Fox, Univision May Go Subscription To Stop Aereo

GTRacer writes "In response to Aereo's recent win allowing per-user over-the-air antenna feeds to remote devices, Fox COO Chase Carey said, 'We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content. This is not an ideal path we look to pursue [...],' that path being a switch to a subscription model. Spanish-language stalwart Univison may join Fox, per CEO Haim Saban. Aereo replied, in part, 'When broadcasters asked Congress for a free license to digitally broadcast on the public's airwaves, they did so with the promise that they would broadcast in the public interest and convenience, and that they would remain free-to-air. Having a television antenna is every American's right.' A switch to a pay-TV subscription model would stymie Aereo but could hurt affiliate stations."

Comments

While you are at it

[Sparticus789]

Can we switch ALL channels to a subscription model? I only watch 5 channels, and I would gladly pay $5 each for those channels and save myself hundreds of dollars per year.

Re:While you are at it

[fustakrakich]

On cable that would be fine, but not over the air channels. If they try that, they should indeed lose their broadcast license.

Re:While you are at it

[Picass0]

The clock is ticking for local over the air affiliates anyway. In a few years expect all the big players like Viacom, NBCUniversal, Fox, Disney, etc... to focus on becoming "apps" with content stores or subscriber libraries. There are constant rumors of HBO GO waiving the cable subscriber requirement and becoming a Netflix or Hulu. Premium channels are not going to standby much longer and watch Amazon Prime and other services steal "their audience". They will get in the game and it will by the end of the status quo for cable tv.

Smaller local news affiliates will become an afterthought. They will need to figure out how to survive as the business model continues to shift to streaming.

Re:While you are at it

[TubeSteak]

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

Life-Line by Robert A. Heinlein, 1939

/If they want to take their ball and go home, I would encourage them to do so.
//NBC/CBS/ABC as well. Someone will fill your shoes, if for no other reason than the lucrative sports broadcast.

Re:While you are at it

[Bieeanda]

I hate to break it to you, but under that kind of model you'd probably be watching four channels worth of serene blue nothing. Cable packages subsidize less-popular channels, which includes... Syfy, TLC, the History channel, not that they're huge losses at this point, and basically anything else that isn't driven by one of the major basic networks or popular premium channels like HBO. Even they'd be impacted, because while advertising is a huge source of income, contracts with cable providers provide steady baseline funding as well.

In a nutshell: A lot of the crap you don't watch is ultimately funding the stuff that you do.

Re:While you are at it

[lgw]

Why should less popular channels by subsidized? Why should anything ever be subsidized (as far as entertainment)? The more direct the funding for content, the less "why would anyone watch this" content there will be, and the more rational discussions of piracy will become.

I'd much rather see a model where I watched all TV by buying downloads of shows - of course they'd ruin it all with some DRM nonsense, but a man can dream.

Re:While you are at it

[mrchaotica]

Why should less popular channels by subsidized? Why should anything ever be subsidized (as far as entertainment)?

Because mass-market pablum will be the only thing produced?

Re:While you are at it

[afidel]

No, they should lose their license, we have MUCH better things we can do with that bandwidth than prop up a subscription business. The VHF band alone is 162MHz, enough for 8 LTE providers (maybe only 7 with guard bands) and penetrates buildings well.

Re:While you are at it

[Mike Buddha]

CW ought to cut through the digital mess quite nicely...

Re:While you are at it

[afidel]

History, SyFy and TLC would all be fine:

Prime-time Average Viewers (Live+SD) Week Ending April 7, 2013:

1. 
   Network (000s)
2. USA 2718
3. DSNY 2505
4. A&E 1880
5. HIST 1793
6. TBSC 1758
7. FOXN 1650
8. TNT 1601
9. ESPN 1388
10. ADSM 1286
11. HGTV 1198
12. LIFE 1107
13. FX 1089
14. FOOD 1022
15. AMC 1010
16. SYFY 1005
17. DISC 980
18. NAN 963
19. BRAV 957
20. TRU 903
21. SPK 883
22. TLC 844
23. CMDY 834
24. APL 780
25. MTV 771
26. BET 754

It would be the rest of the filler station that wouldn't make it.

Re:While you are at it

[hairyfeet]

And what will REALLY make them shit their pants is when they all switch...and nobody shows up.

I live in a college town with my oldest in college so I am pretty much surrounded by 20 somethings all damned day and you know what I found? they don't watch TV, in fact more and more of them don't even own a TV. They might have netflix to watch a movie, might catch a clip on YouTube but THAT IS IT, they really don't give a rat's ass about watching traditional TV, they have their social stuff and their games and they just don't have any desire to sit and just passively veg out in front of a TV like previous generations did.

I always thought I was a bit of an oddball because I dropped TV nearly a decade ago, turns out I was just ahead of the curve. talking to these kids that come into the shop pretty much TV is looked at something for your parents or grandparents, its just not something they care about. They are a HELL of a lot more social oriented, they are getting together with friends and watching a rifftrax on the widescreen one of them uses as a monitor, they are on their FB or in an MMO, regular passive TV really just doesn't hold any appeal to them and I honestly don't blame 'em as when I go out to visit my mother I'm forced to watch it and...fuck is ALL TV this God damned stupid? Is it ALL reality garbage now? Because spinning through the channels that is what it seems like to me, every time I'm exposed to it all I can think is "When is "Ass" or "Oww my balls" coming on?" because it feels THAT stupid.

So give the OTA bandwidth to cellphones, maybe add a nice free channel for the next gen of WiFi, because honestly even the old folks aren't watching that shit anymore, they have Dish or DirectTV and the kids don't watch any of it.

Re:While you are at it

[hairyfeet]

If you make something good people WILL buy it, you may not have the budget that the mass market crap has but I don't see why they couldn't turn a modest profit. That is why I thought the idea Joss Whedon floated a couple years back was smart, it was basically "if enough people buy the DVD of X we make another one" which I thought was a brilliant way to just bypass the whole system. If enough people want a Spike and Dru series or Firefly or whatever? let them put their money where their mouth is and buy the DVD. hell I'd buy the DVDs and t-shirts if it would give us more of Juliet Landau as Dru, she was great on the show and even creepier in the comix.

If anything I'd say the CURRENT system produces 90% dreck, I haven't watched TV in years because its fucking drowning in reality garbage but apparently watching white trash and cat fights is cheap to make and easy to sell so now we are up to our ass in this shit. Hell look at it this way...it can't get any fucking worse than what we have now, what we have now is so close to idiocracy its fucking scary. Its not even the kind of trainwreck bad you can make fun of like "Heil Honey I'm Home" its just pathetic and sad how stupid and worthless this dreck is.

Re:While you are at it

[Pope]

And yet there are a lot of great shows on TV nowadays, and the mid to late 20 somethings in my office are up on all of them. Very few watch reality shows. They watch Justified, Walking Dead, Game Of Thrones, etc.

Re:While you are at it

[shutdown -p now]

What makes you think that they watch these on TV, and not on Netflix, AIV etc?

(or download from TPB where that's not an option)

Re:While you are at it

[shutdown -p now]

And what will REALLY make them shit their pants is when they all switch...and nobody shows up.

The process of them shitting their pants has already begun.

The sad part of it is that they still don't get it - they think that they can solve it by bringing it to iDevices and such, without changing the basic subscription model of cable.

Re:While you are at it

[Rockoon]

I don't even think its the subscription model...

Sure, television always had a lot of crap.. but it wasn't always so loaded up with cheap crap aka "reality television."

How many channels have names that lie about their content now? The learning channel? National geographic channel? The history channel? ....

Its cheap to pay 4 or 5 guys with cameras to follow around a bunch of douche bags.. its crap so they only get 10% of the viewers that they used to, but it only costs them 1% of what their old programming had cost to produce, and sometimes the cast of douche bags they are following are so extraordinarily douchy that they have a "hit" and get twice as many viewers as their old programming did...

I'm not sure that I wouldn't make the same decisions as they are if I was in their place.. profits are up all the way down the death spiral...

Re:While you are at it

[hairyfeet]

Exactly, the days of tuning in at X to watch Y are fricking over, some of my oldest boy's friends like Walking Dead, I'm guessing they get it from the net because they are watching it on laptops and tablets. Like I said he doesn't have a single friend that OWNS a TV that is used for that, a couple got cheap 32 inchers they use for monitors but none of them are watching traditional cable or OTA, they see it as too expensive (or in the case of OTA too much a PITA as we lie in a valley and digital don't work worth a shit here) for too little they care to watch.

What am I missing?

[therealkevinkretz]

If they already provide a free over-the-air signal, in order to be available to the most viewers (and therefore to the most advertising targets), isn't another company extending that viewer base at no expense to Fox, Univision, CBS, NBC, ABC a *benefit* to them?

Re:What am I missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a benefit to the affiliate stations, however Fox wants your to watch your LA affiliate when in LA, not the NY affiliate. Especially for their "talent" shows.

Re:What am I missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

SSssshh! They're going to take Fox off the air and we don't have to do anything

Re:What am I missing?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Of course not. They expect to be PAID to have their advertisers commercials shown to a larger audience.

Re:What am I missing?

[bws111]

Only if that extended viewer base is measured and reported in a manner that advertisers trust, and then only if increased viewer base means increased ad views.

Re:What am I missing?

[SirDrinksAlot]

Yea I have no idea what they're complaining about. Instead of fighting Aereo maybe they could work with them instead? When you're broadcasting you have no idea who's watching what and what kind of exposure paying advertisers are getting. Aereo likely knows what channel you're watching and at what time, this seems like ENORMOUSLY valuable information to a broadcaster. If everybody setup a TV tuner in their apartment and streamed it to their device of choice then the broadcaster has no clue what kind of market penetration they're getting.

It's like cutting off your nose to spite the face.

Re:What am I missing?

[interkin3tic]

Didn't you read "We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content."? Translation: "Someone else is getting some profit off of our stuff. That means we aren't extracting all the value out of it we can. That can't be tolerated." Witness Rupert Murdoch and his battles with google. Losing two dollars to claim a dollar in someone else's pocket seems to be an all-too-common approach to the internet. It will take a while before people realize it's counterproductive to do shit like this. When they see profits going up, they'll attribute it to that, without realizing that it's due to other factors. When their profits go down, they'll use that to further justify this.

Re:What am I missing?

[Attila Dimedici]

You apparently do not understand that Fox and Fox News are not the same thing. Fox News is not "on the air". It is a cable channel. Fox on the other hand is broadcast "over the air" in most markets.

Re:What am I missing?

[j-turkey]

I suspect that this is the same resistance to a third party pushing content that nearly every IP owner has shown over the years. It has nothing to do with being compensated. It is likely easy to grab viewer metrics from Aereo and renegotiate the value of those viewer impressions with advertisers. I'm guessing that Fox just wants that control - they want to roll their own service, the same way that all of the music publishers wanted to roll their own streaming/subscription service, the same way that the cable companies want to roll their own VoD service, and the same way that the film studios want to roll their own VoD service.

It's no secret that these groups have all failed. The music industry tried and failed over and over again, with Apple dominating that marketspace now (and the IP owners are still managing to be compensated for this). The cable companies and film studios have also failed to run their own VoD services that are competitive with Netflix, yet they are all compensated for their IP streaming. This is just the same repeat behavior.

I'm no expert, but it would seem to me that content producers might want to stick to their core competencies, and excellence in broadcasting (or lack thereof) is showing to be unequal to excellence in developing a digital distribution model. They've failed over and over, while the third parties have succeeded almost exclusively...and in spite of lack of cooperation from "legacy" media. I know that the legacy IP owners want to maximize their profits and control by running their own digital distribution networks, but this seems akin to having their cake and eating it too - and it has proven to be historically risky.

Re:What am I missing?

[DJ Particle]

No. What they do is give you an antenna in the cloud. Each customer has their own antenna powered by an array. You watch the same content that someone with a rooftop antenna does.

On facebook, I did a basic outline as to why this was ruled legal:

Why Aereo is legal in an easy side-by-side comparison between traditional and digital:

1) Just as you had a TV antenna on your roof that only you can access, you have your own antenna that only you can access. Each customer has their OWN antenna. Your service fee pays for maintenance of the array your specific antenna is powered by.

2) Just as you could split your roof antenna signal as many times as you wanted throughout your house to send the signal to all your TVs, you can access your Aereo antenna with any device you own via the Aereo app. Your service fee helps maintenance of the Aereo app and keeps it updated. To clarify...keep in mind you are not so much accessing CONTENT, as you are an ANTENNA! That's the key point of this right there. You're accessing an ANTENNA that is exclusively YOURS, and sending its signal to your video device. The internet is simply playing the role of the coaxial cable.

3) Just as you could use a VCR to record any signal that comes off your roof antenna to watch for later, your personal Aereo cloud storage can store recorded programs to access at a later date on any of your devices that run the Aereo app. Until 2008, this could have been illegal, but Cablevision won a decision that said they could store programs in the cloud for their customers' personal viewing. What Aereo does in this case is no different. Like the Cablevision situation, each customer has their OWN cloud storage. Your service fee helps the maintenance of the cloud storage.

4) The one limitation: Just as your roof antenna could only receive local stations that you had to live in the area to access, you need to prove you are in the right market for the service. This is why right now, only the NYC market is eligible for Aereo, despite its user being able to watch their programs over the internet. You have to live in the area to get its channels. This is due to FCC rules of exclusivity. Aereo is planning rollouts in numerous other cities (including my home area of Minneapolis) before the end of the year. Your service fees help Aereo to grow.

Re:What am I missing?

[alexander_686]

There are 2 downsides with that from the TV perspective –

First, time-shifted /place-shifted advertisements are worth less. People pay less attention to them. (Live sports, for example, can charge a premium because people don’t time-shifting watching those vents.)

Secondly, and more importantly, the TV stations would have to share their revenue with Aereo – and more importantly – Aereo would be in the driving seat in terms of negotiations. I think the TV stations would want to go into negotiations in a stronger position.

So I don’t think they are inherently against it – they just want a larger slice of the pie. (Not saying that we should give it them.).

Re:What am I missing?

[sjames]

Aereo is not time shifting or place shifting. They are providing the 'signal' only to people nominally in the broadcast area who simply have bad reception. The signal is provided live.

The people using Aereo would otherwise have to subscribe to cable or just not watch TV at all.

They're already getting a fair piece of their pie. Aereo baked a brand new pie and Fox wants to steal it off of the window sill.

Re:What am I missing?

[sjames]

So, do the many rent-to-own places somehow owe Fox money? They rent equipment that can be used to legally timeshift programming. So does Aereo apparently.

If I go on vacation and tell the house sitter to hit record when "The Following" comes on, does HE owe Fox money?

If I rent a slingbox, who (if anyone) owes Fox money?

Hilarious misinterpretation of their license

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of "broadcast in the public interest and convenience" are they failing to understand? A significant portion of the country no longer owns televisions nor are interested in non-time-shifted content.

Re:Hilarious misinterpretation of their license

[wonkey_monkey]

And if any of your acquaintances didn't have a TV, you'd know about it.

Re:Hilarious misinterpretation of their license

[rockout]

Well, like Mark Twain pointed out, it's all in how you look at the stats. The numbers of households without a TV was 1.1% - now it's 3.3%, or triple the number. The trend is clearly towards less households with TVs, and again, it's young people leading that charge, so it would seem that 3.3% is going to increase.

I don't care much one way or the other - I have only 1 TV, which probably puts me in the minority of households with multiple children (most families I know have multiple sets) but there's no denying that the perception that it's necessary to have a TV in the house is declining. That's got to be of some concern to network execs. After all, at some point 96.7% of people were buying CDs and weren't using Napster. That trend continued despite the record companies ignoring the early signs. Not a perfect analogy, I admit, but it's sort of relevant.

Good.

[pecosdave]

Instead of seeing it as a way to increase their viewing area to their advertisers they're alienating their customer base. I quit watching normal TV years ago, if enough stations do this we could reallocate all that useful TV bandwidth to something useful.

Awesome!

[onyxruby]

Let's hope all the like companies do this, it would be great for the American public. Once they do this we can then take the considerable bandwidth that is being allocated on TV and use it for more useful things like next generation wireless devices. I for one must encourage this behavior and the removal of public TV from public airwaves. We also gain the benefit of removing decades old indecency standards from the days of the Model T.

How many people would sign a petition in support of this measure?

Re:Awesome!

[Antipater]

Broadcast TV allows me to watch programming I enjoy, for free, without my stream lagging to hell whenever my ISP arbitrarily decides to throttle me.

And I would rather have my indecency standards set by a monolithic, slow-as-molasses bureaucracy than by the whims of a media company.

Until net neutrality is settled, I would ask that you not sign any petition doing away with public TV.

Cancel it!

[simonbp]

Fox is so good at canceling good shows that they thought they'd cancel themselves!

Cut off the node to spite the face

[olsmeister]

Going subsciption only would turn them from one of the 'Big 4' networks to just another cable channel, like TNT or Discovery. I can't believe that this would be good for their ratings or advertising revenue. I guess they could try to demand premium pricing, like ESPN, but they might not have as much luck with that as they think.

I fail to see why these companies don't have a problem blasting their signal free out into the ether for anyone to receive, but the instant you try to blast it free into the internet for anyone to see, suddenly all the executives start lawyering up.

And by "May"...

[Anonymous Coward]

And, of course, by "may go subscription" you really mean "are spouting entirely hollow threats because everyone knows they're not going to throw away their broadcast money just to spite one company."

Aren't OTA TV stations compensated by ads?

[NevarMore]

"We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content. " - Don't you sell advertisements to get paid? I never recall getting a bill for OTA TV .

Re:Aren't OTA TV stations compensated by ads?

[crmarvin42]

I could be wrong, but I believe that is their point. OTA TV is funded by commercials. Commercial rates are based on viewership, and the assumption that those viewers (or some percentage of them) are actually watching the commercials. I believe the objection comes from the ability to skip commercials via Aereo's restreaming technology. They get a different rate from cable companies, which I believe includes some compensation for the DVRs that the cable company rents out to customers. Since the courts have already determined that time shifting is legal, and they now have classified Aereo's approach as time shifting and not rebroadcasting, the broadcasters fear that they will lose money unless they find a way to neutralize OTA time shifting.

Not saying they are going about it the right way. Just my impression of their perspective.

Ridicolous

[benjfowler]

What a ridiculous, childish tantrum.

Their arguments, that format-shifting is depriving them of revenue -- make about as much sense as an angry, stompy blue-faced toddler.

I would say that this stupid, childish dummy spit is aimed purely at screwing money out of Aereo. That in itself is fine. What ISN'T fine, is these overfed elite con artists insulting everyones' intelligence in the process.

You can't protect rights you don't have

[Anita Coney]

They're complaining that the courts and government are not protecting their rights. Their copyrights.

But copyrights exist at the discretion of the government. If 17 USC 107 provides a fair use exception to copyright. And if time shifting is fair use. Then there are no rights to protect.

It's not the government's job to protect your IP rights. The government grants you a monopoly covering certain aspects of a work. If the government decides that time shifting is not a violation of copyrights, you don't have that right. Deal with it.

Cry me a fucking river...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Broadcast TV sits right in the middle of some pretty nice spectrum. Any broadcaster who doesn't like the economics of broadcasting is more than welcome to step aside and let us find some more productive use of that spectrum. Not that I think Fox is serious; but I'd be delighted if they were.

Re:Right doesn't equal access

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Well, given that they just finished losing a lawsuit denying exactly that, they apparently do quibble with that part, they just didn't get their way...

Re:Right doesn't equal access

[h4rr4r]

Please?
That spectrum can then be taken back by the FCC, right?

Inevitable step

[Average]

This was an inevitable step once we went down the path of allowing OTA broadcasters to start demanding payments for retransmission on cable (originally "Community Antenna TV"). That was a stupid step to begin with... you're sending an unencrypted signal into my house... why do you care how I get it or if I let a middleman bring it to me? It is also inevitable once the broadcasters started getting bought by pay-TV companies (Disney, Comcast, etc).

For FOX, though, I don't think their #1 TV property (a little thing called the NFL) is going to be real happy at all with them becoming 'yet another cable station'.

Re:Inevitable step

[Lumpy]

It wasn't a stupid step. it was an example of that your Civic leaders are greedy asshats that will happily take a bribe to throw your rights under the bus. Blame your town mayor, and every elected representative you have. Your city or town has a "franchise" agreement with cable companies. It's a legal kickback of money for allowing them to strongarm customers and keep competition out.

Re:Inevitable step

[DJ Particle]

The difference with cable is that with cable, all subscribers are accessing the same feed, hence making it a paid-for public performance. This is not true with Aereo. With Aereo, each customer gets his/her own dime-sized antenna (locked by password) that only picks up normal broadcast stations. That's a significant difference, and why it's not considered a "public" performance like cable TV is.

Yes, it is a desperate attempt

[rickb928]

It seems to me that Aereo is a centralized equivalent of a Slingbox, just, well, centralized.

So of that's the case, the complaint by broadcasters would be, what?

- Infinging on sales of any mobile app they have to enable place-shifting their programming?
- The age-old argument that time-shifting is wrong? We fought that fight and won I think.
- Opposing Aereo because they mess with various ratings and data collection? This, BTW, I believe would be enough to justify the fight by itself.
- Opposing Aereo because they don't want to have to buy the data *again*? See above.

Same fight going on with Dish and the Hopper. Lack of 'control', which in the current environment is really failing to reocgnize that fight is already lost. We can place-shift, time-shift, do both at once. We have multiple ways. If these channels expect to be able to get me to pay for content with my eyeballs (commercials), or a mobile app for convenience, and get more and more revenue for the same content, they have a challenge. I'm not far from focusing my interests on programming that is given to me cheaply, be it Neflix or YouTube, or something else. The dinosaurs are fighting it out, but they will lose.

And I can't see this fast enough. Adapt or die, losers.

Fox Corporate Asshole

[SpaceManFlip]

+1 for appropriate Heinlein wisdom

This Fox COO is making dumb threats. As one with an inside-view of how broadcast TV is made available to viewers, I can tell you that this action if taken will result in no good for Fox.

Basically, there is in many areas at most a 15-20% marketshare for OTA broadcast TV, and the rest get their TV from cable or satellite. For Fox to be able to charge the "freeloaders" viewing by broadcast, they would have to implement some kind of scrambling of the broadcast signal.
Scrambling the signal would require hardware on both ends: 1 scrambler at the broadcast transmitter, and 1 descrambler at each viewer's house (many).

How many currently free viewers do you reckon are going to start paying Fox for hardware/subscription to view their 1 broadcast channel that they used to get for free? My bet is nearly none. So their 15-20% share would drop to ~ 2-5% costing them 10+% of their viewers. Look at that number, then think of the nation-wide ad revenue for the corporation it could represent, and plop that figure onto the table of the shareholders' meeting....

Re:Fox Corporate Asshole

[mabhatter654]

We have had subscription Broadcast TV before. When I was a kid, my neighbors had "IT TV" that ran a scrambled channel, that was in the 1980's.

Maybe If Fox sold off stations, Google could launch a YouTube Network. They could use all 4 Digital channels for maximum effect. They would have to clean up some shows for swearing and such, but they try to do that already. They have mastered short ads every few clips so DVR wouldn't really hurt them.. In fact they could work with TiVo and the built in program guide Digital TV includes to automatically record shows based on keywords.

Re:Fox Corporate Asshole

[internerdj]

Maybe I misread but I thought they just meant drop out of broadcast and only air the channels over cable or satelite.

Re:Fox Corporate Asshole

[nabsltd]

You forgot one important thing.

I'm pretty sure most broadcast licenses from the require that the content to not be encrypted.

Mostly. The regs basically say that a 480i unencrypted signal would suffice for keeping the license. This could be done in about 3Mbps, leaving nearly 16Mbps for encrypted content.

The OTA stations that are affliated with ION do this right now. Although they do have 720p as their main signal, the bitrate is about 6Mbps, which looks like crap. They have two other unencrypted sub-channels (both 480i), and 5-6 encrypted streams, including things like Starz and NFL Sunday Ticket.

Re:Two Reasons

[thunderclap]

You act as if that's difficult. It was done with ease prior to the advent of the internet. Now its simple. The question isn't how to get an NYC street address, but would anyone want to who isn't there already? If Bloomberg were running anyone other place outside the US, there would be UN sanctions against him already.
"“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance." This was said by him on 11/29 2011. So who in their right mind would want an address there? Now Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami, or even New Orleans, yea. But NYC? no.

Re:Right doesn't equal access

[Omestes]

VOTE Ron Paul 2016 to END this bullshit once and for all.

He isn't any better really. He just wants everything to be up to the highest bidder, i.e. to be private. Which, in the end, is pretty much exactly what we got now, minus a layer of government.

We need actual public property, which is held, by the government (it is part of their job, after all) for all of us, with all of us having the exact same rights over it regardless of our monetary worth or political clout.

The NFL will have something to say about this.

[futuresheep]

The NFL Broadcasts it's NFC division games on FOX. I don't think they'd be happy to lose half their Sunday audience.

Re:So what is this mythical new business model?

[shutdown -p now]

I don't know who that "everything must be free" crowd are. Personally, I would gladly pay for quality content if that content is made available to me in a convenient way. This boils down to two things: 1) I must be able to pay for it once and stream it when I want it (i.e. no subscription), and 2) it must not be bundled with some other crap. I'm fine with time-limited rentals, DRM etc. Just make it all easy and convenient and get rid of all the bullshit.

Oh, and forget the word "cable". And the general idea that I need to subscribe to a load of crap to get a few things that I actually care about. I want to pay only for what I actually want, and no more than that.

Re:So what is this mythical new business model?

[jakimfett]

I'm more than willing to pay a dime (or several hundred dimes) if I can actually get easily accessible things that I want to see.

For example, I have a Netflix and Hulu subscription. Why? Because streaming content, my choice of what I see or don't see, no advertisements, and no contract. I'm happy to pay for it, because it gives me what I want, when I want it, and doesn't get in my way.

Conversely, I'll never pay for a cable subscription again. Cable requires (at least in my area) a 2 year contract, gives me 100+ channels of crap with only 3-5 that show something that I'd like to see (but only shows what I want to see at certain times of day), and forces me to watch advertisements. Why would I pay to watch advertisements? I'd be 100% ok with ad supported free channels, but if I'm paying for it, it had better not have ads.

Here's a suggestion for the cable companies out there. Turn your network into the Netflix of TV. Basic premise is that you can watch the last 3, or 5, or maybe the entire season of a specific show. For news, show the last week. Give it to me searchable, and let me pick up from where I was watching last time. Make it available for a reasonable, tiered price (eg, it's ok to charge extra for premium channels like HBO or Starz), and don't force me to sign a contract. Finally, get rid of the advertisements. Or, maybe give people the option to pay 75% the normal subscription price if they'll watch an advertisement at the beginning of the content.

Re:So what is this mythical new business model?

[hairyfeet]

For me I have a little slogan "If you want me to buy, MKV or AVI" because I am NOT dealing with a bunch of phone home DRM bullshit, not when i can just buy the damned disc and rip it if I really want the show. online is supposed to be EASIER, make it EASIER for me and I'll be happy to give you my money but its gotta be in a format that it doesn't matter if I want to watch it with my mom, who only has one of those old DivX AVI players, or my dad at his place with his Nbox that plays MKVs, or if my ex wanted to watch something on her tablet I want to be able to say "here" and that is that.

I mean I can buy any song and any album in plain old MP3 and that plays on everything so why in the fuck should I have to have more bullshit just to watch a damned show? Especially with the shows as it makes NO fucking sense, any pirate can just record that shit OTA or off their cable and its on TPB the next day so ALL you are doing with the DRM is being a pain in MY ass, NOT the pirate's, so why should I pay you for being a dick?

Just give me the damned thing in my choice of a bog standard .MKV or .AVI and call it a damned day already, sheesh.

Re:So what is this mythical new business model?

[shutdown -p now]

Well, you didn't also say it had to be available at the same *time* as it was via other means. Since you were amenable to time limited DRM-encumbered rentals, if you just "wait a year", it will be available.

I figured I didn't need to expand on that, as it is kinda common sense. I don't demand content to be available on the same exact day (though then again, why not?), but a year later is obviously unacceptable. I'll just go to TPB instead to see it now, and then buy it once it is available for sale after a year (this is precisely what I did with GoT season 2), so the end result is that they get my money a year later than they otherwise would have. Their loss.

I mean if you *really* wanted it at the time, you could just get HBO for the months the show was on, then cancel (like tons of people used to do for The Sopranos).

I don't want HBO. I want specifically Game of Thrones. Why do I have to pay for all the other stuff on it? More importantly, I don't have cable at all, and I don't want it. I certainly won't get it just for a single show, no matter how good.