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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.
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.
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
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.
That's retransmission for one person (you). Aereo was doing mass retransmission -- also known as redistribution.