Fortune

[Commentary] It's a good time to delve into a development that could forever reshape the future of television: the possible merger between two of the nation's biggest cable companies, Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

A merger between these giants would threaten an open and fair market for cable television as well as Internet access.

To understand this, consider that Comcast could gain 11 million subscribers if it buys Time Warner Cable. Even if it winds up divesting 3 million subscribers to Charter Communications to gain approval from the Federal Communications Commission, the combined company will still have 30 million subscribers nationwide.

Some would say the companies don't directly compete -- Comcast has its own markets, such as in Philadelphia and Washington (DC), and Time Warner Cable has its own, such as in New York and North Carolina. The lack of overlap may temper antitrust concerns, but even geographically divergent markets can create an anticompetitive environment.

Another factor to consider is how the scarcity of a necessary resource like broadband will inevitably increase the power of monopolistic distributors while hurting content providers and consumers.

So while the merger may not be anti-competitive in terms of eliminating existing competition, it does obviate the need for both Comcast and Time Warner Cable to expand their services and aggressively compete with each other on price, quality of service, and capacity, which amounts to the same thing. The Federal Communications Commission should consider all this before approving a deal and recognize the long-term ramifications of allowing cable juggernauts to expand their footprint artificially instead of through investment and competition.

[Sanghoee is a political and business commentator]

[Commentary] Should Aereo win the right to retransmit the over-the-air signals of television broadcasters, other operators could use similar technologies to also avoid paying the retransmission fees, and that, say some legal experts, could undermine the entire broadcast business model.

The rumors of the death of broadcast TV could be greatly exaggerated however. Pamela Samuelson, professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law said: "My prediction is that the court will split on the case, but Aereo will win on statutory interpretation and the court will say if you don't like this result, tell it to Congress.

Aereo has on its side that Microsoft and other tech companies think that many cloud services companies would be at risk if ABC's interpretation of the statute prevails." However, the broadcasters may instead opt for what some have called the "nuclear option."

In the summer of 2013, executives at Fox threatened to pull its prime time content and move it to a cable offering, while more recently CBS hinted it might also consider such a strategy. The question becomes whether broadcasters could really make the jump to cable.

[Commentary] Aereo will finally plead its case to the nine US Supreme Court justices who will determine its fate. Since the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1976, retransmitters of broadcast signals have been required to first obtain permission from the broadcasters -- who own copyrights to much of the programming encoded therein.

Congress has enacted elaborate rules dictating how cable and satellite providers can obtain such permission -- sometimes through statutory licenses and sometimes through negotiation. As a result, retransmitters generally end up paying fees for the privilege, and retransmission fees have become a crucial portion of broadcasters' revenue, especially as advertising revenues wane in an Internet-dominated world.

Yet because of Aereo's quirky technology -- which is in many respects less efficient than existing, alternative methodologies -- Aereo claims it can do an end-run around the need to ask such permission. As the broadcasters look at things, then, Aereo "simply captures over-the-air broadcasts and then, without authorization, profits from retransmitting those broadcasts to its subscribers," the broadcasters write in the joint brief, which was authored by a team headed by Paul Clement of the Bancroft law firm and Paul Smith of Jenner & Block.

"This would seem to be obvious copyright infringement -- an entire business model premised on massive and unauthorized commercial exploitation of copyrighted works, where the prices of competitors are undercut because they are licensed and pay fees." The government rejects Aereo's attempt to portray itself as a simple provider of individual antennae and DVRs, stressing its status as "an integrated system."

[Commentary] Google opens up its Explorer Program, offering the general public an opportunity to purchase Glass for $1,500. Although spots are limited, the expansion of the Glass club has created tremendous excitement across tech blogs and Silicon Valley -- finally, the tools are readily available to record our complete existence, every moment of our lives on Earth, every face we encounter.

According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, we need not be concerned if our entire lives are recorded and made visible to others, because: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Reality, of course, is far more complex than Schmidt's vision of a flat monoculture of morals. We all do things that we don't want our grandmothers, significant others, friends, or bosses to see. But Glass changes all that because we no longer have control over how our lives are recorded and shared online.

A key driver of our cultural output is our robust civil society -- the private sphere of human interactions outside of business or government that creates and nurtures new ideas. We don't need to go back far in history -- the Stasi, McCarthyism, the Salem witch trials, etc. -- to observe the disastrous cultural effects wrought by the breakdown of civil society. In all of these cases, the usurping of privacy was a key tool of the regime in control; the perception of being constantly watched created a normalizing effect, where citizens slowly internalized the surveillance and modified their behaviors to be less and less idiosyncratic.

[Madsbjerg is a senior partner at ReD Associates]

[Commentary] Chris Dixon, one of my favorite writers and investors, wrote a piece on what he sees as the inevitable decline of the web as the world transitions to mobile computing.

The thesis is simple -- mobile is dominating, and apps dominate mobile. Ergo, the web is dead. However, Chris misses a critical distinction that must be made to understand the future (or possible non-future) of the web. 'the web' heretofore has meant two things:

1. A distributed platform for publishing content globally
2. A frictionless delivery system for Internet-enabled software

Unfortunately, these two things are often conflated, which has led to countless confused conversations. Clearly, mobile will be the dominant medium for computing. Rich native mobile apps provide a significantly better customer experience over web apps loaded via a mobile browser. For this reason, Internet- enabled software will transition primarily to mobile apps.

However, that doesn't mean mobile apps will displace the web as the world's primary publishing platform. More devices and more users will only drive demand for more and better content. Content will continue to be primarily published via the web.

[Rosen is co-founder and CEO of Pantheon, a San Francisco-based professional website platform for developers, marketers, and IT users]

Tens of thousands of viewers who tried to tune in for Sunday's season finale of the HBO hit crime drama True Detective may have been left without a resolution to the complex plotline. It wasn't because of a cable outage. It wasn't because of a blackout sparked by a cable services feud with a pay-TV channel. Rather, it was the result of so many people trying to watch the finale on HBO Go -- the cable channel's streaming service.

Streaming media -- or "over the top" (OTT) as it's called by those in the industry -- has long been seen as having the potential to seriously disrupt the status quo of the cable television business. But HBO's recent failure shows that the drama isn't limited to just what viewers are watching on the screen. Even Netflix, which successfully transitioned from a DVD-by-mail service to a streaming provider, has had problems ensuring quality of service. Many viewers who expected Blu-ray or at least DVD-quality video were left with a picture of much lower resolution, especially during peak hours where demand was high.

"It is an inherent problem with OTT," said Greg Ireland, research manager in the consumer markets for video program at research firm IDC. "If we expect the OTT market to develop and supplant traditional paid TV, then reliability and quality becomes so much more important."

Netflix, which is now producing original programming such as the critically acclaimed and award-winning series House of Cards, recently agreed to a deal with Comcast so that its subscribers using Comcast's service would see improved picture quality, rather than the lesser quality picture resulting from throttled bandwidth. Netflix reported that speeds to Comcast customers were up 11% in February from the month prior, following four straight months of declines. Netflix -- the Internet company seen as competing with traditional cable channels such as HBO and Showtime -- must pay the cable company to ensure quality of its streaming service. The fates of the disruptor and disrupted are intertwined.