Looks like they’ll be blowing a lot of that wealth manufacturing cars.
Someone on this thread hinted at Apple using old tech to deliver TV content. If you’re implying the rollout of some kind of OTA network, I can’t disagree with you there :-). I’ve always wondered why there isn’t some kind of encrypted OTA network out there that uses a decoder not unlike satellite radio. It might have to do with the available TV spectrum ... But I think there’s plenty out there still.
Back in the early to mid-1980's we had a TV station in the Chicago market called "ON-TV." It was a scrambled signal broadcast OTA and it required a special set top box (descrambler) to decode the picture and sound.
It was ahead of it's time ... well, almost. There were some shall we say "enterprising" electronics buff's who figured out how to decode the signal, built their own set top boxes and sold them for $300/ea. to make extra money while putting themselves through college.
IIRC, "ON-TV" lasted about 2 years before it went off the air and reverted back to a spanish speaking station, as it originally was before "ON-TV."
OTA descramblers are not hard to make. Almost anyone with basic electronics experience can figure out how to descramble a picture and audio. ENCRYPT the signal, that's another story.
Almost forgot: There's plenty of spectrum in the old analog "TV Bands." The US Government has wanted to auction off this spectrum since before the Digital TV "revolution" but has run into a problem with doing that.
Without getting into the technical aspects of it, Analog signals "bounce" and are affected by geographical and man-made barriers. I don't know how old you are, I'm 53(ish..) so I remember things like ghosts in the TV picture, static, snowy pictures, and if you held the rabbit ear antenna's juuuuuuuuuuuust right the picture would come in fine. If the antenna on your rooftop was pointed just slightly the wrong way, you'd get the same thing. Heck, even on stormy days the picture could go bad.
Analog signals can "overcome" many things and still deliver a signal. That signal may be crap, may not be watchable, but you got a signal.
Take that same analog spectrum and try running an IP network over it and guess what happens? Packet Loss. Transmission re-tries. Degredation of service to the point of the bandwidth not being usable.
That's why the US Government has struggled to sell off that bandwidth and why very few (if any..) are buying. What worked well for a pseudo-reliable TV signal does not work well in an IP based "guaranteed delivery" model.
Digital TV to some degree suffers the same fate. I live in the Chicago media market. I'm lucky because even 25 miles outside of Chicago, I'm up on a hill and have line of sight to Sears Tower (I'm sorry .. "Willis" Tower now..) and the John Hancock building. I can pick up some 70+ Digital TV stations out here. Friends who live @ 20-25 miles west of Chicago on lower elevations that are heavily wooded aren't so lucky. Many of them cannot pickup one or two of the major network stations from their home. Digital TV is highly hampered by geographical location and things like, oh, TREES.
In some cases, same friends can pick up the two major networks that they ordinarily don't get during the Winter months. Why? NO LEAVES. As soon as Spring comes, same two TV channels disappear until the following late Fall/early Winter.
We've had a summer home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan since 1993. We had a TV antenna on a tower @ 75' up to be able to pick up stations from Green Bay and Marquette, MI. When the cutover to Digital happened, that antenna no longer worked. Why? Because even at 75' it was below our tree line. The only way to get any sort of TV up there has been Dish Network. To get that to work we had to clear about a half an acre of trees on the southern exposure of the house for the dish to have visibility to the south in order to pick up satellites.
Gawd I love Digital. It's been like that since 2004'ish for them. BTW, I'm not kidding, it's the leaves & foliage that kill the signal for them. Any amateur radio operator who's driven through a heavily wooded area while trying to use the 2 Meter band knows exactly what I'm talking about here.
Not going to happen. The FCC is trying to shut down the broadcast TV industry and it will happen sooner rather than later. The bandwidth the TV signals have been using are desperately needed for other purposes than entertainment that is being used by fewer and fewer customers. As more and more people are picking up Satellite transmission from Geosynchronous orbiting satellites, and more people are getting their content from the Internet, fewer are picking it up from antennas. When it drops below a certain point, they WILL pull the plug and auction off those bands to companies who are slobbering in the wings, wanting to bid for the bandwidth being wasted on old tech.
No one is going to put any investment into developing anything that would use those wavelengths for more entertainment.