Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

How long since you have given much thought to over-the-air TV? Maybe since you lived somewhere else, would be my guess.

Where I have lived, so far, in this community and in rural, southern-tier-west New York, there hasn’t been much OTA TV. Before cable, you had to have a rare, favorable home site, or a tall antenna, either on the roof or on a tall mast or both, preferably with a rotor. And then the signal was iffy.

You got the best antenna you could, with dipoles of widths ideal for the three stations using a site in Colden, N.Y. to beam signals here. Widths were about like your outstretched arms for Channel 2, less wide for 4 and pretty narrow for 7. Forget rabbit ears.

In our tight little valley, line-of-sight signal was a bad joke. The same was true of many other towns and most of the countryside in the region. But for much of the country OTA is feasible, at least for some channels.

For the rest, it’s cable or satellite TV service, right? Well, not necessarily. There have been technological advances that have been putting OTA-type service into the homes of viewers right and left. That could be all many viewers need to enable them to the cut the cord.

The technology I am talking about includes Google Chromecast, Roku and Apple TV hooked to Hulu, Amazon or Netflix. And, more recently, Aero. If you have Internet access, you can use it to obtain TV signal.

Whereas the others I mentioned deliver lots of content, the major OTA broadcasting networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox) have made it difficult to get OTA channels via the internet. But Aero has changed that, in parts of the country that include lots and lots of viewers.

Aero has been so well adopted, the OTA networks have taken notice, and taken up the cudgels too. Hence the case the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has agreed to hear, ABC vs. Aero, probably in April.

The Aero service isn’t just about how consumers can receive TV signal and content. It is also about what you can view it on—what devices, and where.

Aero provides clusters of small antennas in an area, then assigns two to each subscriber in that area. One is for viewing live shows and the other is for recording. The OTA shows available locally can be streamed to a digital video recorder (DVR) in the clouds.

You can watch even your local TV stations using your browser on a PC. Or you can watch them on Apple TV using Airplay, or on an iPad or iPhone, or some Roku boxes and Android (in beta). Chromecast lets you send shows to your HDTV.

Good old conventional TV networks and content purveyors have lined up and sued Aero one after the other, or even simultaneously. They get moolah from cable and satellite companies, which pay handsomely for the privilege of carrying those channels.

SCOTUS is being asked to decide whether a company “publicly performs” a copyrighted program when it transmits a broadcast to subscribers.

Folding out of a decision on that would be some implications, such as whether the TV industry has a right to prevent streaming of its copyrighted programs via internet, without making the streamers or the consumers pay the copyright owners or their licensees.

The case finds its way to SCOTUS because a U.S. Court of Appeals did not uphold an injunction that pretty much blocked Aero’s technology across the board. Areo’s Chet Kanojia, CEO and founder, issued a statement saying, in part, “…we have every confidence that the Court will validate and preserve a consumer’s right to access local over-the-air television with an individual antenna, making a personal recording with a DVR, and watch that recording on a device of their choice.”

If we think the case is just about how we access and consume our entertainment, we haven’t thought hard enough. It’s also about the cloud, cloud storage and cloud-based processing.

There was a key decision about that, in the Second Circuit, involving Cablevision, a while back. It encouraged the cloud industry considerably. The broadcasters that are battling Aero in ABC vs. Aero have framed their case in such a way that it can also attack part of the Cablevision ruling.

If SCOTUS rules against Aero, this will affect how we can access TV, obviously, but also the future of cloud computing and storage.

If SCOTUS rules for Aero, millions of us will be able to access OTA TV signals who would not have been able to with an ordinary antenna; and of course other millions will who would not have found it convenient to do so, and who could not have streamed that programming to all sorts of devices. And the outlook of cloud industries will be even sunnier.

But, a win by Aero might cause major networks to turn to encryption and sale of “keys” to viewers. No more free TV anytime, anyhow?

Some of us think consumers should be able to use antennas and DVRs to tune in and also to record TV. We see the cloud as being just another enhancement of reception ability. Some of a certain age can even remember when radio signals were enhanced by cloud cover, which reflected them downward for our antennas to catch.

It will be an interesting decision.