I was bummed that the Supreme Court ruled against Aereo this summer. Aereo had not yet expanded to my town, and now it never will.

I’m a cord cutter. I don’t have cable TV, but I do have a big internet pipe. The internet pipe feeds Internet-available television content to my Roku. I also have an Over the Air (OTA) antenna mounted on the roof and a TiVo Roamio DVR on which I record local news and Big Five Network programming.

My OTA antenna sucks. Or rather, I should say my OTA reception sucks. Even though I’m not far from the network transmission antennas in Saint Louis, I’m in an older subdivision thick with very tall old-growth trees. Once the leaves drop, my reception is flawless. When the trees leaf up, my reception sucks. To get normal OTA reception I’d have to put my antenna on a thirty foot extension pole. Not going to happen.

What Aereo did was this: They put a big array antenna of their own right across the street from a network transmission antenna. The Aereo antenna was covered in dime sized smaller antennas. Aereo would lease me – the end user – the exclusive rights to one of those dime-sized antennas and then convert the signal into an internet digital feed that I could decode perfectly on my Roku, or whatever device I chose.

It was a perfect end-around from having to pay a cable company to get my local stations that I should be getting for free over the air.

But then Aereo stepped on their dick. They recorded the content to a DVR distribution cloud and allowed users to watch any recent network content on-demand. Nope. That sank their clever end-around legal argument. Now they were no longer just delivering the free signal for an antenna-lease subscription fee. Now they were reselling pure entertainment content.

The secondary implications of the Supreme Court decision was that – if it had sided with Aereo – it would have legally busted the “package” subscription model of cable entertainment. The door would be open for me to subscribe to only those cable channels I want to watch, without paying freight for all the crap channels I never watch.

But… Alas. Moot point. Crusty old dumbshits didn’t even know that HBO was a pay channel, much less understand the technical merits of Aereo.  Sigh.

I could get every cable channel sent to my Roku if my parents would let me add a Slingbox to their unused cable box in their guest bedroom, but my mother is convinced that the Cable TV police drive around in a surveillance van, looking for too much entertainment signal emanating from a particular house. She doesn’t want jackbooted Cable Cops kicking down her door.  Double sigh.

ROUND TWO: HBO has announced it will finally sell its programing to anyone who wants to buy it, even those of us who don’t have a cable package.

It would appear as though the era of a la carte entertainment may be at hand.

As this author points out, all it would really take to shatter the current cable business model is ESPN offering a similar service. Pay for what you watch. Build your own entertainment package. Cut out the middleman and sell your content direct to the consumers who want it.

YES!!! (Was that really so hard, folks?)

No doubt that MLB.tv will find a way to screw up this business model. I can subscribe to MLB.tv and on my Roku I can watch ANY MAJOR LEAGUE GAME I WANT TO WATCH!*

*Exception: Any baseball game I’d reasonably be expected to want to watch is blacked out.

Genius, MLB. Pure genius. Charge me $130 a year to watch other cities’ baseball teams. Frickin’ brilliant, you all are. It’s YOUR product! You own it! You make the rules! You write the contracts! Cable television agrees to your terms, not vice versa.

Idjits.

But enough about the negative. The Horn of Jericho is sounding! Hear it? All that is left to do is wait for the walls to fall.