If the Big Four broadcast networks were to leave OTA behind, it would be game over for OTA. It doesn't matter what the stations left behind tried to do: the Big Four networks are the only thing propping OTA up right now. As long as the Big Four ensure that (most of) the most popular programming is on OTA, it will survive and people will support it; the instant that changes no one will even have a reason to recognize its existence. There would be no pressure to keep the must-carry or retransmission consent rules up, and without those the audience for broadcast transmissions that anyone actually cared about would be approximately zero. That's why this thread was never
not going to be about whether or not OTA will or should survive, because everyone here (aside from FredLeonard) loves OTA and don't want to see it go away - and we seem to be alone in that.
The FCC and Congress have been stacking the deck against OTA and in favor of cable for 20-40 years now, some of it intentional, some of it not. The biggest thing is probably something that neither one of them did directly, the ability for cable networks to charge subscription fees. The FCC places content restrictions on the broadcast stations in the name of "decency" and "education" and "protecting the youth" but claim to be helpless to apply the same rules to the cable networks that are broadcast stations' direct competitors in every other way (thus the only effect is severely restricting broadcast networks' ability to get the same kind of programming that cable networks can get, and in the case of E/I regulations, also restricting their ability to get programs kids will actually watch and severely throttling the potential of "cable-like" subchannels). The FCC and Congress put together a digital transition mechanism and adopted a digital standard that substantially reduced the reach of OTA and confused most of what few people still had antennas into getting cable. The FCC allowed duopolies and looked the other way at obvious attempts to circumvent the rules, thus concentrating more stations in the hands of fewer companies that have less incentive to actually put programming people will actually watch on. (We once talked of UPN and the WB as though they might run down the Big Four one day; today three-fourths of their successors are
owned by that Big Four.)
If there are stations out there that actually care about OTA - and as we saw in the Aereo case the deck has become so stacked against OTA broadcasting that even those that engage in it would rather you subscribe to cable - they need to get serious about getting the FCC to un-stack the deck against them, because time is running out fast. I think OTA has a place in an Internet-based on-demand future if it knows what that place is; TVCOOL has a point in that if linear television is going to survive at all as separate from the Internet, most if not all of the cable networks, insofar as their "method of transmission" is different from OTA's, would ideally go away before OTA did, if only because wireless transmission can reach devices like smartphones and tablets that wired transmission can't (even if it doesn't seem like it right now). Here's a hint about where that place is:
On-demand, online viewing will continue to gain the upper hand as programmed broadcasts lose viewership. That relates directly to the method of transmission. OTA television is not capable of on-demand programming, so it will quickly become obsolete.
There are, however, some types of programming that
can't be delivered on-demand, namely live events. As someone who follows the sports media, and as such has become so used to big media companies becoming so desperate to go after sports rights as to affect their business strategies and acquisitions and ESPN potentially being a media empire unto itself if it were separate from Disney that my first thought when the Fox-Time Warner news came out was that it had to do with Rupert Murdoch coveting Turner's sports rights, I understand how important this is to the nature of linear television in this day and age. I hold out hope that Sinclair's American Sports Network is the beginning of the broadcasting industry starting to realize this, even if only in baby steps.
Maybe OTA will become to network shows like "How I Met Your Mother" what HBO used to be to movies before VHS rentals, and then DVD rentals were to seeing movies at the movies. You could spring for an expensive ticket to see a movie at a first run theater, or you could wait until it came to the cheaper neighborhood theaters for a deeply discounted ticket price, or you could wait even later to see it on HBO or Showtime. Then VHS and later DVD rentals replaced the pay cable networks. Then relatively cheap DVD purchases replaced rentals for first-run home viewing, followed by waiting four weeks to rent the movie from Redbox or Netflix. That chain has been around for a long time now. So maybe we would just see more syndication of network shows after the episodes are a few years old.
I didn't start watching Big Bang Theory until it was stripped weeknights on my local station. So maybe OTA TV would continue to broadcast the same crap it broadcasts now, only a year or two later.
I think we're seeing the opposite model developing, where a particularly popular show gets its initial premiere on a linear channel, so everyone who wants to can watch it as soon as it's available (and
take part in the resulting social media conversation without being spoiled), and then - admittedly fairly immediately - show up on some online on-demand service.
I mean audio programming will be on-demand - not fixed - too. Pandora is an intermediate step - a computer tries to custom program your personal audio stream based on what you like (and don't like).
I think radio will never completely abandon the linear model. At the very least, I don't see a way Pandora ever goes out of business or fundamentally changes its business model unless some even bigger technological wave comes along. There is just so much music out there that it's very easy not to know what you want to listen next or even not to know what you would want to listen next even exists.
A lot? No way. Some maybe. A few. This is another of those man bites dog stories the media love so much. Except the media today finds a man bites dog story and plays it as a new trend. "Is your dog safe?"
I'm not even sure that's entirely the media's fault, or if it is it's the result of flaws in some of their most basic assumptions. When the media report nothing but man-bites-dog stories, at least some people are going to come to the conclusion that men bite dogs all the time, because that's what the media reports. I think this has become a big problem in politics; I don't think it applies to cord-cutting, which would be much further along if not for a) how complicated it is to do it well at the moment (at least if you're not going the hardcore OTA-only route) and b) the active and passive efforts by big media and cable companies to keep more people from doing it.
