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Supreme Court To Hear Aereo Case
schwit1 writes "The Supreme Court will hear broadcasters' challenge to the legality of startup Aereo, in a case that may not only determine the future of digital streaming of station signals but of network television itself. Without comment, the justices on Friday agreed to accept ABC Television Stations vs. Aereo, in which the television networks are seeking to halt the Barry Diller-backed venture, contending that its offering of streams of station signals in New York and other markets violates the public performance provisions of the Copyright Act. Justice Samuel Alito took no part in the consideration of the petition, the court said, without elaborating. Typically such recusals are for a potential conflict of interest, and Alito has previously said that his family owned stock in the Walt Disney Co."
Then again, if I understand the situation correctly the broadcasters aren't really losing anything. Broadcast TV gets its revenues through advertisements, there is no revenue flowing from the delivery of the product. In a way, broadcasters should be grateful that someone is helping them show their ads to even more people without costing them a dime. If they could figure out a way to get viewing figures from Aereo as a form of compensation, to bring to their advertisers as a basis for negotiating rates, they could have the cake and eat it too. If Aereo on the other hand was recording the broadcasts, stripping out the advertisements, and then streaming it on to consumers, that would be a whole other situation.
Aereo is essentially a leech on the system
How? Broadcasting over the air is a way of distributing content. Aereo does exactly the same thing. Think of it as a repeater for the broadcast signals. The broadcasters should be happy that another party is helping to distribute their content. The broadcasters get paid via advertising revenues, which are proportional to the number of viewers. Why should they object to more viewers?
Broadcast television got a pretty sweetheart deal: All of this spectrum is yours, just give us a little public interest news every day.
And that's why it's so easy to root for Aereo: Broadcast television got an absurdly sweet deal (one that, given the absolute shit that passes for 'news' they arguably aren't even honoring) on a very nice chunk of RF. Time for them to move.
If 'broadcasting' over the internet is sufficiently lucrative that Aereo (a 3rd party that has to run a silly teeny-antenna farm for legal reasons) can make money, they can cut out the middleman and do that instead. But if they want to keep acting like a very nice chunk of the airwaves was just handed to them by god for their convenience, fuck 'em. I'll cheer Aereo every step of the way if they do, in fact, cause one or more of the broadcasters to follow through on their threat to take their ball and go cable only.
(That said, I'm not actually sure that I believe your argument: Yes, Aereo doesn't provide anything back to the content producers; but neither does putting an antenna on my roof. And yet, sending free signals laced with ads to people with antennas turns out to be a functioning business model. Aereo doesn't actually detract from that, indeed, they increase the number of viewers within range of the signal, at no additional cost to the broadcaster. If they do have a financial effect, it's purely on the assorted shakedowns that govern the 'Must-carry' rules on cable outfits, another absurdly sweetheart deal given to the broadcasters for, um, reasons. Or something.)
ABC does not own the content that it broadcasts: it licenses it from the original authors/producers. That license permits it to distribute the content over the airwaves with the payment of a fee.
Think about it this way. Suppose I wrote a play. I would have both (1) a right to prevent others from copying my written work (the script) and (2) a right to prevent others from performing that play if they got a copy of the script. If I permit a playhouse to perform the play, that playhouse can limit the viewing of the licensed performance to those inside the building. Here, ABC is broadcasting its content to the public: it's like a playhouse that has no walls that anyone from the street can enjoy. The playhouse's recourse is to perform the play inside an enclosed building, and ABC's recourse is arguably to distribute its content to those under contract, which it cannot do over the public airwaves.
Now, if ABC owns the original rights in what it broadcasts, the story is different. In that case it can sue as the holder as the copyright, rather than the holder of merely a license. Even then, arguably ABC has granted everyone with access to broadcasted content an implied license to view it, and forward the content to another location as apparently Aereo does. What Aereo would then be doing is merely a "fair use" of that broadcasted content, which is specifically permitted by the copyright statutes.
Aereo is an online streaming service - among its offering, it enables people who stay very far away from NYC (for example, Sydney Australia) to watch TV stations from NYC.
The argument from the teevee stations is that by allowing the streaming of their broadcast content, Aereo is violating the "copyright".
I dunno about you, but I find this argument utterly preposterous !
Legally speaking, true, the way the copyright laws has been stipulated by those "legal experts" is that a copy of whatever copyrighted content (be it sound, image, book, or the combination of any form) can only be used one time, in one place.
Aero addresses this the same way Slingbox does. They argue that by having one physical receiver per active subscribed user, that they are not in violation; this is the same way it would work if you had a Slingbox at home in your NYC apartment, and were traveling in another country. The major difference is that advertisers that you see for NY products on your Slingbox have a reasonable expectation that you will be returning to the regional purchase market where your Slingbox is located at some point in the future, after your trip is over, while there's no similar expectation that you'll go to the roof where the Aereo receivers are located at some point, and then proceed to "buy local".
But c'mon !
People living in Sydney Australia don't get to watch teevee station beaming from NYC anyway - and by allowing them to watch it via online streaming, how the fuck this going to make the NYC teevee station losing money ?
ABC objects to this because they license content, and make money on commercials.
Commercials tend to be related to a regional market (i.e. you are unlikely to have a Big-O tires or Chick-fil-A or Trader Joe's or other locale centric food chain specific to the U.S. in Australia). Because of this, advertisers in the NY market don't see any benefit to ABC stations streamed outside the NY market, since they aren't applicable in remote markets; the thing that bothers ABC about this is ads tend to get paid by region, an by Nielsen ratings for the broadcast station within the region. So they don't get a higher income for their licensed content for their franchisees.
Assuming they could get franchisees in the local markets in Australia to pick up and license ABC programming, then there would be advertising for the local market in the broadcast area, and they'd see income for those programs within that region.
So Aereo breaks their regional marketing models by moving content + advertisements. This also devalues their properties, unless they agree to simultaneous release in various regions, and it erodes their leverage position of getting a franchisee in another region where there is no franchisee, because they are unable to hold them hostage to in demand content, which would (effectively) blackmail the local stations into taking a full content package, rather than one or two programs, and would cause income sharing for regional advertising back to the parent network (ABC).
This effect is, incidentally, the same reason that various networks have been going after cable and dish networks to get a larger programming package payout (with the exception that the cable and dish networks do regional advertising substitution on the fly into program packages, rather than taking all the advertising from the network). This was the basis of the CBS (network)/Time Warner (cable provider) dispute last year: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/09/02/cbs-time-warner-resolve-dispute/
If Aereo wins, the networks are going to need to revise their business model, so the most likely outcome is actually that there will be a loss for Aero, with a time period for them and the networks to agree to an implementation of a fetch-model for advertising, at which point Aero doesn't end up actually losing, and the network gets part of
NO! And that's where you're missing the important point, Aereo's business model is 'rent antenna's, a DVR & bandwidth to allow a user to stream content they want from the available OTA signal anywhere the user wants'...Aereo's users are NOT paying for streaming NBC, CBS, ABC etc., if they were then indeed Aereo's business model would be copyright infringement. Consider that for it to be the case that Aereo were charging for 'streaming NBC over the internet' then all they'd ever need is to record 1 copy of the show for themselves, then make that available to all their users that is explicitly not what they do, every user is recording & streaming the particular station they want to watch, again they are renting the infrastructure not paying for the content.
I just looked at the Aereo website, and it appears that they are actually restricting the service to users who live in the same metro area as the Aereo antenna farm in question. If things are as they seem, it impossible for people in Australia to register for Aereo, and the local ads remain relevant.
Not sure where you're getting your information, but I'm an Aereo subscriber in Houston - The people living in Sidney Australia can't watch Aereo USA - you have to live in Houston to receive Houston stations - I can't watch stations in L.A., New York, Chicago, etc,... - only Houston (they check zip codes & monitor IP addresses)