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Bye Bye Aereo, For Now
An anonymous reader writes It didn't take long for Aereo to deal with the realities of the U.S. Supreme Court decision. As of 11:30am EDT today Aereo is suspending operations while they go back to U.S. District Court. In order to keep good will with customers during this time, they are refunding the last month's payment for service. curtwoodward (2147628) writes to point out that the decision which has shut down Aereo for now doesn't mean doom for other cloud services: Don't listen to the trolls---the Supremes were very clear that their ruling only applied to Aereo's livestream and things that look just like it. iCloud, Dropbox and friends are fine.
The Supremes weren't as clear as they wanted, hence the lawsuit by Fox against Dish over Hopper the next day.
...think that was ever going to last? C'mon now... really?
A Letter to Our Consumers: Standing Together for Innovation, Progress and Technology - An Update on Aereo
"The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress." --Charles Kettering, inventor, entrepreneur, innovator & philanthropist
A little over three years ago, our team embarked on a journey to improve the consumer television experience, using technology to create a smart, cloud-based television antenna consumers could use to access live over the air broadcast television.
On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision in favor of Aereo, dealing a massive setback to consumers.
As a result of that decision, our case has been returned to the lower Court. We have decided to pause our operations temporarily as we consult with the court and map out our next steps. You will be able to access your cloud-based antenna and DVR only until 11:30 a.m. ET today. All of our users will be refunded their last paid month. If you have questions about your account, please email support@aereo.com or tweet us @AereoSupport.
The spectrum that the broadcasters use to transmit over the air programming belongs to the American public and we believe you should have a right to access that live programming whether your antenna sits on the roof of your home, on top of your television or in the cloud.
On behalf of the entire team at Aereo, thank you for the outpouring of support. It has been staggering and we are so grateful for your emails, Tweets and Facebook posts. Keep your voices loud and sign up for updates at ProtectMyAntenna.org - our journey is far from done.
but they tried to use an loop hole to get out of paying the fees to the OTA channels for the rights to retransmit.
Dish, directv, TWC, Comcast, WOW and others likely would of done the same if Aereo won to cut there fees.
Now Aereo can stay around and do the same thing if they pay the fees.
If they simply delay the stream by a tiny amount, even just a few seconds, the decision no longer applies, because then it becomes timeshifting on behalf of the customer, rather than live retransmission. Am I the only one who sees this loophole?I hope not.
Got a second customer letter this morning - he's framing it as this is against progress *qua* progress. That sort of approach won't work - he needs to find whatever business model will work with what they want to accomplish.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Why the fuck do basic tech terms get defined, but "Aereo" has no explanation?
Let's be clear on what happened here. The supposedly conservative judges modified an existing law.
They took the text of the law and decided that something that complied with the letter of the law was still in violation "because".
Because what? Because they thought that the intent of the legislators when passing the law was to ban this type of arrangement. Perhaps so, but that should not be relevant. What should be relevant is the text of the law. What happened was that the Supreme Court essentially re-wrote the law. But more than this, if any law doesn't mean what the text says it means, how can there be any certainty in society?
As for the claim that this only applies to Aereo, that is either a deliberate lie or great naiivete by the Supreme Court. Already Fox is attempting to use the ruling against Direct TV.
Why do people waste so much energy on TV?
Aereo can certainly stream PBS and other must carry stations legally by this ruling.
Please Aereo, continue carrying these streams while you work for a solution.
What they should have done is lease or sell the boxes to their subscribers and charge a monthly service fee to keep their boxes from being attacked by viruses, etc.
That way they can't be sued for anything but installing commodity software at the owner's request.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There is a channel, and a cable company. A channel could pay a postive, or negative, fee to the cable company to carry its content. In a totally free market, some channels would pay a positive fee, others would pay a negative fee.
America does NOT have a totally free market. Congress made it illegal for channels to pay a positive fee to the cable company to carry its content. If a channel wants the cable company to carry its channel, Congress says the cable company MUST carry the channel free of charge. If the channel wants to pay a negative fee to the cable company, the cable company DOES NOT have to carry the channel.
That is why cable companies periodically try to drop some over the air channels, and the channel tries to paint it as the big, evil cable company trying to kill the little tv channel. What the channel is really saying is, "We want you cable users to keep paying to receive this channel via cable. Yes you could say money by watching this show over the air for free, but we want more money." Many viewers keep supporting the 'local channels', so cable keeps paying positive fees to some tv channels. The public gets what it deserves.
If they simply delay the stream by a tiny amount, even just a few seconds, the decision no longer applies, because then it becomes timeshifting on behalf of the customer, rather than live retransmission. Am I the only one who sees this loophole?
The Supremes don't take it well when you try to evade their decisions by resorting to half-assed tricks and gimmicks. Tricks that may be particularly embarrassing to the minority who stood by you the first time around.
If Aereo had only given away the service they might have survived? Then again. its still rebroadcasting a copyrighted station and content. I am not sure what they hope a lesser court can do now? What they need to consider is if their subscribers are that loyal as to pay more to cover the licenses to re broadcast their channels? I highly doubt it considering you can buy a satellite service for $20 or so and get local channels. As I see it their are other companies re broadcasting legally through streaming, such as Hulu and Netflix. Many station even stream channels on their own sites free. You will always have some cheap skates who need stuff as cheap as possible. Hey, it was fun while it lasted, but most of knew it would not last long. Goodbye Aereo.
Where != were.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
They weren't renting an antenna.
You are correct, except that was exactly what they were doing.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Some of the disqussion I've heard about aero is that they retransmit "about the same time" as the transmission which is freely available through public airwaves. If I could hook up an HD antenna to my phone I could pick up the signals. So, what if:
1. They delayed the retransmission (some sites said maybe 10 minutes, what about an hour?)
2. What if they SOLD the equipment to the subscribers rather than renting it? Maybe $99 or $129 depending upon the amount of data storage you want. They would just be another cloud service. In fact, they could encrypt the signals when recorded, and decrypt them only on the subscriber's system. Now it CAN'T be a public performance.
Let's be real, here. You only get the signals for your local area. You can't get Chicago channels if you live in New York. Some of us live in areas where there are NO channels via HD. Our options are limited. Lucky guys.
If I could find someone to host a receiver for me in the big city, then hook it up to the Internet, I could do the same thing. Stick a tuner card in a PC that is always on. That's all that aereo is doing.
Have one company that "rents" the antenna and provides a Software Defined Radio as a Service offering, where an API is simply provided to provision an antenna controller box which has its own IP address that listens on a specified frequency and bandwidth, compresses the bits, and streams them to the consumer.
Then another company that makes a box, which integrates with this service and "selects" television channels, from the radio antenna provider who is acting as a common carrier for "capturing signals in the air" and feeding them through across mediums, with no specific knowledge or interpretation of those signals or what data they might represent.
Look at this example. With technology, technically, according to the US Supreme Court, the act of my antenna on a roof picking up a signal and transmitting it to my TV is in fact, "retransmission".
But it simply isn't so.
Also what precisely is the difference between my antenna wire and the internet? This is the exact same issue that impacts other technologies, often in the forms of patents. Once a technology is patented, sometimes a new technology comes along like Ethernet replacing modem, but the courts have been allowing the patent to continue to function applying the patents technologies to the new technologies. This is exactly the same things that make Newegg lose to a recent patent troll who had patented the use of encryption over telephony modems between machines. The patent was applied to the modern infrastructure, and Newegg was found to be in infringement.
In the case of Aereo, the company has merely shifted the distribution from antenna cable to internet cable (fiber/copper line and even wireless Ethernet), and allowed the antenna to be placed at a remote facility off my actual property. My belief is that with Aereo's service I am in fact renting an antenna, running my account inside a VPS on their services, and streaming the video over to my devices via the internet, which is simply a more modern way of handling video data delivery than we're used to.
Somebody fucked up big time at the US Supreme Court for saying this product is anything different that I just explained it.
Also I think Aereo should tweak their service a bit, and relaunch it. Function as if the website browser or streaming platform was the new "driver" or "TV" screen for interfacing with the broadcasted content. But a focus on the fact that each user is renting time to use an antenna and VPS inside their machine whereby they run the Aereo remote broadcasting software should be in order, so that technically it's the users own server doing the streaming ...