I would be willing to pay a reasonable price to access a live CBS/NBC/ABC/Fox stream, but no one (legitimately) offers that. So OTA it is.
There are some bundles of content (youtube TV, I think)?
But operationally, for the viewer at home -- HOW the bits get delivered to your screen is irrelevant; what's ON the screen is what we care about.
I'm thinking the TV operators are running a scam, in a desperate attempt to hold on to $ and spectrum -- both of which they are less and less capable of justifying.
If you're in the US and you have an online provider for cable channels, try swapping an NFL game between the online broadcast and the OTA broadcast. There's a night and day difference in terms of picture quality.
There's no good reason the NFL is better OTA than streaming except streamers aren't complaining enough, I would guess. Note this last season, there was one game that was not available on regular TV, only on streaming. That was a 'test run' but clearly, the NFL is there to make money, and if they can make more streaming... well, there's your answer.
The one playoff game that was carried exclusively via Peacock was the wildcard game between the Dolphins and Chiefs. I also watched it through the Roku devices and I thought the picture quality was fine, better than Amazon Prime had been.
Would I have ponied up $5.99 if it weren't the Chiefs as they're the local team? I don't know. Perhaps next year I'll have to make that decision if they carry another playoff game that has teams I don't care that much about.
The TV industry was ticked off by that comment, and do you recall the name of the ship on Gilligan's Island? The S.S. Minnow
Channels 70-83 were reallocated away from TV in 1983.
Until then, yes, probably some spectrum should be devoted to OTA; maybe in SD, mainly PBS, I dunno, because this would be for the 'no access fee' case. That means cheap folks, or really poor folks. Society should be doing everything possible to eliminate the latter.
If TV receivers were built into smart phones, it would be easier to make this case.
Encryption must be banned in OTA television.
I believe it's a waste of valuable spectrum to burn it on TV. It would be better to allocate TV's spectrum to cell services (for example).
Radio should be used when things are moving relative to each other; AM and FM Radio make sense as receivers are often in cars. People don't watch TV in cars.
If the communications is point-to-point, run the wires/fiber and hook up. If you're in a car, boat, airplane, or train -- fine, use 'wireless'. Yet, even today, wi-fi / 5G + some wide-area services for special cases (planes, boats) gets you there.
TV is a vast wasteland (of spectrum).