Ears On

Given the audio-related mandate of this blog, you might assume I'm talking about audio streaming. But, just this once, I'm talking more about video.

Here's an optimistic view of the future: The United States adopts a fabulous new digital television standard that includes high-definition TV. Suddenly picture quality takes a quantum leap forward. It's so good, in fact, that cable and satellite operators struggle to provide a high-def picture of the same quality available for free with an antenna and a good signal. Prerecorded video also takes huge steps forward as the nation migrates from VHS to DVD, and then from DVD to Blu-ray. Meanwhile the spread of broadband brings a wealth of internet-related services to Americans, transforming our lives in countless ways. Things just get better and better.

Now here's a pessimistic view of the future: The U.S. adopts an HD-capable standard. But then the internet begins delivering video. And not just the kind of video that the internet is good at—Facebook-embedded YouTube cat videos and other tasty clips—but full-length movies and TV shows already delivered by traditional media. With this redundant burden, video suddenly becomes the majority of internet traffic. This slows down other things we can get only from the internet. And the compressed picture quality is grossly inferior to both broadcast and Blu-ray.

Have you figured out which vision of the future is the one we're getting?

But wait. It gets worse. The Federal Communications Commission is preparing for a massive spectrum auction that would reallocate precious space on the public airwaves from free television broadcasting to mobile broadband—potentially undermining the DTV transition, which was decades in the making. Cisco reports that video as a percentage of mobile data traffic passed the 50 percent mark in 2012, jumped to 55 percent in 2014, and continues to grow. The catch, of course, is that much of this migrating video traffic consists of TV shows hitherto distributed via free broadcast TV, like reruns of Seinfeld. Much of it also consists of movies hitherto rented on disc or accessed by cable/satellite/telco video on demand.

Not all broadband video traffic will travel via mobile networks. In fact, Juniper Research expects most of it to travel via home wi-fi networks. But that still leaves the internet, mobile or home network, groaning under the weight of redundant old-school video traffic.

Does it matter that mobile broadband will squeeze free TV broadcasting onto smaller slices of the airwaves? Much of the audience for broadcast TV, once the only television audience, has already migrated to other media: cable, satellite, and telco TV. But most of those pay-TV media are not growing nearly as fast as internet video streaming. Part of the reason for that is the rise of cord cutters, the folks who are ditching traditional pay-TV delivery for internet-delivered streaming.

However, free broadcast TV is also an indispensable cord-cutting tool. The proportion of U.S. households relying exclusively on over-the-air TV increased from 14 percent in 2010 to 19.3 percent in 2013, according to GfK Media & Entertainment. That's nearly 60 million viewers. Minority households make up 41 percent of the total, with a majority of Latinos using an antenna to get free TV.

Can the spectrum auction be stopped? Nope. The federal government is already counting the money it expects to rake in. The question, then, is how severely will free broadcast TV be affected by the FCC's spectrum repacking scheme? The commission is required by law to protect viewing populations and station coverage areas.

Will the entire current audience for free over-the-air TV still be able to get all the channels it gets now? Or will some viewers lose some channels? We're about to find out thanks to the FCC's giant science experiment. And if you depend on free broadcast TV, you're the guinea pig.

Audio Editor Mark Fleischmann is the author of Practical Home Theater: A Guide to Video and Audio Systems, now available in both print and Kindle editions.