Comcast’s Broadcast TV fee hits $27

Before that there was a service called ivi.tv that streamed broadcast TV from cities all over the US and boy it was a lot of fun. You got four chances to watch every network TV program, one for every time zone. In election season I think it's a lot more interesting to watch the local coverage (and local ads) in competitive districts than it is to get the safe-for-the-nursing-home take from CNN. And of course you get a better selection of football games on any given Sunday.

It might have been most threatening to the TV industry in that it held it accountable. In particular you would see that the TV market in Los Angeles was unlike any TV market in America, including major markets like NYC. TV in your town is not a "vast wasteland", it's a postage-stamp sized wasteland compared to the independent channels in LA in the digital age where you can tune in nearly 100 channels with a modest antenna including broadcasts in languages I can't recognize.

Unfortunately it got sued and was shut down very quickly and vanished without a trace while oddly Aereo got a huge amount of coverage. I can see it being compelling that you could get channels that don't tune in well at home, but portable TV was a wash back when it was possible in the NTSC era. Standards committees have spent a lot of ink on standards for digital mobile TV but the only people who've been more indifferent than the broadcasters are the viewers. I know Verizon thinks anything is meaningless if you do anything without a smartphone but I hardly expect the rest of the world to agree.