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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 charges that OTA channels get to charge cable companies a purely a protection racket. THAT is what should have been made illegal, not Aereo!
but they tried to use an loop hole to get out of paying the fees to the OTA channels for the rights to retransmit.
In fact, those are rights to rebroadcast. While technically you would have to describe Aereo as "transmission", what they are really doing is transporting, and they are doing it as your agent.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Aereo was a leech. They were trying to take OTA signals, for free, and retransmit them for profit. There's no "must carry" analogy here, "must carry" implies that the channels are made available for cost (where I live the CATV provider offers local broadcast channels for next to nothing, $4.95/mo last time I checked), not that the CATV provider is marking them up for profit.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.