Aereo Shutting Down Boston Office

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."

Comments

Re:TV on the pocket screen....

[BitZtream]

Except ATSC IS better than the Internet for distributing large amounts of video over regional areas. Streaming video over the Internet, as its done now, is extremely wasteful from a resource perspective. Each viewer requires its own duplicate stream, rather than just sharing the same stream as everyone else.

Switch the Internet to IP multicast, THEN you MIGHT have a comparison ... not really, but at least you're getting into the same ballpark.

ATSC over the air broadcast can effectively serve as many receives as there are in its range without additional resources. Serving 1 or 1 billion is the same resource usage, only distance determines required resources. You do not need more bandwidth for more viewers. With IP (without using multicast), you still have the distance issue, but you also need an additional resource share for each additional view and there is no savings for larger numbers of viewers either. It just gets worse as you add viewers.

WTF aren't we using multicast dammit.