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Broadcasters Petition US Supreme Court In Fight Against Aereo
First time accepted submitter wasteoid writes "Aereo provides live-streaming and cloud-based DVR capability for Over-The-Air (OTA) broadcasts to their paying customers. Broadcasters object to this functionality, with Fox claiming about Aereo, 'Make no mistake, Aereo is stealing our broadcast signal.' The focus appears to be the ability of Aereo to provide streaming and DVR capabilities that traditional broadcasters have not delivered. The litigious broadcasters are fighting against "Aereo's illegal disruption of their business model.""
Living in Japan once in a while someone from NTT knocks on my door asking that i give them money for receiving the signal they broadcast.
my teachers told me about this scam however i tell them two true things
1. i dont have a TV. so im not paying for something i'm not receiving
2. if you don't want me to get the signal then don't broadcast it to me.
same should apply here. the TV stations broadcasted their signal in "cleartext"
So we have no rights to the content beamed into our homes, but they have the Right to Profit, even with a bad business model.
Learn to love Alaska
This is exactly WHY this should be allowed. If it is cheaper to setup your own antennas than pay someone else to do it then consumers are being overcharged for the service. Competition should be protected, not the opposite of it.
--- Mercutio was right.
The real reason the broadcasters are doing this is because right now if you dont have an antenna (and many people dont, people in apartments and other shared dwellings, people with no light of sign to the transmission tower etc) the only way to get the OTA channels is to buy pay TV. And the pay TV operators pay a fair chunk of money to the OTA networks for rebroadcast rights.
So what Aereo is doing is allowing a lot more people to get the OTA channels without going through the cable companies (which means the cable companies wont be willing to pay as much for the rebroadcast rights to the OTA networks)
... then why don't the big broadcaster get together and buy Aereo before it can - supposedly! - "do more damage". --- This whole thing reeks of the stink TPTB raised each time an Internet file-sharing tech came along. Instead of investing/going along with the "new wave in media consumption", TPTB always demonize whatever the latest content-delivery mechanism does. ---- So My Dear Big-Broadcasters: Put your money where your mouth is, and buy Aereo "for the good of the industry". --- I sometimes wish that the Big Media PTB would hire a CEO/CTO who is in his 20s - 30s only. I bet that CEO/CTO would go along with new trends in media distribution and consumption, instead of trying to shut them/shoot them down before they even get a chance to mature. My 2 Cents... As always, feel free to disagree. =)
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
...than a case of how far away from your TV your DVR is allowed to be located.
Which is to say the broadcasters are trying to use smoke and mirrors to cover up rent seeking.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I remember before there was FOX network.
When they came along the big 3 had such a hissyfit at them for daring to do something different.
And now here we are.. Fox is having the fit for someone else daring to do something different.
Didn't take very long at all. 27 years to turn you into a stick up the ass 'we demand profits forever for doing the same thing' greedmonster.
with Fox claiming about Aereo, 'Make no mistake, Aereo is stealing our broadcast signal.'
It's clearly not theft. Why is it not illegal for Fox to make this fraudulent claim in a public forum?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Since the Americans hold their Constitution so dear, almost to the level of Scripture itself, maybe a proper way to deal with corporate parasitism, is to make it unconstitutional to make any law which props up a failing business model or restricts competition in a free market.
no, not a NIH.
they already invented getting paid for retransmitting the signal they broadcast.
it's not the pvr. it's the retransmit of something they're sending out. aereo is cutting into their fat, fat margin on that service(you'd think that a ota free channel would only be aiming for highest possible viewers?? HAHAHAHA NOT SO! because this is bizarro world. they're shooting for the highest possible money extraction from cable companies and the cable companies customers.).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If you weren't suing them, I may not have heard of their service. Now that I'm aware of it, I will most likely sign up once they are in my area.
.. then why don't the big broadcaster get together and buy Aereo before it can - supposedly! - "do more damage"
Three reasons:
1) If you win in court, it prevents other people from trying to pull the same stunt
2) It may well be cheaper to pay lawyers to litigate against Aereo instead of attempting to buy it.
3) It just might not be for sale.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I wonder if this isn't a big deal because Aereo isn't rebroadcasting. Broadcasting is transmitting to a wider audience. Aereo has a single antenna distributing to a single person. Obviously this is what Aereo thinks is the case, the stream from my DVR to my TV is not a "rebroadcast." Contrast this with the cable TV operators, who receive the signal once, often through specialized equipment, and send it to all of their local subscribers.
That's the essence of Aereo's legal position(founded on the 'Cablevision Case', where CableVision's 'cloud DVR product, with a similar 'one tuner and storage allocation per user, controlled by the user' was upheld as licit).
Team Broadcast is apparently shitting themselves for some combination of (A) reactionary stupidity and (B) fear that cable companies that currently pay absurd fees to retransmit OTA programming will find it cheaper to set up these goofy antenna-array things than to pay off the broadcasters(which is a pretty good sign that the broadcasters are currently overpaid, if such a silly mechanism actually saves money; but they obviously like being overpaid...)
If you've ever had your provider get in to a deadlock contract with an OTA station; you'll realize retransmission fees are a scam.
According to the law; a TV station has two options; they can negotiate a retransmission fee for a cable system; or invoke "must-carry", in which the cable provider is *required* to carry them. The station does not have to pay for a "must-carry" station; they are however required by law to carry them. That's bad for the cable company because they have to dedicate QAM space to a channel they may not want. However, if a cable provider negotiates a retransmission fee; they are allowed at that point to insert "local" ads over OTA stations.
In reality; the stations are only screaming about *potential* loss of profits here. The real losers are the local advertisers; who are paying the bills to keep the station's OTA signal running. Thier ads will only get seen by people with OTA; and those times when a local company isn't inserting ads over airtime.
This is why it's common in some areas for a cable/satellite provider to lose the right to carry a local channel. The station wants more money to reach it's demographic; and when a deal cannot be struck, the channel becomes unavailable. If it's a network affiliate; you lose that network entirely. FCC laws prohibit an "outside" station to be piped in to another market. Ironically; this law was made to protect local advertisers, ensuring they had a better chance to be seen in a market where their ads are already possibly being covered over with whatever promotion your provider is running this month.
The ruling that Aereo is legal was upheld by an appellate court already. They found the place-shifting technology (which is what this is); did not constitute public performance. Likewise; since there was an individual receiver and antenna for each user; there was no breaking of any law.
A2B TV does a similar thing; only with satellite TV. And they've even changed since I first found them. Used to be they'd get you set up with a cable TV account at whatever provider was local to the datacenter, along with a slingbox and "hosting space"; thier new model seems to use satellite TV and you have to send them a receiver. I own a Slingbox (two of them actually); and it's perfectly legal to have them hooked up to my TV's; of course I do pay for a TV service. But what about the Slingbox I sent to my friend in Texas with an OTA receiver so I could watch my favorite football team? Legally, it's my receiver and my hardware; so it *still* falls under placeshifting; and it's still not public retransmission.
Networks are going to complain and bitch because they're "getting thier business model stolen"; they seem to forget thier original business model was providing a service for free that was funded by advertisers; that's shifted in to a service that's still provided free, but paid for by cable and satellite companies. I can't blame advertisers for wanting to pay next to nothing; would *you* want to pay top-dollar for advertising knowing the majority of your demographic on cable or satellite might not see it? Of course not.
Again, it's just the networks sitting there looking at the potential profits they're losing because a lousy business model they created failed; one that was doomed for failure in the first place. What were they doing all those years when analog C-Band was still dominate; and they did not scramble the network fee? All those people were watching network TV without local inserted ads. What were they doing before the 1992 act and cable providers could literally pipe in any OTA channel their antenna farm could pick up; you know, back when the FCC mandated providers had to carry locals. Complicate the matter by the fact the FCC has allowed cable broadcasters to begin encrypting OTA feeds; which were once required to be left unencrypted.
The real issue is if they get this declared illicit; what's to stop them going further? They could begin saying multi-room DVR is illegal; worse yet, they coul
The problem here isn't that aero is using their signal for free, it's that the broadcast channels think they're entitled to money for retransmitting their signal over another medium. The FCC should make it illegal for broadcast companies to charge cable companies to carry their signal.
I'm quite pissed that when their deal with my local cable company expires the fucking broadcasters have the gall to run ads asking me to demand my cable company caves to their extortion so that I can have the privilige of a higher bill.