The Texas bluebonnets were blooming near Rocket Park on the NASA campus.

I’m back from a visit to Houston, where I used to live a stone’s throw from the NASA campus. Except now, with heightened security, they’ll probably track you down if you try to throw stones at NASA.

So there I was, in a third-floor hotel room about 30 miles from downtown Houston, and just for fun, I hauled out my little USB stick ATSC tuner. I plugged in my 3-inch rabbit ears, stuck that next to a window, fired up my netbook, and scanned. I came up with 62 digital channels. That’s twice as many channels as I could watch in my first cable TV subscription! (I’m pretty sure it’s also more channels than I paid for when I lived there.)

And what a variety! In addition to the major networks and Spanish-language stations, there were several independents with RTV-style reruns., ABC News Now, and even CCTV News.

Free TV via satellite is really cool, but remember that free TV with an over-the-air antenna is really easy. If you haven’t already, scan the digital airwaves where you live and see how many extra channels you can find. Leave a comment to let us know how many you’ve got.

* At Time-Warner Cable, the director of digital communications coined a great phrase: “Television is melting.” You can read his entire blog post here, but the basic idea is that folks who watch video on screens other than their TVs still want to watch the content that they’ve paid for. Video delivery is morphing, and TWC’s streaming (in-home) app wants to be a part of that.

* But I read a much better summation of the state of things on Diane Mermigas’s blog at Business Insider. She points out that the big media companies know as well as anyone that the delivery systems are shifting, yet they want to maintain their profits from the status quo. “The growing rift between content providers and mainstream distributors … is beginning to resemble an existential play.” Go read it!

The Open Mobile Video Coalition has been, well, coalescing over the past three years or so. Its goal sounds pretty good; the OMVC wants to use another platform to spread free TV. But unless it can bag partnerships with some major cell phone manufacturers, this is going to be another solution in search of a problem.

Let’s back up to the beginning. The changeover from analog to digital over-the-air TV killed the signals to millions of old portable analog TVs. The new digital channels work beautifully with HD sets, but a small screen doesn’t really need all those extra pixels. And apparently it’s difficult for a digital TV to maintain its picture if the TV is moving, as in the back seat of a car.

Enter the OMVC, which agreed on a particular type of digital subchannel designed for a particular type of receiver. Mobile viewers will be able to tune in to any of these “mobile TV” channels in their market if they use one of these new mobile TV receivers.

Now let me tick off some of the problems with this plan.

• Will there be enough mobile TV channels to make viewers want to buy a receiver? I sympathize with the OMVC, which has a chicken-egg problem. They’re trying to get enough stations in enough markets to broadcast enough mobile TV channels that electronics manufacturers will feel good about creating more mobile TV receivers. And the OMVC needs to have some mobile TV receivers available so enough stations will want to devote some broadcast bandwidth to mobile TV. But will this reach critical mass in enough markets to reward the broadcasters and manufacturers?
• Will these channels be free? As the OMVC tries to get as many stations as it can under its tent, it’s stayed kind of fuzzy about subscription channels. Clearly, some stations want to broadcast some kind of pay TV, hopefully as a supplement to some free channels. OMVC just chose Neustar as its “Mobile DTV Trust Authority”, or DRM system, so pay-TV channels are a definite possibility. I thought that the failure of Flo TV showed that there aren’t many consumers who are ready to buy a mobile TV device and pay for a subscription to watch it.
• Who’s going to watch? The prototypical mobile TV viewer is a commuter on a train. Otherwise, hmm. You can’t watch while you’re driving to work. If you’re home, you can get a better picture on your regular set. If you’re sitting at work, or sitting in a stadium, or if the power goes out, you can watch from a regular, battery-powered portable digital TV. So how many train commuters are there? Will the signal reach down into subways?

The only way mobile TV will catch on is if it’s free (or mostly free) and it’s already in your pocket. Later this year, there’s supposed to be a mobile TV device that works with iPhones, and I’ve seen mobile TV USB dongles for netbooks and laptops, but that still requires making customers go out and buy and carry around some extra thingie just to watch mobile TV. On the other hand, if your Android phone or iPhone 5 already had a mobile TV chip built in and the antenna was your earbuds, that would make a nice feature. You might find yourself watching local news while you waited in a checkout line. But that’s only if you didn’t have to buy or do anything extra to the phone you were probably going to get anyway.

The OMVC will be exhibiting at the NAB Show again this year, (free exhibits pass still available here) and it promises to show off a prototype mobile phone equipped with mobile TV. If that works, and if the OMVC can get installed on enough phones, then it has a chance. Unless all that works out, mobile TV is going to be just another failed branch on the tree of technology.