Win or lose in the Supreme Court, Aereo as we know it won’t last

[Commentary] I wouldn’t put money on any particular outcome from the Supreme Court’s review of the Aereo case given how flummoxed actual experts seem to be by the question. But even a clean victory for Aereo isn’t likely to buy the company much beyond a little more time before it needs to find a buyer or be overtaken by the very forces of disruption it would unleash.

It’s an inherently inefficient way of doing live streaming that Aereo is already having trouble scaling to meet demand. If you had clear license to transmit broadcast programming over the Internet without needing the legal protection of the Cablevision precedent that’s not the way you would do it. And therein lies Aereo’s real problem. If it loses in court it’s done. But even if it wins there’s nothing to stop broadcasters themselves from eventually providing streaming access to their broadcast signals, potentially at no cost to viewers. It’s simply a matter of time before the technological infrastructure is in place to provide universal live streaming access and to do it much more efficiently than Aereo can. It might look something like Tablet Television, which uses an ATSC dongle to turn tablets into digital TV receivers, or it might look something like LTE multicasting (a.k.a. LTE Broadcast). But it will be scalable and robust in a way that Aereo and other unlicensed services working around the margins of the Cablevision decision will have a hard time matching.

[Sweeting is Principal, Concurrent Media Strategies]