Major Networks Suing To Stop Free Streaming

AstroPhilosopher writes "In a move similar to Hollywood's attempt to have the Supreme Court ban VCRs back in the 80's, ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and Univision are set to appear in court next month to urge a New York federal judge to block Aereo. 'Aereo lets those in New York who want to watch on their iPad what they can pull down for free from the public airwaves to their TV with an antenna.' The networks, however, say Aereo will cause irreparable harm to their business. Aereo's conduct apparently causes them to 'lose control over the dissemination of their copyrighted programming, disrupts their relationships with licensed distributors and viewers and usurps their right to decide how and on what terms to make available and license content over new internet distribution media.'"

Comments

First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Cutting_Crew]

then what difference does it make where you get it from? Maybe someone can make it clear for me exactly what their lawsuit is saying here.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[hodet]

I assume the place shifting thing is a problem. The article mentions you rent antennas from Aero which to me would mean that you could get local area streams no matter where you live. I can already stream my own local area OTA with a Slingbox, not sure if that is also a problem for the Networks. But this seems to take it a bit far. I admit I read this quickly and may be missing something here.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[iamhassi]

then what difference does it make where you get it from? Maybe someone can make it clear for me exactly what their lawsuit is saying here.

Good luck with that studios. Worked great for the music companies.... oh wait, no it didn't, they're owned by Apple now because Apple sells most of their music and the music companies could not survive without Apple.

So sue away... until another Apple ends up owning you because you flatly refused to give customers what we're begging for and willing to pay for, an easy way to watch every TV ever created on every media device we own.

If it wasn't for the stupidity of the music companies trying to sue napster and everyone there would have been no iPod, iTunes, iPhone or Android, because had the music companies made their own store and sold music then Apple would have never made billions off iTunes

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[dmomo]

The Networks make deals based on the assumption that those airwaves are only accessible from in certain areas. Advertisers may or may not pay different fees based on the "market" their commercial would reach. It's a legitimate concern.

A lot of these slow-changing old companies are trying to shoe-horn the world to fit their aging business models. They really should be adapting to the new realities of Technology in the Modern World. The market is shifting, and clinging to old revenue streams is merely going to put them behind.

Lawsuit or no, their real concern should be the viability of their business model in a quickly evolving World.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[cforciea]

I think they have a couple of reasons for this lawsuit. First, they don't want any precedents set. A portion of this lawsuit is actually about how it is being streamed; specifically, there is a 1:1 ratio of antennas and users, and Aereo claims they are protected because they are just a long wire between the antenna and the user. If that argument holds for free over-the-air programming, it might be used later to protect streaming of something that is not quite so free. Also, they are probably worried about losing out on revenue from selling people the programming if they don't see it for free over the air when it broadcasts (or via DVR). They want additional advertising value to go to re-runs rather than disappearing into this system, and they are possibly scared it will hurt things like DVD/iTunes sales. They want to be in control as much as possible of any format swapping you do.

Personally, I think they are shooting themselves in the foot, in that I bet they could negotiate advertising revenue by leveraging these additional live viewers, and this adds to the ever-increasing perception that the old school broadcasters are unfriendly to viewers because they can't keep up with the times, but those are of course the typical mistakes these people make anyway, so it isn't surprising.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article (heresy, I know, that's why I remain anonymous), the largest portion of the complaint seems to be that Aereo is bypassing the license fees that satellite and cable redistributors pay. There are a number of potential angles of attack that the broadcasters will attempt, but the motive appears to be that Aereo is avoiding the redistribution fees.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Gideon Wells]

'lose control over the dissemination of their copyrighted programming, disrupts their relationships with licensed distributors and viewers and usurps their right to decide how and on what terms to make available and license content over new internet distribution media.'"

That is the key sentence, I believe. Back when TNN, I think it was them?, tried streaming their cable services to iPads there were comments from the industry that this was causing an up roar. Some being so blatantly honest to admit they were fast nearing the point of no longer even knowing what qualified as a "television". How much of the industry is built around a dumb box which displays images they send to it?

What does it do to the industry now that televisions are increasingly becoming glorified computer monitors for watered-down/specialized computers? How much more is the line blurred when you can get television easily on your computer devices? This sounds like they are trying to halt the coming computer/television singularity by keeping television away from clearly computer devices.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally speaking, if someone is rebroadcasting content, they have to pay a licensing fee. A Slingbox is okay because it's your own device rebroadcasting to you--fair use. The issue against Aero is that it's Aero's device rebroadcasting to you. However, since Aero has dedicated antennas for each user, it's essentially a remote Slingbox system for freely available broadcast. Hopefully the courts will see it as such and Aero doesn't go bankrupt from fighting this.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Cutting_Crew]

I believe it is a legitimate concern IF and ONLY IF people that stream from the iPads even watch commercials to begin with. What are the studios going to do next? Sue all the people that don't watch advertisements?

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

It is about distribution. The media companies want to be able to get consumers to pay time and again for the same content. In their view each outlet or distribution path of the same content represents a different product. So...watching at home and watching a digital download of the same content, to them, represents two separate, different products.

Or as they said 'lose control over the dissemination of their copyrighted programming, disrupts their relationships with licensed distributors and viewers and usurps their right to decide how and on what terms to make available and license content over new internet distribution media.' In other words, we can't sell you the same thing and get you to pay again and again. This is why the DVD/BD comes with a 'bonus' digital download, they see it as a SEPARATE product bundled with the disk, not as just another version of the SAME product.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[hodet]

Thanks, that clarifies things. I have a hard time believing this does not fall under Rebroadcasting rules. This company aims to profit from streaming content that they have no rights to redistribute. Free OTA content is not public domain. The content is still owned by somebody. I think its a really cool service but I don't see a snowballs chance in hell that Aereo does not get nailed for this in court.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[dmacleod808]

Obviously neither you or anyone else in this thread did a little research... From Aereo's webpage: "Aereo is available exclusively in New York City"

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[icebike]

They are on uncharted legal ground here, mostly because they employ new technology.

From TFA:

Instead, Aereo has deployed a small forest of baby antennas, which users rent from Aereo. Chet Kanojia, the company’s chief executive, said the business model of providing a remote antenna for a user is “consistent with over-the-air broadcasting.” He said “it doesn’t require licensing.”

The thing is, even a Cable Company needs permission to pick up a local station and rebroadcast it. There are fees involved, even for mandatory must-carry stations.
But Aereo is claiming they are exempt from these because they just capture over the air broadcasts that anyone could pick up. Presumably they transmit it, ads and all in real time.

Broadcasters claim they lose control of their content. After all, if this goes viral, time-zones and markets mean nothing any more. There is no technical reason you couldn't watch a NYC show/event in Tokyo, or London. The internet has a long reach. Local Licensing deals are now world wide in scope.

An Example: Major League Baseball may not broadcast that Yankee's home game on any given Saturday, but someone living in Tampa may want to watch it. Because of national contracts MLB has signed, only local broadcasts of local games are allowed on some Saturdays. Or maybe the Yankees suck so bad they can't fill their seats. (ok, it could happen I suppose), and because of this they locally black-out the game. In an Aereo world, NYC subscribers could just pick up the feed from visiting team's city.

Aereo could not get that programming from any other source. But they can pick it up over the air and transport it beyond licensed markets or into embargoed markets.

So that's the rational for the challenge. (not saying its right).

Never mind that a private slingbox that you set up in NYC market could already give you the same capabilities, the mere fact that someone is doing this as a business model (they eventually plan to charge for it) and doing it on a grand scale is just more than big media can swallow. You know damn well that if the big media companies had developed this technology it would be fine, but because someone else did it, they have to rush in and stomp it out.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Eponymous Hero]

another dying industry trying to sue its way out of extinction. the revolution will not be televised because it is television.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Savage-Rabbit]

Hopefully the courts will see it as such and Aero doesn't go bankrupt from fighting this.

I think Aero going bankrupt from this is the general idea behind the lawsuit.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[MightyMartian]

At some point it isn't going to matter. When you get a company like Apple with vast amounts of cash reserves and basically it's own distribution system, the lights will go on and the decision will be made to start creating more content. While the networks and the major studios try to control when you can watch something and where you can watch it, the new media will simply come in, start delivering people what they want, and it will be irrelevant.

These guys are literally fiddling while Rome burns. Each step along the way they make themselves more and more irrelevant. Hell, I haven't actually sat down and watched an actual TV show from our satellite in a couple of weeks, and the wife and I are seriously contemplating just ditching it entirely. We're paying like a $100 a month for bad TV, boring sports and the same movies shown again and again and again.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[icebike]

You have to ask if their transmission constitutes a broadcast.

After all, with AEREO you rent an antenna in NYC, and send it by TCP/IP over the internet. Its not that much different than sending it from the roof to your basement lair over a wire. You just have a really long antenna lead. Its exactly the same thins as a Slingbox hooked up to your roof antenna.

Big media doesn't care about this as long as Aereo stays in one market, but they know that the internet gives Aereo a long antenna lead to anyplace.

So yeah, its market control, but really its the fact that someone else found a way to make money off of the OTA feed. We can't have that now can we?

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought they tried that with TiVo.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[h4rr4r]

Netflix already has one series. It is good if you are not too stupid to read some subtitles and will be bringing back Arrested Development next year.

Hopefully apple does the same thing, as should amazon.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I've always found it ironic that cable TV got its start rebroadcasting OTA feeds to places with lousy reception(much against the preferences of the OTA broadcasters); but once it received government sanction and came into some money of its own, swiftly re-positioned itself as a crusading champion of the absolute dominion of broadcasters...

These Aereo chaps are virtually identical, in terms of business model, to the original cable guys(except that they are bending over backwards to accommodate the absurdities of the law by having an individual antenna in a huge array for each subscriber...

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[jank1887]

just remember, the first 'cable' systems were just that: some guy put a good antenna way up on a hill or mountain near town where it could get good reception of the nearest broadcasts, and it would 'redistribute' that signal down to the town. I.e., Community Antenna Television (CATV). It was only a bit later that they cabled content directly from the broadcast station. I'm not sure at what point they found a way of imposing a redistribution fee, but if they have grounds for it, and Aereo is claiming to be doing the same thing people did 60 years ago and paid fees for... methinks they'll have to pay fees too.

It ain't new just 'cause you're using the internet.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[dmomo]

I did read it. The "market area" case was just an example of the type of thing that would appear in a contract with advertisers. There are certainly many other terms and factors in the deals they make, and disruptive Technology like this affects those deals.

So, again. To the networks; this is a legitimate concern. I didn't pretend to defend or promote the reasons for this concern. My aim was to simply answer a question brought up with the parent post. No need to be righteous with your snitty comment. Noting that the service is available in New York only, sufficiently adds to the conversation.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I get the impression that Team Content wishes to operate under the legal theory that anything that happens to their precious content without their permission is illegal, period.

They'd probably still be upset if somebody were using a clever arrangement of metallized balloons to bounce the RF from the New York broadcast region to wherever they wanted it... The fact that the filthy, filthy, internet, with its pernicious pirates is involved just drives them into a blind rage.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[icebike]

A portion of this lawsuit is actually about how it is being streamed; specifically, there is a 1:1 ratio of antennas and users,

A legal lillypad at best.

You know that if this court challenge is shot down, that there will be one antenna per station, and one Singe-cast TCP/IP feed per end user (for a little while), and then there will be one Multicast TCP/IP feed per station. (Single-Cast does not scale).

This is market killing technology. The gene is out of the bottle (again). Big Media might as well try negotiations, or settle for the increased advertising reach.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[similar_name]

As far as I'm concerned if a network doesn't want me watching their ads then it's no skin off my back. Networks make money by providing content and selling ads. However, it seems they are more concerned with controlling how I watch their content and ads. I understand they charge different rates for different markets. I understand they have licensing agreement with their affiliates. But none of that matters to me. It's really their problem.

So if they don't want me as a customer I'm not going to put up a fight to be one. 90% of my TV watching is from the internet. I know not everyone has their TV hooked up to the internet nor does everyone watch their TV on tablets and other devices but things are moving that direction. The writing is on the wall. If I were a shareholder I would want the company to focus more on adapting their business model to these realities rather than wasting resources on litigation that does nothing to stop the inevitable.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

The media companies want to be able to get consumers to pay time and again for the same content.

This is content they're already sending to consumers free, over the air.
Consumers paying for it has nothing to do with it.
They're just bothered someone else is making money doing something they're unwilling to do.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[icebike]

From the article (heresy, I know, that's why I remain anonymous), the largest portion of the complaint seems to be that Aereo is bypassing the license fees that satellite and cable redistributors pay. There are a number of potential angles of attack that the broadcasters will attempt, but the motive appears to be that Aereo is avoiding the redistribution fees.

They could care less about the fees. (The increased reach of the advertising revenue offsets that by a lot).

If this goes viral, they lose all control of anything broadcast-ed OTA in every city, and every country.

This is about control.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

I can already stream my own local area OTA with a Slingbox, not sure if that is also a problem for the Networks.

It's actually called a Kaiserbox.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I believe it is a legitimate concern IF and ONLY IF people that stream from the iPads even watch commercials to begin with. What are the studios going to do next? Sue all the people that don't watch advertisements?

As saith Jamie Kellner, Chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting: "[Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming."

People who living outside of Jamie's delusional universe don't actually remember signing any contracts, much less any that meet the requirements of hundreds of years of contract law precedent, to watch OTA broadcasts; but it isn't a big secret that the broadcasters would love to...

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Any outcome is possible, it seems, in these cases; but if I were the broadcasters I'd be worried about my chances of winning this one by anything other than burying Aereo in paper until they run out of money and stop twitching...

The Cablevision case, a few years back, over their 'cloud DVR' system was decided in Cablevision's favor(despite the long-distance transmission) because of the argument that, since Cablevision physically stored an individual copy of the recorded show, per subscriber recording it, the service simply amounted to Cablevision running a 'DVR colo' service.(I don't think that the case decided exactly what a one needed to do to demonstrate a unique copy. Does it have to exist at the disk level? Is it OK if the filesystem sees two copies but the SAN is silently deduplicating blocks in the background? Does a 'single' copy at the FS level stored on a raid volume count as slightly more than one copy, depending on the level of redundancy?); but there would seem to be a clear analogy between the, now vindicated in court, DVR-across-the-network concept and the antenna-across-the-network one.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[markhb]

Or maybe the Yankees suck so bad they can't fill their seats. (ok, it could happen I suppose)

It was called "The Eighties" :)

(Hey, it's Opening day at Fenway, I couldn't resist!)

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[MightyYar]

A Slingbox is okay because it's your own device rebroadcasting to you--fair use.

Isn't this just a slingbox that I am renting?

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree.

If this is *actually* shot down, then why only do one station per antenna? Using software defined radio (like GNU Radio), you could just record everything simultaneously.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[MightyYar]

Sorry didn't mean to reply to you - you made the same point!

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[UnknowingFool]

The one detail you've missed is that Aereo does not have an agreement with the local stations but the cable companies do. They are essentially saying that they don't need permission as it falls under Fair Use. This is somewhat murky because courts have allowed for time shifting and format shifting but most of those uses assumed prior permission. Cablevision allowed cable companies to store/replay content which their subscriber paid for. Sling streams content from the subscriber's home. This is slightly different.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[LandDolphin]

Renting a physical device you hook up at home is similar, but slightly different then renting the use of someones box they set up at their place of business.

You can rent a VCR and record OTA broadcasts. You cannot pay a company to use their VCR to record a ORA broadcast for you.

similar but different.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[nine-times]

Yeah, I don't know about this case, since it does seem to be a case of rebroadcasting. However, I think you're right to draw a comparison between the music industry of 10 years ago and the TV industry today.

We all know the story: in the late 90s, once people had been exposed to Napster, most people knew where music distribution was going. People had been exposed to a system where they could search online for essentially any song ever, and then download it. Contrary to the way we sometimes talk about it, the revolutionary thing about Napster was not that it allowed piracy, but that it enabled people to easily fetch whatever song they wanted without leaving the house. It was perhaps the first exposure the masses had to the idea of a highly available massive online media library, and people loved the idea.

If the record companies had been smart, they would have taken one look at this setup and said, "We need to make this happen. This needs to happen, and it will happen whether we like it or not, so let's get ahead of this thing. Let's figure out how to make money off of this thing immediately so we can be the first business into this market."

Instead they stonewalled. They dragged their feet. The people running the record companies not only expressed that they weren't happy with online distribution, but they were even unhappy selling CDs and wanted to go back to vinyl. They tried to kill online services. When they made online services, they focused on preventing piracy, and they focused on creating synergistic marketing campaigns that would maximize shareholder value with a high ROI. What they didn't focus on, however, was making these services good.

And then Apple came along, leveraged some industry connections and a popular music player, and Apple drank their milkshake. Too bad, so sad.

Now the TV industry is doing the same thing. A growing number of people are asking, "Why can't I just have Netflix, but with all the TV shows and movies that I want to watch?" The people in the industry are dragging their feet, stonewalling, trying to prevent piracy, and engaging in bullshit marketing deals. They are not focused on making a good service that will make their customers happy. The only question is, will it be Apple drinking their milkshake again, or will it be someone else this time?

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Culture20]

What's the difference between me renting a TV from rentacenter (then place shifting) and renting an antenna from these guys? They're not broadcasting; they're unicasting content from my (rented) antenna directly to me at my request.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[icebike]

Because of quality.

A hardware tuner does way better than GNU Radio. The quality simply can't be compared when you have 20 or 30 HD broadcast stations. For the best reception of OTA broadcasts you still need to align your antennas to the tower.

But after reception, the feed has to be processed thru your tuners, and doing that with a single radio isn't worth the monkeying around when you realize that tuners can be had for $20. Then you have to encode to video packets, and put it on the network. That too can take a little computing power. (Or it might be built into the tuners these days, I haven't been paying attention for a few months).

The fiction that they are renting you an individual antenna basically doesn't sound believable to me. I think its all for show, and they actually use a single antenna per station, and a single tuner/encoder per station. Then they show you a picture of some hightech soldering job and say See, totally new technology!
Precisely who has ever inspected this equipment?

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Sarius64]

This remains the reason I see many people torrent TV from around the world. Getting access to TV from say three countries in Asia and two countries in Europe at the same time is impossible in my location, to the best of my knowledge. When I was in Australia last, getting TV from the states or the UK was months behind. If people were really interested in making money they'd sell a buffet from around the world, IMO. I would readily pay the same price for TV I want to watch where now I have hundreds of channels with utter shit for content.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[UnknowingFool]

I wouldn't say their stupidity was suing napster. Napster was infringing on their copyrights and it was within their rights to sue. Their stupidity was recognizing that customers wanted digital music and trying to foist their system upon customers that included unreasonable and impractical obstacles. Fortunately for consumers, this backfired. Ironically by requiring DRM, the RIAA gave Apple the upper hand as it locked customers to Apple's iTunes. May be the RIAA thought Apple would license FairPlay but they didn't. It wasn't until iTunes became the #1 seller that Apple forced them into accepting the inevitable. The only way to weaken iTunes was to accept DRM free music which unfortunately weakened their licensing schemes.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[danomac]

just remember, the first 'cable' systems were just that: some guy put a good antenna way up on a hill or mountain near town where it could get good reception of the nearest broadcasts, and it would 'redistribute' that signal down to the town. I.e., Community Antenna Television (CATV).

Some cities still do this. I know (as an example) our city still has this. There's an antenna farm (& satellite farm) with the cableco's logos around it in the southwest part of town. Back when I had cable I noticed one day I had 7 or 8 channels missing. Apparently something happened to the antenna farm that was pulling in the stations. This didn't happen all that long ago, perhaps 3 years ago now.

That antenna farm is still there, I would assume they're still using it. That may be a regional farm, as I know the city ~30 km away also lost the channels at the same time I did.

Amazing how not much changes. I guess that's the old adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Lumpy]

Cable companies also lobbied hard to get the rebroadcast fees into law. That way it made all community TV antenna systems that were their biggest competition illegal.

IT was common for a city block or subdivision to have one large tower and several antennas picking up the TV stations and then running coax to all the homes rolled int othe association fees. Apartment complexes also used to do this before it was railroaded into being illegal by the cable tv industry.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Lumpy]

They prefer that everyone wear the setup used on the protagonist in a clockwork orange.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[iamhassi]

I wouldn't say their stupidity was suing napster.

Yes, it was stupidity. They went to Napster and said "So... you have millions of our customers downloading copyright stuff for free?!? We're suing!"

They should have said: "So... you have millions of our customers downloading copyright stuff for free?!? Here's a million dollars, we're buying Napster from you, and we're going to start charging these people, $1 per song. We also have a mp3 player we're selling too. Either take the million and sell or we'll sue you."

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[kermidge]

Yes! The universal juke box.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[ZombieBraintrust]

Your saying this company should be able to legally create DVD's of programs broadcast for free on the airwaves and then be able to sell them? Because that is basically what they are doing. Just replace DVD with IPad Streaming with a rental fee. If a user was doing it in their home then it would be non comercial fair use.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Lumpy]

"Then you have to encode to video packets, and put it on the network. That too can take a little computing power."

You dont know how ATSC video is transmitted.

ATSC is a MPEG2 Transport stream. there is no "encode to video packets" as it's already video packets. there is ZERO computing power to take a OTA TV station and stream it onto the internet. IT's simply changing from wireless to wire the file stream stays the same.

It's why I can record 20 ATSC or QAM channels at the same time using a old Pentium III to a U SCSI hard drive. all I am doing is moving bits.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[MightyMartian]

I suppose the only thing holding companies like Apple back is the fact that entertainment is a risky business. Look at the $200 million hit Disney took on John Carter. Still, I think as the studios continue to play hardball, it is inevitable that eventually guys like Apple and Amazon will just give Hollywood a big "f you" and forge their own course. And it isn't a bad thing. The big studios haven't had meaningful competition other than their own incestuous cabal for decades. Might be just what they needed.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is content they're already sending to consumers free, over the air." You miss the point, we are receiving it for free, but it is not sent for 'free' - they recieve $$ from the adverts. And when you watch it on your mobile device, they want you to purchase that copy from iTunes or such. And pay again to watch it on Showtime/HBO, and again when you buy or rent a disk (DVD/BD), etc...

It is about distribution, and controlling it. Read this quote again, from their own mouths: '...lose control over the dissemination of their copyrighted programming, disrupts their relationships with licensed distributors and viewers and usurps their right to decide how and on what terms to make available and license content over new internet distribution media.'

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[UnknowingFool]

You really think that would have worked? I think that's naive and impractical. First of all, it would encourage others to follow Napster. "We can engage in copyright infringement now because the RIAA will just buy us out later.". Second, as copyright owners they were well within their rights to sue Napsters into oblivion just like IBM will decimate SCO. Third, Napster's entire architecture supported file sharing not file buying. No music store today uses this structure for a reason.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[sjames]

The detail YOU missed is that when the cable companies were at the same point in development that Aero is now, they had no agreement either AND didn't even try to accommodate the absurdities. Of course, the legal landscape was a little less absurd at that time.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[WRX SKy]

Is it really rebroadcasting though? Or is it "repeating". There are TV repeaters all over my area due to the hill/valley nature of the terrain.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[someSnarkyBastard]

Your milkshake brings all the boys to my yard,
and they're like - it's now better than yours,
damn right - it's better than yours,
I could license content from you,
but not if you want to charge (my customers for IP violations)

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that the reason is because Fox has exclusive broadcast rights to any games before 7:00 PM eastern.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but John Carter was a stupid risk that they deserved to lose money on.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[UnknowingFool]

The point YOU failed to understand is the difference between compulsory and selective licensing.

Copyright holders in the programs being re-broadcasted have no say in the matter, under what is known as compulsory licensing. Congress adopted the licensing structure following Supreme Court decisions in the ’60s and ’70s that allowed cable companies to hijack over-the-air broadcasts and include them in their primitive television packages.

Cable companies have always licensed OTA broadcasts; under compulsory license they were not required to individually license each station, copyright holder and copyright holders could not refuse to license.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[leonardluen]

the advertisers should be throwing a fit that the networks are trying to shut this service down. as presumably the advertisers are getting some new viewers from it that they normally wouldn't be able to reach.

why don't the advertisers ever band together and fight against the networks? they are the real ones being screwed here.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

so that would mean that going to use the bathroom or the kitchen to get a snack is implicity illegal.




---
(posting AC because of mod points)

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[LoverOfJoy]

I guess I'm stealing road access when I drive down the highway without looking at the billboards?

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[sjames]

It's a funny thing this 'control' they expect to have and THINK they have. They splatter their signal all over everything in a fairly large area but expect to somehow have control over it?

Fundamentally, they stream out a free feed of entertainment with advertisements interspersed. Advertisers pay them on the basis that statistically some of the viewers will actually see the commercials. Let's face it, since the inception of television commercials, most viewers have considered them bathroom break time.

Since Aero isn't removing the commercials, and it isn't repeating their signal outside their area (where local ads wouldn't make sense), it's not costing them anything at all.

They are simply deathly afraid that if they don't somehow squash it, the major networks might decide it's easier and cheaper to stream their content with national ads only and cut them out. Meanwhile, the only reasonm we have ever had the arrangement of a single affiliate in an area was the relative scarcity of spectrum and the cost of broadcasting. Progress marches on and that is much less of an issue now, but they'd like to continue seeking rent.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you missed this one

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[lordbah]

From the MLB.TV FAQ:

Regular Season Weekend U.S. National Live Blackout: Due to Major League Baseball exclusivities, live games occurring each Saturday with a scheduled start time after 1:10 PM ET or before 8:00 PM ET and each Sunday with a scheduled start time after 5:00 PM ET, will be blacked out in the United States (including the territories of Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands). ... and man is this stupid. I'm not going to watch two teams I don't care about simply because it's the only game on TV. I'm going to do something else instead. By denying me an opportunity to watch "my" team, you decrease my level of involvement with/commitment to the team and to MLB in general. So no one profits by this deal (well, maybe MLB, *if* they received enough money to cover the decrease in fan enthusiasm and thus attendance and purchase of apparel and so forth).

Exclusivity in video has to fail eventually too, but we'll probably have to go through a couple decades of pain first.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[AlienIntelligence]

You really think that would have worked? I think that's naive and impractical.

I think it would have worked... a million dollars back then?
It's worth at least $200,000 nowadays =) /s

-AI

Q. How do you make a small fortune?
A. Start with a large one.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[AlienIntelligence]

so that would mean that going to use the bathroom or the kitchen to get a snack is implicity illegal.
---
(posting AC because of mod points)

Don't lie, you're posting AC cause you don't want to go to jail for illegally taking a bathroom break.

YOU CRIMINAL!

-AI

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[AlienIntelligence]

ATSC is a MPEG2 Transport stream. there is no "encode to video packets" as it's already video packets. there is ZERO computing power to take a OTA TV station and stream it onto the internet. IT's simply changing from wireless to wire the file stream stays the same.

It's why I can record 20 ATSC or QAM channels at the same time using a old Pentium III to a U SCSI hard drive. all I am doing is moving bits.

Zero, really? Lil bit expansion of truth for purpose of demonstration?

-AI

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Kreigaffe]

The music industry at the time didn't like mp3s, at all. Digitized music? FUCKING HERESY! Format shifting? More like format PIRATING!

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[AlienIntelligence]

That is the key sentence, I believe. Back when TNN, I think it was them?, tried streaming their cable services to iPads there were comments from the industry that this was causing an up roar.

TNN ceased in 2003.

-AI

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[AlienIntelligence]

another dying industry trying to sue its way out of extinction. the revolution will not be televised because it is television.

Why only a score of 1?

He even had a witty saying at the end.

No caps, but still at least punctuation.

-AI

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

Your saying this company should be able to legally create DVD's of programs broadcast for free on the airwaves and then be able to sell them?
Because that is basically what they are doing. Just replace DVD with IPad Streaming with a rental fee. If a user was doing it in their home then it would be non comercial fair use.

It's YOU'RE muther fucker. YOU FUCKING ARE... a FUCKING CONTRACTION OF TWO WORDS!

As in YOU'RE AN IDIOT.

Your reading comprehension skills are pitiful.

Please tell me |you are| from a non-english speaking country.

-@|

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[interkin3tic]

So sue away... until another Apple ends up owning you because you flatly refused to give customers what we're begging for and willing to pay for, an easy way to watch every TV ever created on every media device we own.

But they'll profit in the short term, which is a win. By the time the industry collapses into ashes, the execs making these decisions will have still made obscene amounts of money, and probably will have new industries to move onto. They don't care that they're screwing over everyone now including hindering the transition and thereby the industry itself.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[mcgrew]

It seems especially retarded to me, considering that every single one of those networks stream their shows from their own websites! I rarely get a watchable signal for CBS, so I stream Big Bang Theory from CBS' site. It does annoy me that they don't put up the stream until the show is finished airing in California.

Sometimes I think that in order to get a job in the media biz you have to take an IQ test. If you score more than two digits you're disqualified from the job.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

They would get sued if the content was not free. This works because

Free OTA -> rentable antenna -> internet equals a slingbox
Cable -> rentable tuner -> internet equals a Terms of Service Violation

There are no Terms of Service on OTA.

I actually think this model could stand up for Aereo, but it will have a bad overall effect. TV network will stop broadcasting OTA and Aereo will go out of business and we all lose.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[DarwinSurvivor]

I'm not sure how relevant this is, but there is a slightly similar law regarding restricted radio (as in VHF/UHF communications in Canada). It is 100% legal to intercept and decrypt/unscramble and listen to ANY radio communication in Canada (including police/etc channels). It is however 100% ILLEGAL to then give that information to someone else if the original broadcast was restricted. Ex: If I have a super-duper scanner and hear about an alien spaceship landing on the parliament buildings, I am fully in the write to intercept it and go check out the landing (barring physical access restrictions to the landing site of course). If however I tell my buddy in the next room about it, then I'm violating the law.

This is how it was explained to my by a personal friend that is also RCMP (Police), I just adde the aliens.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Actually, I do RTFA]

So sue away... until another Apple ends up owning you because you flatly refused to give customers what we're begging for and willing to pay for, an easy way to watch every TV ever created on every media device we own.

One, that's a pretty tall demand.

Two, like half these companies are part owners of Hulu. The rest license content to Hulu. I'm sure this is more about protecting Hulu's profit margin, and standing to sue, than anything.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Eponymous Hero]

all me, brother. i default at 1, cuz i have Positive karma. i had Good karma, but then i crushed the velvet pimp hand on a bunch of lamer gamers whining about mass effect 3.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[BlueStrat]

The thing is, even a Cable Company needs permission to pick up a local station and rebroadcast it.

There's where the problem is.

There's that pesky first syllable in the word "broadcast" that defines it to mean "cast broadly", which is almost the exact opposite of what Aereo is doing.

The networks want to call this "rebroadcasting" when it's actually "singlecasting" from an antenna that is the recipients property (rented property is considered legally to be "owned" by the person renting it, in the sense that a TV from Rent-A-Center that's paid up sitting in your living room is "yours" if someone steals it, or the house you rent is "yours" for the purposes of trespass, burglary, etc). It would be much like them claiming that it's illegal to watch their OTA broadcasts if you receive them through an antenna on your roof that you rented and did not buy outright.

Strat

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[iamhassi]

You really think that would have worked? I think that's naive and impractical. First of all, it would encourage others to follow Napster. "We can engage in copyright infringement now because the RIAA will just buy us out later.". Second, as copyright owners they were well within their rights to sue Napsters into oblivion just like IBM will decimate SCO. Third, Napster's entire architecture supported file sharing not file buying. No music store today uses this structure for a reason.

First, no it wouldn't. Napster was highly successful, yet how many others were doing what Napster was doing? Almost no one at that time, and the lawsuit didn't stop anyone because Limewire came out in May 2000, Only a few months after Napster's Dec 1999 lawsuit. Napster had a captive audience, if millions of people logged in one day and it asked for $1 for a song they would have paid. One could argue that Limewire existed only because Napster no longer existed, leaving millions of customers searching for another source of digital music.

Second, just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Third, there was no option to buy. Everything was free on Napster. But clearly from iTunes's success customers do want to pay for media, they just don't want to pay very much.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[modmans2ndcoming]

yes, that is a possibility, however, the company region locks you so if you live in NYC, you only get the OTA signals from NYC based antenna, and it is a 1 to 1 ratio of subscriber to antenna... They even go so far as to assign a specific antenna to a specific user.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[icebike]

Well, I wonder if Aereo is really Singlecasting. Knowing how poorly singlecasting scales, they would go bankrupt paying bandwidth.
MultiCast is designed for this, and unless you do some packet inspection you wouldn't know the difference.

One multicast stream for each channel vs one unique TCPIP stream for each receiver. Which way would you do it?

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[modmans2ndcoming]

They raised 20 million dollars expecting the lawsuit the day they went live with the service.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[ceswiedler]

I actually support a lot of copyright restrictions and enforcement. But I have to laugh whenever a company gets its panties in a wad about what people do with the unencrypted signals that are deliberately broadcast at very high power from extremely large antennas in the middle of large cities.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[BlueStrat]

Well, I wonder if Aereo is really Singlecasting.

Well, that would be up to the networks to prove in a court of law, and then make a link to the rebroadcasting rules/laws that will stand up in court.

If the court determines Aereo is in violation of rebroadcasting rules/regulations/laws despite "singlecasting", that could spell trouble for SlingBox and it's users. Which, of course, the networks and content providers would love. That's quite a legal hurdle to overcome, however, IMHO. Of course, IANAL and all that other disclaimer junk.

Strat

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

www.google.com

search for "how do computers work"

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't recall signing anything with any network that requires me to watch commercials. Are they going to come after me for leaving the room when a commercial comes on?

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[sixsixtysix]

You can rent a VCR and record OTA broadcasts. You cannot pay a company to use their VCR to record a OTA broadcast for you.

i'll never understand this. if person A can do X and person B can do X, person A should almost always be allowed to do X for person B, for free, fee or whatever. anything else seems highly illogical. that's why i use torrents as my dvr, sure it is not legal, but i don't care. i have a cable subscription, but neither the time nor resources to capture all the shows i watch. i can see how they don't want non-subscribers to get free stuff, but if they would just offer me the download instead, it'd work out just the same. of course, since discovering yet another revenue stream of tv on dvd, they got the greedlust, and we all lost. precedent was set by allowing home recording, and no argument of quality, lack of generational degradation, etc. should have any bearing on this. they should get what they can from the initial broadcast and be happy at that. anything else is bonus at best and scumbaggery at worst.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[LandDolphin]

I'm not sure where I fall on the issue personally. I do recognize that all of the media industries are holding onto dieing business models. But at the same time, I do respect that content producers do/should have rights to their content and be able to control who sees it and how.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[sjames]

In your own quote, you note that the compulsory licensing scheme came AFTER cable was already up and running. So no, they have not ALWAYS licensed the OTA broadcasts.

Then the Supremes ruled that they weren't breaking the law, so Congress tossed some absurdity into the legal landscape. If not for that, we might not have so much trouble with monopolies and kooky turf wars today.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[UnknowingFool]

First what does this all have to do with Aereo who has no agreement whatsoever with the local stations. And second, please research more about this subject and come back with actual factual information.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[sjames]

Read again if you have lost the thread.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[rtb61]

Yeah but so what, they a no stealing from the original broadcaster they are simply scamming the end user into paying for something that is already free, they just can't access it because the overpriced iPad lacks a TV-tuner.

At the end of the day rather than wasting money suing the TV channels just need to extend their broadcast to frequencies the iPad is capable of picking up.

All that is happening is Aereo is sucking people into paying for free to air commercials, the existing channels just need the numbers to ensure they can charge advertisers for the extra audience.

Of course if they are editing out the commercials that's a whole other story.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to see your new invention "Multicast TCP/IP"... :)

I think you are referring to plain Multicast... That is done over UDP since you don't want to send ACK's from the client to the server.. There is also another big problem with multicast and that is that basically each ISP out there have their own multicast network and they dont have a common one... You are probably not even allowed to send traffic to the multicast backbone without specific contracts with each ISP you want to use...

Here in Sweden there are more and more ISP's that have started with distributing IPTV using their existing networks and this is creating some competition for the cable-companies. But you are still limited to what that specific ISP is offering..

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Anonymous Coward]

Computer power is a requirement. The end-user most probably does not want to stream the OTA broadcast in its original quality. The bandwidth of an OTA transmission can be as high as 18Mbps depending on the number of channels being broadcasted on a single frequency.

The end-user is expecting a stream bandwidth ranging from 256kbps (low quality, Standard Definition resolution) up to 5Mbps (high quality, High Definition resolution). To accommodate the different bandwidth capacity of your end-users, you want to stream the same content at different bitrates. This is called Adaptive Bitrate Streaming [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming]. Instead of streaming the original MPEG2-TS format, you also may prefer to use the H.264 format over the Adobe HTTP Live Streaming or the Apple HTTP Dynamic Streaming protocol. The H.264 codec offers a better compression ratio than the original MPEG2-TS one.

Moreover, the multiplication of streaming platforms (standard web browser, iDevices, Android, BlackBerry, etc) requires the use of specific bitrate/codec/wrapper settings to support each of them.

Streaming OTA signal toward the Internet in a elegant fashion does requires serious computing power. I work for a broadcaster and this is one of the project I am currently working on.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[Solandri]

Big media doesn't care about this as long as Aereo stays in one market, but they know that the internet gives Aereo a long antenna lead to anyplace.

This is really the bigger issue here. The Internet has pretty much made the concept of geographical markets for media content obsolete. Big media refuses to accept this new reality, and is suing anyone trying to do business in accordance with reality. [Insert buggywhip analogy]

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[lonecrow]

I can't believe that there is anything available on OTA TV worth watching. I think they are fighting of dead terrain already

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[HArchH]

Aereo receives broadcast signals in a market off the air; off the public airwaves to be more politically correct. Aereo then re-encodes (in some fashion) those signals and puts them out over the internet. At your home you subscribe to Aereo and play the re-broadcast signals on the video player device of your choice. (See https://aereo.com/how-it-works)

Aereo seems to claim that their service provides a "virtual antenna" to consumers who could otherwise both receive for free and "DVR" (as verb) those signals to reply them at the time of the consumer's choosing. (Regarding the service provider's DVR feature see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_DVR. It appears to have been determined in court to be a legal business model.)

A similar service called Skitter (see http://www.rapidtvnews.com/index.php/business/media-investment/skitter-aereo-once-again-test-the-virtual-cableco-waters.html, http://www.skitter.tv/html/index.html, or http://www.mediabiz.com/news/morningbridge/?publication_id=17&release_id=1416).

Skitter is attempting to reach agreements with broadcasters, and I presume, paying them a fee. Aereo, it seems, is not, based on their "virtual antenna" claim.

Skitter is carrying some stations without an agreement in its markets under the FCC"s "must carry" provisions (ref http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Must-carry). This is likely (IMHO) a losing legal argument.

Both Skitter and Aereo are charging, or are about to start charging, $12 per month to subscribers. While I can see that they have costs, what I can't see is how they can hope to sell someone else's broadcast and reap payments for it without fair compensation to the broadcaster. Apparently Skitter has seen this logic, and Aereo sees it differently today.

Question: Assuming Aereo and Skitter leave the broadcaster's advertising in place, why does this hurt the broadcaster?

Answer: First, the broadcaster will get no "Neilsen Rating" (ref http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_rating) credit for those viewers. Viewers that stop watching on cable and start watching OTT won't be counted by Neilsen and so the station will get lower ratings. Lower ratings in a market means lower commercial charge rates and revenue. I can't judge the impact of this in ratings or in dollars at this time. It's clear to me that if it became a real financial issue, Neilsen could find a way to survey these numbers at the ISP rather easily (as could any of Neilsen's competitors) or at the consumers just as they do today with cable consumers.

Answer: Broadcasters make money off of the carriage by and commercial insert slots bought by the local cable company. While the relationship between these two parties in any market is not often cooperative, it's generally cordial except when the contact carriage rate is up for negotiations. (Again see the Must Carry reference, and the links in it for some examples of carriage disputes such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Warner_Cable#Carriage_controversies.) If Aereo and Skitter are allowed to carry channels at rates below what the broadcasters get from the cable companies, especially on a per-subscriber basis, what position will the broadcasters be in the next time their carriage rate is negotiated with the cable company? The broadcasters simply MUST ACT to protect their primary revenue sources (cable carriage fees and advertising rates).

Answer: Any sports franchise that is carried over local (or remote)

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[HArchH]

Does anyone really believe that Aereo's antenna array and tuners, "under the control of the end user", is really capable of receiving a useful signal? Even if it was sitting in the clear, it's much smaller than any antenna sold commercially. And the thing is attached to a circuit board, inside some kind of chassis, inside some kind of rack, and inside some kind of building.

Then, even if it did work, what kind of scale-able model do they have? Do they have to add another PCB for every 200 subscribers? How many PCBs fill up a rack, and what power do they consume? Heat? Do they really generate a dedicated stream for each connected subscriber? What about all that DVR storage space?

I don't have the numbers in front of me. I'm sure I could understand them if I did. On the back of the napkin here, I don't see an effective business model either financially or regarding antenna performance.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[sjames]

Let's see:

Answer: First, the broadcaster will get no "Neilsen Rating"

Nonsense. The Neilsen rating is based on a miniscule sampling of the population in a broadcast area. The figures don't change if you go to cable, OTA, or watch your neighbor's tv through binoculars. Even if you are one of the Neilson families, it won't affect the figures sinmce you'll still record what you are watching, no matter how you watch it.

Broadcasters make money off of the carriage by and commercial insert slots bought by the local cable company.

I have no doubt the broadcasters enjoy the free money, but they do also send it out for free (at considerable expense no less to run the transmitter and maintain the license). Meanwhile, they don't have to colo any equipment for Aereo or Skitter. In truth, Aereo and the cable companies are doing the broadcasters a favor. If the Nielsens accurately dinged broadcasters where a significant portion of the population in the broadcast area couldn't actually receive them, the broadcasters would be begging them to carry their channel.

Answer: Any sports franchise that is carried over local (or remote) broadcast channels is going to have to worry about the affect of television blackout rules on Aereo and Skitter.

Aereo only offers in-market services. As long as they continue to do so, this is a non-issue. In any event, it would be the sports franchise that would have cause to complain, not the broadcaster.

As long as the cord cutters continue watching OTA programming from their broadcast region, they continue to support the broadcaster's businss model of selling eyeballs to advertisers. They just stop supporting the cable company's business model. The mandated switch to ATSC probably undermined the cable companies as well since it not only provided the perfect picture over the air to a significant portion of the broadcast area, but it also provided the broadcasters with extra channel space they can (and do) resell to syndicated networks.

Pretty much all of this reminds me of a toddler that shows no interest in a toy until another child starts playing with it. Then suddenly it's "MINE!!!!!".

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[HArchH]

The words in your reply are insulting. Is that intentional?

Regarding Neilsen: You are simply incorrect. Nielsen doesn't collect most of its information through the booklets any longer, but through electronic reporting systems (people meters). If you don't watch a channel connected to the device, it doesn't count as being watched. The sample size isn't relevant. It is what it is. The fact that you consider it minuscule isn't important.

Regarding commercial inserts: They money they get from cable companies isn't free. It's part of the Must Carry rules and a negotiated "fair value" and it will reflect the channels' value as a broadcast as reported in the ratings. It is unimportant that Aereo doesn't require an co-located equipment at the studio or in the tower. It is untrue that the cable companies or Aereo are doing the broadcaster a favor. Dictionary.com defines "favor" as "something done or granted out of goodwill, rather than from justice or for remuneration". Neither of those cases is true. It's a strict business relationship. The channel produces and delivers content, cable pays to deliver it and makes money doing it, and Aereo attempts to deliver it for free.

Regarding blackouts, you state that Aereo only delivers in-market broadcasts. There are numerous ways to appear to be in market via the Internet. The broadcasters will complain because they will feel the revenue impact and because they need to support their business relationship with the sports franchises (which is big money for all concerned).

Finally your conclusion is wrong in stating that "...they continue to support the broadcaster's businss model of selling eyeballs to advertisers". Watching via OTT services do not provide for counted eyeballs. Only counted eyeballs support that broadcaster's business model.

Are you shilling for Aereo? And you simile about childish behavior is, as you say, "nonsense".

If Aereo positioned the antenna at your home, and converted it to an internet signal for you on a device they buy or rent from you, they might have a business. In their present model, with their perhaps "pretend" antenna array at an ISP which ships someone else's broadcast content, for a fee, to someone else's home, I can't see that they have a chance in court.

I support free to air broadcasting. I'm not in love with any cable provider. I don't own stock in any broadcaster. I applaud the conversion from NTSC to ATSC and the subchannel opportunities it provides to licensed broadcasters and the interesting innovation being made with it. I don't support overt re-purposing of copyrighted content by someone like Aereo without a license from the content owner. A photo displayed in public doesn't make the photo public property. A TV signal transmitted OTA doesn't make that content public domain. "Must Carry" exists for the benefit of the broadcaster and its be litigated extensively already. IMHO, Aereo appears to have a business plan based on IP theft.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[sjames]

It doesn't matter if the Neilsen data is gathered by diary, electronic box, or trained chimp, if the Aereo viewer isn't one of the Neilsen families, it doesn't matter. They will be assumed to follow the same pattern as the very few families measured did.

Your primary argument was based on the false premise that the Aereo user would somehow influence a statistical sampling even without being measured. How? I'm sorry if you found the word nonsense insulting, but how else am I to characterize that premise?

As for blackout restrictions, unless you have some actual evidence that Aereo is lying about restricting the service to in-area, it's not an issue.

I'll say it again, the Neilsens are based on a miniscule sampling of people watching TV (historically that sample size has been much too small for any sort of accuracy). The Aereo customers will be 'measured' to the same degree the vast majority of people w/ a conventional antenna are.

Regarding commercial inserts

Aereo doesn't do any commercial inserts that I know of. They carry the signal exactly as received. That is, the broadcaster spends a great deal of money to reach everyone in the broadcast area. Aereo helps them reach more people in the area who were missed due to signal propagation problems and doesn't ask the broadcaster for any compensation. That's quite favor like.Cable does the same. In a sane world, the broadcasters would have no complaint about that. In the real world, they yelled "MINE!!!!!" like a 2 year old.

Note, if Aereo replaced the broadcaster's commercials with their own or even just blacked them out, THEN the broadcaster would have cause for complaint. But that's not happening.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[HArchH]

In answer to your question, you could simply state that you disagree without resorting to the use of insulting words.

Now, regarding the sample size, what if one Neilsen user starts using Aereo? If the sample size is one, the impact will be 100%. If the sole size is 100 there will be a 1% impact on the ratings across the board. Isn't this how statistical sampling works? You might be one of many arguing about the validity of the Neilsen sampling and ratings, but they are the defacto method used today.

I never suggested Aereo was inserting or replacing ads.

You never replied what is your relationship to Aereo?

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[sjames]

I doubt a Neilsen user will continue using a useless box if he switches to Aereo, it would be either back to the diary or cease being a Neilsen family. What if the new Neilsen family feels 'the eyes watching" and starts watching prime time PBS so they seem more intellectual? There's no great mystery to how to collect viewership data. You have to make a LOT of presuppositions to turn that into an actual problem.

I realize the Neilsens are the standard today, however unreliable. I haven't yet seen a reason they would be any more or less accurate (or altered in any way) because of Aereo.

I never suggested Aereo was inserting or replacing ads.

Then why did you say "Regarding commercial inserts:"? In broadcasting, that's when you replace an ad from your upstream with a local ad.

You never replied what is your relationship to Aereo?

That sounded more like a snark than a sincere question, but the answer is: None at all. I first heard of them because of TFA. As far as I know, their service is unavailable in my area. My OTA reception is fairly good and I get the locals over satellite anyway, so I wouldn't likely be a customer even if they were here due to lack of need.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[HArchH]

I haven't yet seen a reason they would be any more or less accurate (or altered in any way) because of Aereo.

Statistically, Aereo is going to have an affect on the ratings. If a serious number of people cut the cord and switch to Aereo the counts will drop unless Neilsen starts counting them at the ISP.

Then why did you say "Regarding commercial inserts:"? In broadcasting, that's when you replace an ad from your upstream with a local ad.

Rather than "quote the parent" I was attempting to reference the paragraph in your reply, the topic of which was the cable company doing ad inserts into the broadcast stream and which I attempted to reference with my 3 word heading.

Re:First? If the public airwaves are free already

[sjames]

Statistically, Aereo is going to have an affect on the ratings.

HOW???!!!

Do you figure Neilsen will just fling the box through the window and assume that family doesn't watch TV when it records nothing? Or do you think that just maybe they might use some other method to collect info from that family, perhaps a diary or just skip them and find someone else whose TV setup is more compatible with their hardware?

So, please, tell me how the method of receiving the very same video stream will matter one little bit to the ratings.

They need a lobbyist

[binkless]

I hear Hilary Rosen is available

Re:They need a lobbyist

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't she be at home raising her children?

Re:They need a lobbyist

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Reptiles require little, if any, nurturing.

Re:They need a lobbyist

[brendank310]

Meh I heard she's never worked a day in her life either

Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[NeutronCowboy]

I thought this battle had been fought and won in the VCR times.

You know what - I'm trying really hard to be a law-abiding copyright user. But I'm getting to the point where I really don't care anymore. Fuck the content providers. I can always send artists a check, support companies via kickstarter, or directly contribute in other ways. But I know how to rip, I know how to store, and I can create a darknet for friends and family. I have most of the hardware and software in place, and I expect that over the next few years, I'll actually have a nice library of movies (thank you, library), music (thank you, friends) and books that is sitting on my personal storage server, and freely available to anyone I give access to. The server is sitting behind a firewall, and nobody knows about it unless I tell them the secret knock.

Have fun, MPAA/RIAA. Welcome to your worst nightmare.

Re:Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[Myopic]

I can just hear the bobblyhead executives screaming "HOW DARE they help people watch our TV shows and COMMERCIALS? WE DON'T WANT more people to watch what we BROADCAST! If we wanted people to watch, WE WOULD MAKE IT EASY AND CONVENIENT! WE MAKE IT ANNOYING AND DIFFICULT FOR A REASON!"

#headasplode

Re:Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[hawguy]

I thought this battle had been fought and won in the VCR times.

Since they are rebroadcasting from a central location, this isn't quite the same as the VCR case (as much as Aereo tries to make it so). This would be more like if a company was recording shows off the air onto VCR tapes and mailing them to subscribers. Which is quite a bit different than a user recording shows at home for later viewing.

Re:Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[loftwyr]

The sell commercials to based on certain people in certain places watching at certain times. This breaks that model completely and makes prime time (the most expensive) available to people who don't fit who the ads were targeted to. That "Wastes" the ad buyers money.

Re:Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[betterunixthanunix]

How is allowing one person to see the received signal from an antenna in any way "rebroadcasting?" Perhaps you should look up the definition of the word "broadcasting."

Re:Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[DogDude]

As somebody who might have the same attitude and might be doing the same thing, I'm curious: how do you store DVD movies? If I were to do such a thing, I'd rip them, and store them as the standard VIDEO_TS files so that one could re-burn a physical DVD at any time, but each movie would get broken into 3-4 files which makes streaming viewing a bit annoying because you'd have to "play" each file individually.

Re:Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[Anonymous Coward]

haha exactly this. I love your comment. They literally are getting to broadcast to more viewers for free and complaining about it. They are skipping the middle man, the cable company and reaching more viewers for their advertisers. Their real problem is they are used an aging rating system to count their viewers. They need to find a way to account for all of the online viewers, and then they can charge still charge more for shows taht are popular online. This doesn't apply to say PPVs or HBO, any show that is paid for to not have commercials. Maybe that is their real problem, just that the commercials are edited out.. But they can't stop the same thing from happening on TV with TIVO's and DVRs, etc.

Re:Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[compro01]

This would be more like if a company was recording shows off the air onto VCR tapes and mailing them to subscribers.

No, it would be more like Community Access TV, i.e. the original form of cable TV. You set up an antenna tower somewhere with good reception and run cable to the houses with lousy reception (e.g. in a valley).

This is no different, except that the cables are way longer.

Re:Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[Lumpy]

I completely agree with you. I refuse to abide by any copyright law anymore. IF they will not play honest, no reason for me to.

Re:Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[guises]

I don't see how this is quite a bit different. If it's legal for me to record something on my VCR, and it's legal for my butler to press the button for me, and it's legal for my butler to press the button and mail it to me when I'm off doing super important business stuff, then how is hiring a butler company which specializes in VCRs any different?

Re:Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[Em Adespoton]

Right... because "extra" viewing isn't wanted if it's not monitored and paid for appropriately by the advertisers....

Re:Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[colinnwn]

No, Aereo's product only place shifts, it does not time shift or offer multiple viewings. Mailing VCR tapes does all 3. In their business model, a user is renting an antenna on Aereo's plant to transfer the signal to their TV in as close as real time as possible and without the ability to time shift, review, or view multiply.

If this is decided to be a form of rebroadcasting, it would invalidate the prescident set in the Cablevision network DVR case. If Aereo loses, I think it won't be for that, but on the basis of potentially transferring geographically restricted content out of the region and that the customer renting the equipment from Aereo's plant does not constitute fair use on private equipment.

Re:Wait - isn't this time/place shifting?

[fikx]

difference is that this is not re-distributing like the cable company did. They took one source and then broadcast it out to many. this takes a single source and sends to a single person.

Derp, Meet Herp

[girlintraining]

The networks, however, say Aereo will cause irreparable harm to their business. Aereo's conduct apparently causes them to 'lose control over the dissemination of their copyrighted programming, disrupts their relationships with licensed distributors and viewers and usurps their right to decide how and on what terms to make available and license content over new internet distribution media.'

That's the exact same argument they used against VCRs. "They'll be able to bypass the advertisement! Share with their friends! Our business model will be in jeopardy." The only thing that's changed between then and now is that back then, the justices didn't support state-sponsored capitalism; That is, the privatization of profits and the socialization of costs.

Which, actually, probably means even more citizens now will be taking the approach of "If a law is stupid, ignore it." -- Which is not healthy for a society, but unavoidable when the justice system has departed so far from the actual values and morals of the general population so as to have lost relevance.

Re:Derp, Meet Herp

[betterunixthanunix]

more citizens now will be taking the approach of "If a law is stupid, ignore it." -- Which is not healthy for a society

Sometimes it is absolutely necessary for the health of society. Remember Rosa Parks? Fugitive slave laws? Laws that made the teaching of the theory of evolution illegal? Sometimes bad laws need to be ignored before they can be struck down by courts; sometimes governments need to be reminded that their power is not handed down by God.

There is nothing holy about the law. If a law is so far out of touch with the realities that face the people it is supposed to govern, then it needs to be repealed and it will be ignored. The right wing of Ameircan politics (which is basically all of American politics at this point) has managed to convince people that the power of the government is absolute, and that the letter of the law is the only thing that matters. You need not look any further than this to see how wrong these fascists are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

Re:Derp, Meet Herp

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny that I'd pay more for TV and certain channels, if they DIDN'T have advertising on it. You know, like premium online streaming services do.

The minute a streaming service I pay for throws ads into their content, I'm dropping them. I pay for content, NOT ads. If I wanted ads, I'd watch regular TV.

And queue the DVR/MythTV argument. Still requires $15 to schedules direct for accurate data. This should be free dammit. I shouldn't have to pay for scheduling data twice, or three times!

Re:Derp, Meet Herp

[CroDragn]

Anytime the laws are not reflecting the moral values of the society they're serving, it isn't healthy; it breeds a contempt for the law, the courts, and the government as a whole. Stupid laws need to be ignored, protested, and fought until they are brought back in line with social values as a whole, since after all it's society as a whole that laws are supposed to serve. The cases you pointed out serve to point this out actually; blacks were not being treated fairly with by the laws, and as a result still to this day don't particularly trust the legal system. The point is that when ever laws and society clash, the laws are usually the ones that need changing, the quicker the better.

Re:Derp, Meet Herp

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you isolate your comment to "the right wing" of American politics? The left wing is every bit as bad of a totalitarian mindset. For example... the health care reform attempts to force you buy health insurance, possibly against your own will, or suffer a penalty. Or how about the card check law (allowing unions to force open voting to unionize a company removing anonymity of votes). Or perhaps the numerous current attempts to further restrict gun rights. Maybe the hundreds of compulsory "zero tolerance" laws/policies that get kids kicked out of school for plastic knives...

You seem to be a person who is likely against polarization of our political system... however you're contributing to it yourself.

Re:Derp, Meet Herp

[dkleinsc]

I'm very surprised you haven't made mention of the guy who best articulated the importance of breaking unjust laws:
Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience

To give you an idea as to how important that essay was, it was specifically cited by Mohandes Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela. And of course the title has lent its name to most non-violent resistance movements.

Re:Derp, Meet Herp

[markhb]

Sometimes it is absolutely necessary for the health of society. Remember Rosa Parks? Fugitive slave laws? Laws that made the teaching of the theory of evolution illegal?

"Because I love you, I can say this: no rich young white guy has ever gotten anywhere with me comparing himself to Rosa Parks." - Isaac Jaffe, Sports Night

Re:Derp, Meet Herp

[girlintraining]

Sometimes it is absolutely necessary for the health of society.

You are misinterpreting; The justice system's laws and procedures should be consistent with the greatest public good. When it isn't, society should resist it. That resistance is unhealthy -- it is effort wasted to correct a corrupted element of the system. That shouldn't happen very often, but these days it is a common occurrance, suggesting that the justice system has become too corrupt to be responsive to civil methods of recourse. That is why the United States sports the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world.

Re:Derp, Meet Herp

[Anonymous Coward]

Jury nullification is a sign that the system is collapsing.

It is not part of a healthy society.

Re:Derp, Meet Herp

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you not fucking read? The immediate follow up to "not healthy for a society" was about how unavoidable it is when the law and the public are so badly out of sync. So good job agreeing with the post you're trying to disagree with.

A fever is not healthy. Chemotherapy isn't healthy. It is literal cell-killing treatment. The former a natural treatment, the latter a manufactured one. In the case of the former, we treat the fever as part of the illness, not part of the cure because it is not healthy. In the case of the latter, we give it because the alternative is so goddamn unhealthy, the treatment is still less damaging.

A populace that disregards the law by rote is not healthy. It may be necessary, but it will never be healthy.

Re:Derp, Meet Herp

[sjames]

Perhaps it's better to say it is not the most healthy for society. That is, in order of health, Sensible laws that the people obey is healthiest. Next is silly laws that the people ignore (the case you cite), but worst of all is silly laws that the people obey anyway.

Re:Derp, Meet Herp

[shutdown -p now]

Civil disobedience is not merely breaking unjust laws; it's doing so in a prominent, in-your-face way, so that when you're prosecuted for it, people around see the absurdity of the law, and so that, once you're in the spotlight of public attention, you can argue your case before it.

You already distribute it

[Galestar]

Over the airwaves. The device I use to receive it is my business.

Let's not jump the gun.

[TheSpoom]

To understand the latest legal jockeying, substitute the term VCR with Aereo. The upstart, Aereo, opened for business last month and supplies internet streams and a DVR service for over-the-air broadcasts to its New York customers. In other words, Aereo lets those in New York who want to watch on their iPad what they can pull down for free from the public airwaves to their TV with an antenna. For the moment, the service is free, but will soon charge $12 monthly.

This suggests to me the following:

1. Aereo receives television signals over the public airwaves.
2. Aereo rebroadcasts the signals through their internet distribution network.
3. Aereo soon plans to charge for this service.

If I was a TV station, I would have serious problems with steps 2 and 3, and I believe copyright law would agree (with the usual disclaimer that I am not a lawyer and you should not take legal advice from me).

Just because it's broadcast over the public airwaves does not make the broadcast public domain. It's still copyrighted, and by redistributing the signal, it seems to be clear copyright infringement to me. If they want this to be legal, they appear to need new laws.

This is not like a VCR because with a VCR, the distribution of video still happens directly from the copyright owner or their agent. This would be like a company renting a single movie, making copies, then charging for access to the copies, without compensating the original distributor.

By the way, if this practice were legal, what's to prevent Aereo from charging even more to remove the commercials from their rebroadcasts entirely?

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[NixieBunny]

Finally, someone who understands what this is actually about. As you say, "free" broadcast signals aren't really free, they're encumbered by all sorts of restrictions such as private viewing only.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[fishicist]

I can currently do everything you describe using MythTV, including stripping the commercials (albeit not in realtime).

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[Anonymous Coward]

can't I legally do this myself? what difference does it make if I pay someone else to be my RF and TV tech and maintain my equipment?

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[gl4ss]

but why wouldn't it be legal for me to rent a flat in nyc and place a dvr in there and stream the end results for my viewing whereever? that's what they do essentially.

the legal points why they think this should be illegal don't seem to exist - the point is just that it fucks up their public broadcasting price discrimination based on locale policy.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[TheSpoom]

You're not redistributing the video. You're essentially timeshifting, which is legal. Redistribution is not.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[cpu6502]

If your read the end of the article, what Aereo is doing may be legal.

QUOTE: "The idea is to rely, in part, on a 2008 federal appeals court ruling known as Cablevision. That ruling, which the Supreme Court declined to review, said Cablevision Systemsâ(TM) cloud-based DVR service was legal only because each user who ordered Cablevision to make a copy of last Thursdayâ(TM)s Seinfeld got their own individual copy in their own folder in the companyâ(TM)s data center.

"Hollywood claimed Cablevisionâ(TM)s service directly infringed its exclusive rights to both reproduce and to publicly perform their copyrighted works. In a highly complex and nuanced ruling, the court said individual consumers, not Cablevision, were copying and acquiring the material at their own discretion, which amounted to fair use.

"That leaves some hope for Aereo. And the companyâ(TM)s got another thing going for it â" a deep-pocketed investor who appears willing to fund an expensive and lengthy court fight. Barry Diller, the chairman of internet company IAC/InterActiveCorp, has invested $20.5 million of the companyâ(TM)s money in Aereo. Ironically, Diller founded Fox Broadcasting in 1986, which is one of the plaintiffâ(TM)s suing Aereo."

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[Skapare]

Cable companies already do this. And they have been doing this since at least 1953. My grandfather built a cable TV system (with 2 channels) back then and charged $100/month (yes, in 1953) until he realized he was not going to have more than 6 customers at that rate.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[CanHasDIY]

From TFA:

Aereo has deployed a small forest of baby antennas, which users rent from Aereo. Chet Kanojia, the company’s chief executive, said the business model of providing a remote antenna for a user is “consistent with over-the-air broadcasting.” He said “it doesn’t require licensing.”

I think Aereo's defense is that they're only providing the antenna, one-per-user, and therefore are not technically streaming anything. Technically, the signal is still originating from the station's transmitter, Aereo is just providing receivers to people who may not necessarily reside in the transmitter's broadcast range.

In layman's terms, it's akin to having a mast antenna on your house, except the antenna is on your neighbor's house 2000 miles away, and you have a really, really long cable.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[Anonymous Coward]

That analogy would only hold up if there was a place to pick up the movies for free. One doesn't have to pay to way over-the-air broadcasting. So if there was a place where I could just swing by and pick up movies for free, would it be so bad if there was a service that picked up a movie for me and streamed it to my house (analogous to them having an antenna per customer)?

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[Kjella]

but why wouldn't it be legal for me to rent a flat in nyc and place a dvr in there and stream the end results for my viewing whereever? that's what they do essentially.

If you record an OTA broadcast to a DVD-R and they record an OTA broadcast to a DVD-R it's essentially the same thing, but the broadcaster will have a problem with a company doing that for profit and selling the DVD. It's not the only factors but what you do for private non-commercial use is treated quite different than a public commercial service. Honestly I find it more likely that your private right to fair use would be taken away than their commercial control would be, so I wouldn't be so quick to tie this to the mast of fair use. The whole ship might go down (though of course there's always pirate ships...)

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[Anonymous Coward]

With MythTV are you rebroadcasting to multiple users? If not, then it's not the same. If you're just watching a stream on your own personal device, that's not the same. If you can rebroadcast, then I'd think they'd have a case against that, too, if the description above is correct.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[jedidiah]

They shouldn't be.

They are being given away to everyone. Much like a web page, there should be no artificial limitations imposed upon whom can view the content or with what.

As long as the signal is not altered, it should be retransmittable by anyone. The fact that this is currently not the case is a gross error in the current law.

It's the current law that is bogus, not this company.

Any "community antenna" service should be allowed.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[Just Some Guy]

Just because it's broadcast over the public airwaves does not make the broadcast public domain.

It doesn't make the contents public domain, but why isn't the broadcasted signal itself? For a thought experiment, suppose Aereo was able to limit its transmissions to customers who would be able to receive the broadcast OTA for free. Further suppose that Internet access was perfectly ubiquitous among those viewers, and Aereo provided such incredible service that they achieved 100% market share such that not a single viewer consumed the OTA signal anymore. The broadcasters realize that maintaining an antenna is incredibly expensive and utterly redundant, so they shut down their transmitters.

In this scenario, the content generators have exactly the same viewership as before, but minus the costs of maintaining expensive broadcast equipment. Aereo is making lots of money from subscriptions. Viewers have the benefit of receiving the content in a form most convenient to them. Who loses here? What harm has Aereo done to the content producers? If we can mostly agree on "none", then where is the line between that hypothetical scenario and what Aereo's doing now where harm starts to be done?

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[fincher69]

Oops, accidentally posted that before I realized I wasn't logged in.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[jakegmerek]

This suggests to me the following:

1. Aereo receives television signals over the public airwaves.
2. Aereo rebroadcasts the signals through their internet distribution network.
3. Aereo soon plans to charge for this service.

That is not quite right though, they are just renting the antennas that receive the signal to the consumer. The Networks effectively want to limit the length of the cord that the consumer uses to connect to the antenna. It is just semantics, if I ran a cable from my house to Aereo's offices and hooked up the antenna that way they could not say much, but since I want to use the internet as an extension cord, the want to call it rebroadcasting.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[nine-times]

This would be like a company renting a single movie, making copies, then charging for access to the copies, without compensating the original distributor.

Or perhaps a better comparison would be cable networks carrying broadcast network channels without permission from the broadcast networks.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[fermion]

It is interesting to note that cable companies pay to rebroadcast the broadcast TV signals. If it is legal to broadcast the signal without license over the internet for compensation, then it will theoretical be legal to rebroadcast those signals over cable as well. Which would irreparable the TV networks.

This technology is not the VCR. This is more like someone setting up a business which will record desired show on tape, and the sell you the tape. That would not be a bad model. Set up hundreds of machines, record a customized set of show for a given night for a given customer, sell the tape for $10. I don't think this, however, would be legal.

OTOH, the problem is caused by random network licensing issues. How much sense does it make to be able to watch Hulu on a laptop, but not a tablet or phone. Most people don't have the data plans to stream Hulu over the cell network, so they are likely going to watch as on a laptop. That someone takes advantage of this arbitrage and tries to monazite it is no surprise.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[KingMotley]

I suppose that depends on what definition of broadcast you are using. Of course, you must pick one that would make Aereo liable for broadcasting, but one that doesn't also include how a TV antenna works, or how your TV retransmits the signal using light rays. I find that hard to do.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[fishicist]

I suppose I mean that, from my perspective, I have all the functions that Aero would provide. If I so chose, this could include streaming to multiple users since several mythfrontend instances can talk simultaneously to the backend over a network. I do note the difference, however, in Aero being run by a company, not by the user.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hasn't this all already been resolved? I thought the cable companies already charged this hill and won regarding their their similar services provided to customers now able to watch content on their tablets through their internet connection to the cable company? Or did the network broadcast content get nixed from those packages?

At anyrate I posit this. If 'wireless rabbit ears' are (or would be) considered allowable as fair use then it doesn't matter if the rabbit ears reside at a remote location or how convaluted the connection twixt antennea and device. So long as they maintain a one to one ratio it should be completely kosher, including the fee for accessing the antennea in this manner etc... At that poiint if they are doing anything it is re-transmission as opposed to re-broadcast. And that is a much sticker, greyer area. Hence my stating you have to solve the basic issue of a wireless rabbit ear technology where the signal is converted and transmitted wirelessly to the end display unit. Messy discussion as technically even in wired form rabbit ears are receiving and re-transmitting the airwave signal to the TV. Those standard broadcast disclaimers have always bugged me for that reason.

Of less clarity to me would be the issue of regional use. It is possible though difficult to enforce that this is only possible to use inside the geographic region targeted by the broadcast signal. For those inside this region this should be all above board. The second you access this service outside of that geographical region it becomes a problem.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[msauve]

"Aereo rebroadcasts the signals through their internet distribution network."

No, the receive, one antenna per user. Then then unicast the stream to that user's device. "Broadcast" would imply they send that stream to all takers - they don't.

How is what they offer different than renting someone a TV to IP converter? The only difference is where the equipment physically resides. Is it legal to own a Slingbox, but not to rent one? How about all the government subsidized DTV boxes, which receive a DTV signal, and remodulate it as NTSC? Legal to own, but not to rent?

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[Col. Klink (retired)]

• VCRs receive signals broadcast over the public airwaves.
• VCRs replay (i.e. rebroadcast) the signal to your television through a wire.
• VCRs cost money.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[mini me]

The article says that the business model is in renting the individual antennas to the customer. So, for a more apt analogy, this would be like putting an antenna up on my neighbours home because he has a better sight of the sky, with a montly fee to cover the rental of his property, and then running the coax into my home.

In this case, the wire just happens to be the internet.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[sjames]

That model is the one the broadcasters want you to see. However, since there is a 1to1 relationship between antenna, video stream, and viewer, it's not reBROADcasting. That suggests that Aereo rents you an antenna in a place that gets decent reception and utilizes advanced technology to transport that signal to you.

If I live in the shadow of a hill and I mount an antenna on my neighbor's house (on top of the hill) and run the cable to my TV in the living room, is that OK? How about if I give my neighbor a few bucks rent for his roof space? What if I use an amplifier on the antenna cable to get a better signal?

Repeat same questions for the case where I live on the 1st floor of an apartment and want to put my antenna on the roof with the landlord's blessing, possibly for an extra few bucks a month. Repeat agan for Aereo.

How about if I put a receiver on my neighbor's roof with the antenna and run an HDMI cable to my monitor in the living room?

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[sjames]

Neither is Aereo. They're renting an antenna to me and coloing it.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[AlienIntelligence]

Just because it's broadcast over the public airwaves does not make the broadcast public domain. It's still copyrighted, and by redistributing the signal, it seems to be clear copyright infringement to me.

You walk along and dump dollars on the ground.

The dollars have advertising on them.

You sue the people that pick up the dollars and
don't spend them on the people advertising on them.

I think this summarizes the OTA TV industry.

-AI

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[AlienIntelligence]

As long as the signal is not altered, it should be retransmittable by anyone. The fact that this is currently not the case is a gross error in the current law.

That's a very sage statement...

"as long as the signal is not altered."

-AI

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[shutdown -p now]

Forget about Aereo for a moment. Suppose that I, myself, go to NYC and install a remotely controlled TV antenna hooked up to a box connected to the Internet and configured to stream the signal. And then I go back home, and stream said signal for myself.

If the above is breaking a law, then you know what? Fuck that law.

And if it's not, then why is it suddenly any different when I pay some guy to set up and maintain an antenna for me?

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[shutdown -p now]

Aereo claims that they are not rebroadcasting to multiple users - every user has his own physical antenna dedicated entirely to himself, and it only sends the stream to that particular user.

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[Bondolon]

The issue with this argument is that they aren't rebroadcasting, they're just directing the signal as a slingbox would. There is exactly one end user unit (could be a person or a household) of the information, and it is not being made publicly available. If I set up a slingbox in my livingroom, it is legal to use that slingbox to consume the signal on another of my devices. What if I set up a slingbox on a roof in Brooklyn and streamed the content to my house in Texas? The only difference between these scenarios is geography. What I see here is the case of a company saying, "Instead of having you own the antenna in Brooklyn, we'll set up the antenna and the tunnel for you, and you can consume it how you wish."

Re:Let's not jump the gun.

[fishicist]

Own individual copy? What if they use ZFS with dedup=on? :)

Aereo should sue the broadcaster

[cbass377]

Aereo should sue the broadcaster for spraying their antenna with copyrighted media.

Not a personal service

[hawguy]

When I read the summary, I assumed that the customer installed an Aereo box at home and used their own internet connection to stream the content to their iPad. This seems like a clear case of fair use - I should be able to watch my home TV service (even over the air TV) on any device I want. However, what the Aereo service does is host thousands of tiny antennas in a datacenter, and rents an individual antenna to each user, no box at home needed.

Sounds like an interesting attempt to allow rebroadcasting, but I can see why the networks have a problem with it. They don't want someone in San Francisco watching TV (and ads) from New York - it dilutes their ability to sell targeted ads and reduces the value of network affiliates. Ever if Aereo claims to do address verification, there are many ways to get a mailing address in New York, but it would be harder to do that if they required a physical box to be the receiver.

Re:Not a personal service

[Trepidity]

Yeah, this seems much closer to rebroadcasting, which you can't do unless the original broadcaster allows you to. Consider even the case where you're not changing mediums. I set up a free streaming radio station at mysite.com. You can receive this, and route it within your house or devices however you want. But what you can't do is rebroadcast my radio stream from yoursite.com, and certainly not rebroadcast it and then sell subscriptions to yoursite.com's rebroadcast of my radio station!

Re:Not a personal service

[w_dragon]

Consider even the case where you're not changing mediums. I set up a free streaming radio station at mysite.com. You can receive this, and route it within your house or devices however you want. But what you can't do is rebroadcast my radio stream from yoursite.com, and certainly not rebroadcast it and then sell subscriptions to yoursite.com's rebroadcast of my radio station!

But I probably can set up a proxy server so that my friend can get to your content through my connection. This is no different from me running a coax wire from my antenna to my neighbor so that only one of us has to have a butt-ugly mast antenna outside to get the signal. I can probably charge them for the connection as well, since it's charging for a wire, not the data on the wire.

Re:Not a personal service

[betterunixthanunix]

So if I have an antenna at my house, that's fine, but if it is at your house then there is a problem? What?

This is a clear-cut case of one business trying to destroy the competition through frivolous lawsuits and abuses of the court system. The broadcasters are just angry that they were not innovative enough to develop such a system on their own. When Aereo is sued into bankruptcy, the broadcasters will buy up all the patents and trade secrets and try to deploy their own version of this system.

Re:Not a personal service

[hawguy]

But I probably can set up a proxy server so that my friend can get to your content through my connection. This is no different from me running a coax wire from my antenna to my neighbor so that only one of us has to have a butt-ugly mast antenna outside to get the signal. I can probably charge them for the connection as well, since it's charging for a wire, not the data on the wire.

Perhaps in theory it's no different than sharing a physical cable, but in practice it is much different -- unless your neighbor literally lives next door, you can't run a cable to him without negotiating a right-of-way through other neighbor's yards or public easements. So anything requiring physical wiring is self-limiting, it won't be done on a large scale. Which is not the case when you're dealing with a virtual service.

Re:Not a personal service

[hawguy]

So if I have an antenna at my house, that's fine, but if it is at your house then there is a problem? What?

This is a clear-cut case of one business trying to destroy the competition through frivolous lawsuits and abuses of the court system. The broadcasters are just angry that they were not innovative enough to develop such a system on their own. When Aereo is sued into bankruptcy, the broadcasters will buy up all the patents and trade secrets and try to deploy their own version of this system.

Since the Slingbox is still sold, apparently the networks and cable companies do make a distinction between you hosting a box at home (or even a friend's house), and having a commercial company host thousands of them and then charging a fee for access to the content. Do you really see no difference between the two?

Re:Not a personal service

[betterunixthanunix]

Since the Slingbox is still sold, apparently the networks and cable companies do make a distinction between you hosting a box at home (or even a friend's house), and having a commercial company host thousands of them and then charging a fee for access to the content. Do you really see no difference between the two?

Sure I do: it is the difference between a talented baker making a couple dozen cookies in their home, and a talented baker running their own bakery. What the broadcasters want to do is stifle the growth of an innovative business, because they lack the creativity and talent needed to deploy innovative technologies on their own. Do you really think that killing an innovative business is a good thing?

Re:Not a personal service

[betterunixthanunix]

unless your neighbor literally lives next door, you can't run a cable to him without negotiating a right-of-way through other neighbor's yards or public easements

Good thing we already put in all that effort when broadband Internet access was being deployed.

Re:Not a personal service

[dgatwood]

Ah, but what if your neighbor lives within range of the tower, but merely does not own a radio?

That is what this company is doing. They are providing streams of content that those people are already at least ostensibly within the range of (assuming they aren't in some interior apartment where they can't receive anything). They are merely providing the same service that a tuner and slingbox would provide, just without having to have that extra equipment on your premises and a wire out to the roof.

This company provides content only to people who live within a single city, and provides content that is freely broadcast within that city. Therefore, that person has a fundamental legal right to receive those channels in whatever way he or she sees fit, whether it is through a tuner that he or she owns or through a tuner that someone else rents out.

In short, if this is ruled illegal, then so is Slingbox, so is recording something with MythTV and carrying it with you on an iPad so that you can watch it while on vacation in another city, and so on. In effect, this lawsuit is complete and utter bulls**t and needs to be slapped down as quickly and as hard as possible, preferably replete with fines for frivolous litigation.

Re:Not a personal service

[hawguy]

Since the Slingbox is still sold, apparently the networks and cable companies do make a distinction between you hosting a box at home (or even a friend's house), and having a commercial company host thousands of them and then charging a fee for access to the content. Do you really see no difference between the two?

Sure I do: it is the difference between a talented baker making a couple dozen cookies in their home, and a talented baker running their own bakery. What the broadcasters want to do is stifle the growth of an innovative business, because they lack the creativity and talent needed to deploy innovative technologies on their own. Do you really think that killing an innovative business is a good thing?

Streaming content to end-users is neither innovative nor creative - Netflix and others have been doing it for years.

The creative thing that they did is finding a way to do an end-run around the need to license the content for redistribution. And the networks are trying to close this loophole. This service sounds a lot like the defunct iCraveTV that tried to stream over the air broadcasts from Canada.

Is the content distribution model broken? Yes. I don't want to pay a cable company $100/month (or more) to get 200 channels of mostly crap just to watch the few shows I care about. Is Aereo going to change it? No. Netflix has much deeper pockets and a lot more clout in this area and they still have a very limited streaming catalog.

Re:Not a personal service

[sjames]

A box IS required at home. That box is implemented in software and lives in your computer..

Would it make the broadcasters happy if Aereo throws in a Raspberry PI that auto-connects to the unicast stream from the user's rented antenna?

Re:Not a personal service

[shutdown -p now]

It's not rebroadcasting if one antenna only streams to one user. It's just a very long antenna cable.

Re:Not a personal service

[Trepidity]

So could I take your internet radio stream and set up one proxy per user, and then resell it?

Could I sell rebranded Slashdot or CNN subscriptions using that method, too?

Re:Not a personal service

[shutdown -p now]

So could I take your internet radio stream and set up one proxy per user, and then resell it?

Yes, sure. If you pay me whatever they would have otherwise paid for the stream, per every user, why would it be illegal, and why would I care?

Could I sell rebranded Slashdot or CNN subscriptions using that method, too?

Again, if you pay per user, and don't rebrand in a way that infringes on anyone's trademarks or makes it unclear who owns the content, why not?

Re:Not a personal service

[Anonymous Coward]

In Sweden, last time i read the laws anyway, it's allowed to rebroadcast any stream you can find. But it's only allowed it no modifications are done to the stream and that it's realtime. ie no buffering etc.

You can't rebroadcast Public airwaves

[cpu6502]

Over the years the FCC has granted to local stations the right to charge for their product. Cable companies pay about 1 cent per station (per household)* for the rights to rebroadcast local stations over their wires. This "Aereo" service may have to abide by the same rules.

*
*Yet another reason I use a CM4228 antenna; I get the locals free without charge.

Re:You can't rebroadcast Public airwaves

[mprindle]

Over the years the FCC has granted to local stations the right to charge for their product. Cable companies pay about 1 cent per station (per household)* for the rights to rebroadcast local stations over their wires. This "Aereo" service may have to abide by the same rules.

*

Sounds fair to me, if they are sending 10 stations then they pay .10 cents per user to the content provider.

Re:You can't rebroadcast Public airwaves

[sdnoob]

maybe in some markets its only a penny per subscriber to each station, but around here it's a lot higher than that (and this is not a top 10 market.. not even top 100 or 200)... and getting worse as each station holds their programming hostage to extort more money out of the cable and satellite companies.

Re:You can't rebroadcast Public airwaves

[cpu6502]

So how much is it?

I know the cable channels charge ~75 cents each (more for Disney/ESPN; less for news channels like CNN) but the local stations have always been just 1-2 pennies each.

Re:You can't rebroadcast Public airwaves

[shutdown -p now]

They are not rebroadcasting it, because they don't have a single antenna from which they take the video feed and send it over to all subscribers. They have one antenna per subscriber, that is exclusively controlled by him and streaming video to him and no-one else. I don't see how it can meaningfully be considered "broadcasting" - if it is, then so is the signal that goes from your antenna to your TV in your own house.

Re:You can't rebroadcast Public airwaves

[Anonymous Coward]

Over the years the FCC has granted to local stations the right to charge for their product. Cable companies pay about 1 cent per station (per household)* for the rights to rebroadcast local stations over their wires. This "Aereo" service may have to abide by the same rules.

*

Sounds fair to me, if they are sending 10 stations then they pay .10 cents per user to the content provider.

Do you work for Verizon by any chance? 1 cent per station * 10 stations = 10 cents, not 0.10 cents.

Dear Government, competition and new services.....

[Tyr07]

Please make them all illegal. New competition is causing harm to our business. Customers have other choices are harming our business.
New technology is harming our buisness. Our business model that's outdated is no longer valid, please make everything that prevents it from still working illegal.

----
Dear Companies,

Some companies close down, it happens, it's called failing to keep up with the time, failing to adjust your business model to adapt to todays market, a company who may no longer be needed.

We don't hear about blacksmiths filing suits against all forms of machinery which takes work away from them and hurts their business.
Fletchers aren't complaining.
The list goes on.

Its time for you to move on.

Wait.. WHAT?!

[Anonymous Coward]

The networks, however, say Aereo will cause irreparable harm to their business.The networks, however, say Aereo will cause irreparable harm to their business. Aereo's conduct apparently causes them to 'lose control over the dissemination of their copyrighted programming, disrupts their relationships with licensed distributors and viewers and usurps their right to decide how and on what terms to make available and license content over new internet distribution media

Don't they, technically-speaking, give up the right to decide the terms of the distribution of their content when they broadcast it over public airwave? I mean, sure, legally-speaking, it's their content, but society is really getting stuffed with all these double standards - "Do what you want as long as it falls in the realm of what we want."

Change is not required of the entertainment biz

[Anonymous Coward]

And neither is survival. Good luck with the courts and all but the long term solution is to adapt. If you don't, I'm sure plenty of consulting lawyers will be very happy to invoice you until you are broke as you attempt to hold back time and tides.

what they're really saying

[slashmydots]

What they're really saying is if you want to broadcast Fox in your town form your tower, you pay them a whole bunch of money to license the content. So yeah, it pretty much is illegal what they're doing. But, if they were smart, they'd invent a compact digital TV antenna and attach it to a digitizer like those cheap composite to USB converters from Kworld and Hauppauge and as long as you're in range of a broadcast, you can get it on your tablet, netbook, or laptop. Then you don't kill your data plan limit either.

Re:what they're really saying

[betterunixthanunix]

No, what they are saying is that if I have a good location for receiving a Fox broadcast, and I allow you to place an antenna on my property and run a cable to your house, I have to pay a licensing fee. Since you got to watch something that you would have had to go through more trouble to watch otherwise.

The broadcasters have no case here, they are wasting court time and trying to destroy innovation through frivolous lawsuits.

Inane psychosis

[Anonymous Coward]

So... a (logically equivalent) signal booster is also illegal because it prevents their control of their copyrighted media?
Seriously, if you want "control" over your copyrighted material, DON'T DISTRIBUTE IT IN FREELY AVAILABLE PUBLIC BROADCASTING.

One day, reality is gonna hit these media companies with the harsh-reality-hammer, and one of two things is gonna happen:
1) The companies will go squish
2) They will reconnect with reality

For the sake of our entertainment economy, broken as it is, I'm hoping for #2, but I highly doubt that will be the outcome.

what did I just hear?

[v1]

"Waaaaaah!"

oh, that. yes, that was it. I'm so tired of people trying to sell me products or services, and then claim a right to tell me how I will be using said products or services.

What this almost always boils down to is that the consumer has found a way to get better value out of the service/product than either party originally expected, and the provider/seller feels that this magically entitles them to an additional cut now that the product/service has become more valuable to the consumer. And unlike say, tethering, in this case the consumer's new use doesn't even create any additional expenses for the provider. They have no ground to stand on here besides perhaps a stray outdated law or two that weren't intended to be applied to this sort of situation.

Why not just stream right from the network's site?

[mark-t]

All of the TV shows that I or my family regularly watch are readily available online at the network's website within about 24 hours of airing.

keep it local

[sdnoob]

as long as the "rented" antenna is in the same local tv market as the aereo subscriber's address, i don't see the problem... not any different than slingbox place-shifting (also orb, vlc, etc) then...

but if they start (presently they do not allow this) letting people "rent" out-of-market antennas (e.g. someone in florida "renting" a new york-based antenna.. then i can see where the networks would have a problem with the service (should have to follow similar rules as satellite companies offering local channels)

__

as far as the dvr functionality.. customer subscribes (leases) dvr functionality from them. who gives a shit where their dvr is (home vs data center).. as long as only programs requested to be recorded by the user are available to that user, shouldn't be a problem there either.

Re:keep it local

[Anonymous Coward]

But the satellite companies are re-broadcasting. They use one 'antenna' to send the content to multiple people. This company appears to be using a 1-antenna to 1 customer relationship.

Pretend for a moment that I own a house in Ohio, and a summer home in Arizona. If I were to hook up a Slingbox to one of my antennas and use it to stream the signal to myself (and only myself) at the other location, would you claim that I'm 'broadcasting'? (If so, you'd at least be guilty of using misleading terminology.)

Money

[DaMattster]

Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't Hollywood end up making quite a bit of money as a result of home theatre systems? You'd think they would've learned by now that technology can generate profits. Aereo is actually assisting in broadcasting the major networks content to a larger audience. In theory, this could be good for advertising revenue.

Abolish govt established broadcasting monopolies

[Anonymous Coward]

Unidirectional government established broadcasting monopolies should never be permitted to be used for commercial purposes.

Preserving some signals for things like GPS and emergency broadcasting are OK, things like cell phone use (some of which is unlicensed) and emergency calling is OK, but any commercial communication should be done over spectra that everyone has an equal opportunity to transmit information over following equal rules.

Live stream = More Customers = More Ad views

[mprindle]

So what's the issue here? It's not like they are removing/skipping the TV ads, they are just converting the broadcast to play on a persons digital device. They even have a dedicated antenna for each user. So, that means more people are now seeing the same commercials equaling more ad impressions which means the TV execs can charge more for the ads.

As others have said why not working the company to work out a fee instead of trying to sue them into the ground.

Re:Live stream = More Customers = More Ad views

[betterunixthanunix]

So what's the issue here?

The fact that the broadcasters did not come up with this system on their own, and therefore cannot make money from it. This is also known as "a greedy abuse of the court system, for which the plaintiffs should be penalized."

Re:Live stream = More Customers = More Ad views

[sjames]

It's worse. The local stations could STILL set up a competing system and undersell Aereo to death, they're just not smart enough to pull it off.

Why give every customer its own antenna?

[billcarson]

Why not use one antenna per channel, and stream it to multiple customers?

Re:Why give every customer its own antenna?

[CanHasDIY]

Why not use one antenna per channel, and stream it to multiple customers?

Legal wrangling, I assume - if you're pickup up broadcasts with one antenna, then sending it to multiple users, you are redistribution content, and thus subject to applicable laws.

Aereo is claiming that they're merely "renting" users the hardware to receive the signals, probably to skirt copyright law.

Re:Why give every customer its own antenna?

[betterunixthanunix]

Why not use one antenna per channel, and stream it to multiple customers?

That would be rebroadcasting, effectively making them a cable TV service that has to pay licensing fees. Since only one person has access to a given antenna at any given time, the service is not rebroadcasting, it is location shifting.

Re:Why not just stream right from the network's si

[cpu6502]

Not always. Some networks hold their shows for 8 days (FOX) or even as long as a month (NBC's Syfy). It's pretty annoying for those of us who use Hulu like a VCR to see shows we missed.

Which is doublespeak for....

[tompaulco]

Aereo's conduct apparently causes them to 'lose control over the dissemination of their copyrighted programming, disrupts their relationships with licensed distributors and viewers and usurps their right to decide how and on what terms to make available and license content over new internet distribution media.'"
I think they could have just been more concise and said that it negatively affects their advertising pricing model.
Remember folks, no matter what they're talking about, they're talking about money.

Re:Which is doublespeak for....

[ratboy666]

"lose control over the dissemination of their copyrighted programming,"

That's the funny bit. Remember the original signal is being broadcast. How much control was there anyway?

And, what is with this --no renting of antenna and decoder-- idea. Is the --with the internet-- meme going completely insane?

Re:Why not just stream right from the network's si

[Anonymous Coward]

They are also available online without the adds in formats that are more or less platform agnostic and sans commercials within 1-4 hours of airing.

Dinosaurs

[owlnation]

Another, predictable, imbecilic move from the Nets. Especially since all of them have seen ratings drop across the board -- NBC dramatically so.

The only sensible future of TV is using an MLB.TV model. For those of you not baseball fans, MLB broadcasts all games live, all season in HD -- for a set fee. They do this for subscribers all over the world. Sometimes there's ads too -- but they are really not yet utilizing the ad model much. It's available for iPad and phones too.

With more advertising, the stream could be free, or at least cheaper. This way, instead of getting a 1.0A18-49 rating for a show like "Fringe", they could broadcast it to every English-speaking fan in the World who wants to subscribe. Plus you have live monitoring of ratings, without having to pay Neilsen.

In that case WB still gets licenses for foreign domestic sales, and iTunes sales, DVDs, whatever too.

There's no technical reason this cannot happen. The only barriers are Ludditism, stupidity, and, of course, fucking lawyers.

Re:Dinosaurs

[tkdc926]

MLB.TV is also screwed up. You cannot view the games of teams in your "market". I live in St. Louis and can view the games of every team EXCEPT the team I want to watch, the St. Louis Cardinals!

Big media's war on viewers

[mspohr]

It's just amazing for me to watch this battle. What other industry goes to this length to keep people from consuming their product? They are truly clueless.
Here you have people going to great lengths and expense to watch a TV show (with original commercials) and we have the creators and distributors of the show actively trying to prevent them. These people are dinosaurs and deserve to die out.

Re:Big media's war on viewers

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The gaming industry
2. music was taken off the radio
3. anything by Sony?

Re:Big media's war on viewers

[PPH]

I'm guessing that it has to do with tracking viewers. The broadcasters can charge advertisers and the studios pricing models depend on the number of viewers each program has. And from what I've seen, all of the parties involved have a major hissy-fit every time Nielsen proposes a more advanced and accurate method of counting them. Because this might end up costing someone some money.

So, in comes a new distribution channel (Aereo) who may or may not be counting heads*. But either way, someone is getting something for free that they were not before. Either advertisers were getting more uncounted eyeballs, which they don't want to start paying for. Or Aereo is counting and the studios don't like the new* statistics which could make their product look like the crap it is.

*Theoretically, with the greater capabilities of Internet-based technology, counting viewers should be easier with Aereo than the sampling that Nielsen does. We know who you are, where you are and exactly what you are watching (just like Facebook, Google and others). But everyone has built their business models (and probably even engineered TV content) to work with the biases built into the existing system. So they don't want anything to change.

Who cares about copyright?

[CanHasDIY]

What I want to know is, where do I get one of those tiny antenna arrays?

Looks neat.

Re:Why not just stream right from the network's si

[mark-t]

Well yes... YMMV, of course. I can only speak from personal experience.

I don't watch anything on FOX.... and as for the stuff on Syfy that I might want to watch, I'd rather wait until the entire current season comes out on DVD, and I can watch it all at my own pace anyways.

Re:Why not just stream right from the network's si

[mark-t]

Of course.... but I was talking about a solution that the networks would approve of.

"Rebroadcasts"

[betterunixthanunix]

It is not really a "broadcast" if only one person is receiving it. What Aereo is doing is assigning each customer their own antenna, and sending them the received signal over the Internet. That is not "rebroadcasting."

What the plaintiffs are getting their panties in a twist over is the fact that they did not realize that they could have done this sort of thing, and now someone else might be able to monetize it. I have no sympathy for them, they should lose and be forced to pay Aereo's legal fees plus punitive damages.

Re:Why not just stream right from the network's si

[metrometro]

Live sports.

Re:Why not just stream right from the network's si

[hendridm]

I don't understand why they have the delay in releasing them to Hulu. If they were on Hulu right away, I would watch with commercials. Since they like to be dicks about it, I just download from TPB and watch without commercials. Who is winning there?

Ether Bunny

[Anonymous Coward]

I control the ether! You all must grovel with your puny license agreements before my supreme radio waves!

iCraveTV - 1999 All Over Again

[Vic Metcalfe]

Sounds a lot like iCraveTV: http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=icravetv

This captured signals in Canada and provided them for live streaming. It was eventually shut down by the broadcasters because it was illegal in the US, even though it was legal in Canada. The owners of the business wanted to be able to travel to the US without being arrested if I recall it correctly. I worked on the project at the time. It was loads of fun! I'd like to see this kind of thing thrive one day.

This has little to do with Sony v Universal.

[John Hasler]

Different issues entirely.

Re:This has little to do with Sony v Universal.

[betterunixthanunix]

How is it a different issue? We are seeing the same argument, by the same group of people who are once again not creative enough to innovate and who are once against trying to squash competition through abuses of the court system. Aereo provides a location shifting service, nothing more, and they are not rebroadcasting anything, just renting antennas to people.

Over the Air?

[Githaron]

I didn't even realize over-the-air public broadcasting still existed.

Re:Why not just stream right from the network's si

[antdude]

Two from my head:
1) Region blocking to outside of countries.
2) Some have to wait eight days later unless you are a subscriber like on Hulu+

I am sure there are more. ;)

There's an Opportunity Here

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be cool if these same studios came to the realization that there was an opportunity here? People would like a service like this and are willing to pay for it. What if ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and Univision got together and said "We're going to offer the same service...?" Not only could they ensure that the ads remained a part of the programming, but they would also have a new revenue stream from the subscriptions. PLUS they would have some very valuable data on exactly who was watching exactly what shows so they could better market to advertisers.

Redirection versus rebroadcast

[The_Dude]

The point of one antenna per customer is to avoid the rebroadcast and carriage fee issue. They aren't rebroadcasting into the air, or even into a shared CATV (community access television) cable. They are "retransmitting" portions of the freely received signal privately over the internet. It seems logical that this should be legal, but logic left the intersection of copyright and technology long ago.

Re:Why not just stream right from the network's si

[mark-t]

This would necessitate having enough interest in sports to watch the live coverage.

I'd dare say you aren't going to get live sports coverage on something like Hulu either.

Re:Why not just stream right from the network's si

[cpu6502]

To the person below: FOX, NBC, etc are trying to protect the local stations and cable channels by discouraging Hulu-watching. They want you to watch the show live and thereby support the traditional TV channel.

To the person above: I don't watch FOX anymore but I used to watch Fringe, House, Dollhouse, and Terminator on FOX. The 8 day delay to release these shows to Hulu was an annoyance.

And the ~30 day delay for Syfy is an annoyance too,
but at least it's free. I don't have to pay for cable.

Um, what?

[DarthVain]

I am pretty sure anyone can do this legally if they have the know how. Are they going to sue everyone? Why is it illegal, because a company is offering a service?

I mean PC TV tuners have been around for ages, heck digital PC tuners have been around for years. Set one up, set up your own stream on your own network, and access it with your iPad... Might be some fiddly bits around getting past Apple's walled garden, but I am sure they much have some retail software out there that can be cobbled together to do the trick...

Umm, Right....

[Casca1]

Oh, So, Umm... Your way or the Hi-Way? Hmm, my iPAD shows me where the nearest on-ramp is.
See Ya!

Demanding you allow THEM to dictate when YOU will watch the program? Same argument, different generation.

That's not content producer's business

[mar.kolya]

I can install antenna on my roof and receive a signal. I can hire someone to install antenna on my roof. My neighbour can offer me to install my antenna on his roof (for money!) and pull wire to my house - because he has better reception. I can hire company X to install antenna on their roof and send signal to my house over wire. All this is not content producer's business! I can receive over-the-air signal in any way which is convenient to me. And I'm just hiring anyone I want to provide me with antenna.

Put. The. Remote. Down.

[DaKong]

There are a million things in the world to do that are more fulfilling than turning yourself into a mindslave for the content industries. Literally, a million. So go do them!

The best thing that could happen from all the endless *AA's' lawsuits would be for everyone to switch off the slave colla...um, I mean, the TVs and stereos and go outside and discover any one of the million things to do that are not that. Or stay inside and discover the million things to do that are not sitting around waiting for some marketing jackass to tell you how to think or what to buy.

If you like music, pick up an affordable guitar and teach yourself how to play. You might not ever achieve a respectable rendition of 'Stairway to Heaven,' but you will probably enjoy it much more than passively listening to a performance of the real thing. Likewise movies. Pick up your smartphone and shoot home movies of your kids. Nobody but you will ever enjoy them, but your family will enjoy them forever. And isn't that what's important?

Stop living in the realm of other people's fantasies, especially when those fantasies come with real chains attached.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what if these programs can be viewed freely via antannae receiving signals broadcast over air? No one owns the air and no one paid money to build a physical infrastructure to transmit information this way. (Accept the transmission and reception points.) On the other hand, pulling down the shows via Internet relies inherently upon someone else having built a network infrastructure, i.e. someone really DOES own (as in property ownership, as in the real deal) the means by which that information travels. Having owned the very means, they also have an inherent right to determine how that property is disposed of, i.e. to what end their property should be used. It makes sense to stop free streaming of content. If you want to watch the tv, get a fucking antenna.

Dont stop

[fluffythedestroyer]

I say let them do it. Let them stop airing it. It will hurt people for sure but it'll hurt the company more than people that's for sure. This situation is a big debate already and it's not about to finish. I think companies need to shift their business model to a more modern one. It seems like lots of businesses are still hanging on to old tradition even if it doesn't work well today.

MP3.com

[transporter_ii]

Content medium shifting is legal for consumers (for the most part). Content medium shifting as a paid service doing it for consumers has not held up well in court at all. Note that I may not totally agree with that, but there are a long list of companies that tried and failed to:

Format shift music
Edit language/content from DVDs that consumers *purchased*.
Rip DVDs bit by bit to a "video jukebox," thus not bypassing encryption.
Store movies on a network DVR....like a "VCR with a long cable in between."

I'm sure we can add quite a few more casualties of the copyright gray area here.

 

changing world

[Anonymous Coward]

Some years ago, I didn't want to like Who Moved My Cheese, but I couldn't help but learn the lesson, and it applies to so many things.

Imagine what creative works the networks could buy with the cash they're spending on attempted world domination.

As far as watching ads in the wrong market... non-contemporaneous ads are going away eventually, anyhow. It's too easy to skip them. We're going to have a lot of product placements instead. Stuff that's so embedded in the show that people will watch or listen to it, or be subconsciously influenced by it.

It's not rebroadcast

[Quila]

It's streamed directly to the one subscriber (renter) of that one antenna. Broadcasting by definition requres sending that signal to a dispersed audience, such as if they took that signal and put it up on a web site for viewing by all.

Sorta Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

The major networks are concerned for THEIR "Rights" but infringe on ours any chance they get without a second thought.

The judge would have to be an idiot to go along with this.

Where are the DTV smartphones?

[PRlME]

Since this is somewhat related, when broadcast made the conversion from analog to digital, I recall hearing how DTV would be coming to smartphones (Japan has had it for over 10 years!). Yet in the past few years since the conversion, I've heard nothing of DTV antennas being added to smartphones. Why did this get buried by the phone/media industry? I for one, consume all media online (I have neither cable/sat/OTA DTV, only degrading analog cable TV hooked up to an old SDTV, which I never use). If my phone received DTV signals, I'd use the feature all the time.

I cant wait till it goes global!

[hesaigo999ca]

Hopefully this will start a movement so big and powerful that in a few years we can all enjoy in all cities this great new technology!

Unchanged signal law proposal

[im_thatoneguy]

I propose that we rewrite broadcast laws such that any stream which in no way changes a publicly available stream is illegal.

So for instance if you transmit an HD signal to the public, I can repeat it and repeating doesn't constitute rebroadcast as long you are within range of the original transmission.

This applies to Satellite companies as well. The fact that broadcast companies can extract money out of cable and sat companies is absurd. The cable companies are offering a really really fancy antenna since the broadcast companies are unable to deliver quality service. The broadcast company makes the same amount of money if you have a TCP/IP antenna or a RF antenna.

Re:Unchanged signal law proposal

[udoschuermann]

Actually, I propose that we let them have their way completely. We just have to stop fawning over their content and go on, instead, to something else. Let them rot in their lonely little tar pits like the dinosaurs that they are. A few years down the line, nobody will remember them.

CFR Section 15, FCC Rules

[Anonymous Coward]

These companies should go back and re-read Section 15(c) of FCC Rules.

Then they should come back and drop their dumbass lawsuit against Aereo for accepting all the incidental radiation from their transmitters.

Bonus: captcha was 'programs'

They need to pull their heads out of the sand.

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply causing harm to someone's business is not something that is illegal or even undesirable. These networks' position doesn't need to be protected any more than the jobs of elevator operators. OK, they've been pressing the button on the elevators for a long time now and become extremely rich on the back of it. Now that we have automated elevators that people can use themselves, they need to go find something else to do.

Dear Major TV Networks

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Fuck You.

Right, so it makes a bureaucratic clustefark ...

[Gimbal]

...out of their precision legal machinery, so they sue.

Science and the useful arts? of intimidation, is it? Well, it's up to the courts, in the end, at that.

BULLCRAP

[way2trivial]

https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1ASUT_enUS455US455&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=video+clipping+service

sorry.. let me try again

Yer Wrong
https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1ASUT_enUS455US455&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=video+clipping+service