It’s become fashionable lately to be a pessimist about broadcast TV. Industry insiders wring their hands over millennials’ shift to mobile video and their parents’ cord-cutting. Some take the nay saying even further: Netflix’s CEO has claimed that by 2030 broadcast will cease to exist.

Television

But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of broadcast’s demise are greatly exaggerated. The truth is that broadcast is a robust and resilient industry that’s survived existential crises before. Remember when broadcast was going to get killed by cable TV? Both mobile-savvy millennials and cord-cutting Boomers still watch TV in huge numbers — they’re just consuming it differently.

In other words: there’s no reason to believe that broadcast’s going anywhere anytime soon. But like everything in the digital age, the industry is changing rapidly. Here are three ways broadcast is adapting to the 21st century — and ensuring its own future in the process.

Broadcasters are getting technical

Broadcasters generally focus on making great content, not on how to deliver it. But today, they can’t afford to ignore delivery anymore. They must get their content into the hands of viewers not just through traditional over-the-air TV or cable, but also via smartphones, laptops, desktops and tablets.

There's an unprecedented technological challenge. There are more than 24,000 different Android devices in existence; add to that iPhones 4 through 7, Roku, Chromecast and Apple TVs, and you’ve got an overwhelming number of devices with vastly different needs. Each of these devices require slightly different encoding in terms of screen size, ad content and stream quality. People expect to watch the same video on all of them, with similar quality for each experience, without ads causing undue interruption.