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Aereo Shutting Down Boston Office

Posted by samzenpus on from the so-long-farewell dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news that Aereo is shutting down its Boston office and laying off some NYC staff. "Aereo's bad year just got worse. The company said on Thursday that it will shut down its Boston office and lay off 43 employees, citing yet another adverse court ruling and its trouble obtaining additional investment. According to Virginia Lam, a VP at Aereo, the company is not shutting down entirely: 'In an effort to reduce costs, we made the difficult decision to lay off some of our staff in Boston and New York. We are continuing to conserve resources while we chart our path forward. We are grateful to our employees for their loyalty, hard work and dedication. This was a difficult, but necessary step in order to preserve the company. We decline to comment further,' Lam wrote in an email."

2 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. TV on the pocket screen.... by The+New+Guy+2.0 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Aereo was an attempt to make local TV be receivable on cell phones and computers, but the copyright license wasn't negotiated properly. Why can't the iPhone have a ATSC chip inside it?

    1. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by rsmith-mac · · Score: 4, Informative

      Why can't the iPhone have a ATSC chip inside it?

      Standard ATSC (8VSB) actually doesn't perform very well when the receiver is in motion. Multipath is bearable for static receivers, but the addition of motion and doppler shift hammers the resulting signal strength.

      There's actually an ATSC addendum to deal with this - ATSC-M/H - but to the best of my knowledge it has never been widely implemented. Of course even if it was, I'm not sure if Apple would want to spend the space on the receiver and the antenna (UHF is fine, VHF is not).