Recently, in a comment made on one of my blog posts, somebody postulated that eventually cable lineups will get much smaller and cable companies will be reduced mostly to a platform to broadcast live sports events. That is a possibility because sports are clearly the most valuable programming asset that broadcasters have today.

But even in the sports world we have seen some experimentation with the web. On fall Saturdays, for every football game that is on one of the cable sports networks there are a lot more games that are only on ESPN3, the online channel from ESPN. For most of these games online is the only way to view them. And even ESPN itself has allowed their ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN Deportes and the SEC Channel onto Sling TV and it’s likely they are negotiating the same deal with others.

But let’s assume for a second that the more lucrative sports like pro football stay off the web. What might a world look like where most programming was streaming rather than broadcast?

First, this would create a huge increase in web traffic, particularly in the evenings in each time zone. According to Nielsen, in 2014 the average home watched broadcast TV for almost 143 hours per month while the average home watched streaming video on the Internet for 6 hours and 41 minutes. This means that less than 5% of video programming being watched is on the web. The companies that control the Internet have already been screaming about the impact of Netflix on their networks, and yet the web is still only carrying a small portion of the video content that people routinely watch.

There are certainly problems to solve before we can put most video on the Internet. One must first consider the difference between broadcasting live video versus streaming video like Netflix does. There is not a lot of live video on the web because the web architecture is not really designed to always deliver content exactly on time. I’ve reviewed Sling TV on my blog a few times and their live sports programming is so terrible that it’s basically unwatchable. Anybody who has watched ESPN3 will tell you a little better story, but even that is not great. ESPN3 mostly is made to work by sending out fairly low quality video to hold down the bandwidth demand. And unlike Sling TV, ESPN seems to have invested in carriers with a more robust backbone. The live streaming problem is not just about sports because many of the other popular shows that have been aired live on the web, like the Oscars, have been a debacle.

There is a huge difference between live shows and streamed video. Netflix can send out many copies of a streamed video at the same time because each end user is basically downloading a large file. As long as the download speed can stay ahead of where the show is being viewed then the viewer gets the intended quality. It doesn’t matter if the download process is erratic as long as the viewer stays ahead of the download. But live shows must be delivered immediately and to many homes at the same time. And when there is any glitch anywhere in the network, the live broadcast is going to hiccup or crash. If there is a local problem then only a few viewers have a problem, but if there are network delays then many viewers will suffer.

The results of moving everything to the web would be dramatic at the customer end of the network as well. The first issue would be all of the customers using DSL or slow cable modems that can’t easily receive multiple video streams. The FCC set the new standard of 25 Mbps download based upon homes wanting to watch 3 videos simultaneously as well as doing other normal web things. If you are sitting today on a 6 Mbps DSL line you already know that watching even one Netflix stream can sometimes be a challenge.

But even assuming that everybody gets upgraded speeds (which might be hard since most DSL won’t go much faster), I still have to wonder how the cable companies and telcos would handle a 10 times increase in video download demand. Almost all local networks have some sort of shared nature. In fiber-to-the-home networks a data stream is typically shared with up to 16 homes. But in cable networks that number can be greater than 500 homes.

You don’t have to remember back more than a few years when the speeds on cable networks almost died every night during prime time as most homes got on the computer. Cable companies have responded by increasing the size of the data path to the nodes and by cutting many nodes in half. But a 10 times increase in video volumes would bring every cable network to their knees. They would have to construct a lot more fiber and they would need to reduce the size of their nodes down to something a lot closer to the size of fiber systems. And they would have to do all of this without getting any additional revenue.

And rural folks would just be left out. All of the millions of homes that are being upgraded to 10 Mbps download by the Connect America Fund (and the tens of millions of other ones already with slow DSL) would be shut out in a world where most video was on the web rather than on the cable systems. I wonder if the politicians could ignore a rural TV gap in the same manner that they ignore the rural broadband gap?