Who wouldn’t like one of our Diginova antennas in a nice mid-century avocado green? What you see above is just a quick photoshop, but I could actually see some demand for antennas that blend in with your surroundings a bit more. This is an outdoor antenna, but I could see indoor antennas having even more pops of color.
Could it be done?
Manufacturers could absolutely make designer colored antennas if they wanted to. It would be a challenge, but it could be done. First people have to want them. Conventional wisdom says they don’t. Most companies will tell you that white, black, and silver are all it takes. Our friends at Televes like to pepper their antennas with pops of corporate orange, but that’s about the extent of creativity in the antenna world.
Would the antenna be just as good?
The key to making colored antennas is in the color choice. Traditionally certain colors like bright yellow and deep blue are mixed with metal powders. That yellow comes from chromium and the blue comes from cobalt. The problem with that is that the metal pigments would actually stop the antenna from working.
But hey, this is 2018 and I’m sure there are chemical dyes and vegetable-based ones that don’t cause problems with antennas. I’m sure that you could work around something like that.
The question then is…
well really, it’s still down to whether or not people want it. I think that’s a question we’ll see answered pretty soon. Cord-cutting’s in full swing now, with people jumping in every day. While some folks are content with just having streaming, the real true-blue cord-cutter knows that without an antenna you’re not getting the whole experience. That’s why antennas are flying off the shelves at Solid Signal. It’s the best way to get 100% free TV and tons of it.
Generally when a trend goes mainstream, you see things kind of mature a bit. Think about cell phones in the mid-2000s, just before the iPhone came out. The market got mature and no one quite knew where it was going. So you saw a lot of weird designs like gaming phones, slider phones, phones with different swappable shells, etc. People really wanted a new innovation and that’s why the smartphone really swallowed up the market. But, for a moment there was a lot of attention put into appearance, because most phones had the same features.
That same thing happens in almost every maturing consumer market. When people want something new and there isn’t a technical innovation to give them, manufacturers fall back on designs and that tends to mean things like new colors. Antennas are a fairly mature technology and it’s hard to see anything coming on the horizon that will make them much smaller or much more powerful right now. That opens the door for designer colors.
Personally I really don’t have a problem with white or black, but I do think it would be cool to have some choice. I remember jonesing for one of the “Flavoradios” they had at Radio Shack back in the 70s and I still wouldn’t mind a different choice of antenna color now and again.
