isn’t the only company or service focused on TV station streaming to arise since the fall of Aereo.

For example, Telletopia Foundation, a San Diego-based company, is also looking to offer a legal OTT service that offers local broadcast TV fare and relies on retrans payments and an exemption from the compulsory license for nonprofits, with original aims to go wide with a national service in 2016.

TabletTV, a joint venture of Granite Broadcasting and U.K.-based Motive Television, is taking a different tack by enabling users to capture OTA signals on a small device called the TPod and feed them to nearby connected mobile device.

RELATED: TabletTV Lets Viewers Mix, Match (subscription required)

A quarter of U.S. TV households have neither a cable nor satellite subscription, with younger people even more likely than the general population to be over-the-air-only viewers, market research firm GfK said.

That comes from GfK's 2016 Ownership and Trend Report, which shows that 17% of U.S. TV households rely on broadcast service, up from 15% in 2015, while another 6% rely on Internet video services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu or YouTube and do not watch either broadcast or traditional pay TV, up from 4% in 2015.

Interestingly, the younger demo (18-34) is most likely to opt for broadcast versus pay TV, with 22% saying they are using over-the-air reception versus an MVPD and 13% saying they were using their TV sets to view Internet video.

“The fact that a statistically significant increase in broadcast-only reception occurred over just one year may be further proof that the cord-cutting/cord-never phenomenon is accelerating,” sayid David Tice, SVP in GfK’s Media & Entertainment practice. “If you include homes that have no TVs at all – about 3% of all households – then less than three quarters (73%) of U.S. homes continue to have pay TV service, with the attendant implications for all stakeholders – not just the pay TV services themselves, but also networks, content providers and advertisers.”

The study, a part of GfK’s The Home Technology Monitor reports, was conducted among 3,009 households.

Chipmaker ViXS Systems is using this week’s confab in Las Vegas to demo the CordCutter TV streaming stick a device that converts over-the-air TV signals to IP format, enabling a variety of connected video devices to receive, decode and display free HDTV content.

ViXS said it has developed the device, a “while labeled” product for original equipment manufacturers, in partnership with Geniatch, a free-to-air TV tech specialist, and Nuvyyo, which designed the CordCutter TV’s interface, which will support platforms such as the Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV (via AirPlay), Google Chromecast adapter, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, and Web browsers.

Nuvyyo is also the company behind the Tablo OTA DVR for cord-cutters.

The product bakes in ViXS’s XCode 5505 hardware transcoding platform, sports single-tuner support for ATSC OTA reception, a real-time OTA streaming server, and Ethernet or WiFi streaming to video devices.

ViXS said the CordCutter TV platform is available for orders today, with samples to become available in May, and production set for June 2016. 

TiVo’s plan to create a service along the lines of Aereo, but “done legally and better,” as TiVo CEO and president Tom Rogers put it recently, is still murky, though the company is expected to reveal all at an event in San Jose sometime in July.

In a brief interview Wednesday, Rogers wouldn’t let the cat out of the bag, but dropped some hints suggesting that whatever TiVo does have in mind, expect it to build on what it’s started with the Roamio OTA, a new DVR model sans CableCARD slot that's targeted to cord-cutters, enabling them to combine over-the-air TV with over-the-top video and essentially create their own video service bundles.

“We haven’t been very specific about it,” Rogers acknowledged, “but it will certainly build on what we currently are doing in the OTA space, fully recognizing that there are…consumers out there that are going beyond where Aereo was when it came to recording network signals.”

Notably, TiVo acquired only Aereo’s trademarks and customer lists for about $1 million in March following a bankruptcy auction. Other parties snapped up Aereo’s patents and some of the now-defunct company’s equipment and technology. 

We’ll know more this summer, but I think that scenario makes it unlikely that we’ll see TiVo build and operate its own antenna arrays, a la Aereo, to capture OTA signals and redistribute them via the Internet.  Given Rogers’s most recent comments, I’d expect the coming product to include expansions and enhancements to the Roamio OTA, perhaps with a cloud DVR component.  

The Roamio OTA is starting off as a retail product, but Rogers also talked up how it is also being positioned to help MPVDs counter the small but growing cord-cutting threat. 

“Increasingly, we’re hearing from cable operators on this who say, ‘Hey, we need to have some way of relating to the broadband only subs that are not taking our video package…and provide us with a way to do that with a combination of a device and an interface where we as operators don’t have to bear programming costs,’” Rogers said. Cablevision Systems, which is not one of TiVo's MVPD partners, has already begun to market specialized cord-cutter packages. 

That approach, Rogers said, gives MVPDs “a nice way of allowing people to get network signals without their paying retransmission consent in a nice way for consumers to integrate whatever streaming services they want that don’t involve payment by a cable operator for programming.”

Frontier Communications is the first and only MVPD so far to announce plan to market the Roamio OTA to broadband-only subs, but expect more to join the club.  Frontier president and CEO Dan McCarthy told an investors conference last week that a trial with TiVo is underway.

“We have some interesting discussions going on with various operators on that front,” Rogers said. “I think they’re quickly concluding that it’s not a question of encouraging cord-cutting, but that there are people who are going to not want the video package but are going to want broadband. And they [the operators] want to be able to maintain as close relationship as they can.” 

Following up on a product plan announced last month, Microsoft said Wednesday that an over-the-air TV tuner for the Xbox One gaming console is now available in the U.S. and Canada.

The new OTA device, made in partnership with Hauppauge, gives Microsoft and its Xbox One platform a way to target a small but growing group of cord-cutters (and cord-nevers), while also building on the product’s other video options, including support for over-the-top video from sources such as Netflix, Sling TV and Hulu, integration of authenticated TV Everywhere apps such as HBO Go, TWC TV, and WatchESPN,  and its ability to pass-through traditional pay TV services (by linking the Xbox One to a set-top box via an HDMI cord) and tie it into the console’s OneGuide interface.

To prime the OTA pump, Microsoft said it is selling a bundle with the Hauppauge Digital TV Tuner and  Mohu Leaf 50 antenna at Microsoft retail outlets and online at Microsoftstore.com for $99.99, a $30 discount. Microsoft is also selling the tuner separately for $59.99 at Microsoft stores and via Amazon.

Microsoft said Xbox One users can also stream over-the-air TV to other devices within the home using the Xbox app on Windows 10 devices or the Xbox One SmartGlass app for Windows, Windows Phone, iOS and Android

“Support for over-the-air TV on Xbox One means you can access broadcast networks available in your area, subscription free, and, in true Xbox One fashion, without having to worry about switching inputs between your games and TV,” Microsoft said.

The Xbox One is one of a growing number of products that have emphasized the OTA angle. Others include TiVo (via its Roamio OTA model), Channel Master, maker of the DVR+ system; and Mohu’s recently launched Channels platform.