That will absolutely suck for anyone who has to watch using this method.
There's no way an informed fan isn't going to go out looking for pirated streams.
God, I can't imagine watching a modern NHL game in 4:3. I've watched plenty of shitty junior A broadcasts with terrible quality, but even they were at least 16:9.
Still waiting to see what Scripps Sports does to add HD for the Coyotes games over the air.
The positive note is the Scripps Sports parent company E.W Scripps owns most of the OTA HD broadcast infrastructure and bandwidth in Phoenix via their ATSC 3.0 broadcast station KASW. Scripps is supplying the OTA HD channel feeds in Phoenix for CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC and CW.
I haven‘t looked at other cities, but wouldn’t be surprised if many are similar with Scripps owning the major HD OTA broadcast systems.
If any company could easily add a new HD channel it’s Scripps. They can do it themselves with their own infrastructure—they don’t have to go begging hat in hand to find another company for a new HD channel.