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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."

30 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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

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

      Because iTunes competes with broadcast.

    2. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by TWX · · Score: 2

      Because according to Apple, they don't design for the past.

      On the other hand, the future in content is murky. Old contracts governing content are already having problems (look at music swaps in TV shows when they're released DVD for example) and it's going to turn into a giant steaming pile before it gets better.

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

      ATSC is the present way of moving content over the air to the public.

    4. 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).

    5. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      ATSC is the present way of moving content over the air to the public.

      ... and a buggy whip is current technology for driving a horse drawn carriage too.

    6. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by The+New+Guy+2.0 · · Score: 1

      ATSC-M/H has been around for a while now... why no implementation?

    7. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by erice · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

      What would be the point? You need a rather large, well aimed antenna to reliably receive broadcast TV as anyone who has tried to use "rabbit ears" can tell you. Even the largest phablet is not large enough for such an antenna and no one will want to aim it at the tower.

    8. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by BitZtream · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

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    9. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by Hamsterdan · · Score: 1

      Depends where the transmitters are. Here If I remove my outside antenna and just use a paper clip in the TV I will still get all the locals.

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    10. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You mean "switch on IP multicast on the Internet".

      > WTF aren't we using multicast dammit.

      Multicast requires smarter routers that do more than just BGP. For some damn reason, folks don't want to spend the money on the hardware to make multicast work across the internet. It's not like multicast would crush the Internet like it might have back in the 1990's; Comcast (and all cable companies that also do data) uses multicast on their WANs to deliver TV service to "digital" set-top boxes.

    11. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by CauseBy · · Score: 1

      Jeez do we still not have multicast? I studied how multicast would revolutionize internet video way way back in 2001 in college. Back then streaming video was fingernail-sized 16-color 4-frames-per-second animated GIFs. I thought we'd have multicast all deployed and ready by 2005 but I stopped paying attention.

      And how's that IPv6 thing going? Are we don't with that yet? Oh, here, let me go back into my hole for another decade.

    12. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      It's like including an AM/FM chip -- it lets phone users skip streaming music, and forcing users to download stuff to overrun caps for extra charges is a selling point to the wireless companies.

      And therefore is not of interest to the wireless companies.

      Remember the customers of Samsung and HTC and friends are the wireless phone companies, not you. So "poor" system designs that use up data are in the interest of the wireless phone companies. Therefore no radio or tv chips.

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    13. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by Megane · · Score: 1

      Also, a few stations are on VHF, which really wants a big antenna. The worst are the few on low VHF (2-6). Another problem is that you have to receive the full (up to 19Mbit) data stream, from which you have to extract the full resolution sub-channel. If it is an HD sub-channel, there is no lower-resolution stream, so you have to down-sample it for a smaller screen. This probably isn't great for battery life. Japan has something called "1seg", which is a lower resolution stream specifically for mobile, but its very nature depends on the ISDB-T modulation they use.

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    14. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by HBI · · Score: 1

      Because multicast is complicated. You think it's easy - it is not. The professional tools for distributing multicast are not ready for prime time and the consumer hardware doesn't know how to deal with it at all. It's not as simple as sparse mode vs dense mode, even. Try doing multicast with multiple links not run by the same provider, for instance.

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    15. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by tibit · · Score: 1

      I don't know what you're talking about. Seriously. You get an HD HomeRun Prime and attach it to your cable. You then install AirPlayer on your Apple mobile device and you can watch up to three cable channels through DLNA. This includes the encrypted but free-to-copy ones if you want to get a CableCard from your provider. If you can get a buddy in Japan to set up an iTunes account for you there, you can also get an app that supports DTCP-IP content encryption - for some reason it's not available on the U.S. app store. But if you do this, you can watch any content, including encrypted no-copy content.

      If you want a DVR, simply get the HD MOXI DVR, and you can do the same, but with recording support. Easy-peasy.

      Putting a space- and energy-hungry cable or antenna tuner into a mobile device is crazy. Seriously.

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    16. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by citizenr · · Score: 1

      Except ATSC IS better

      1 mpeg2 better than h.264?
      2 pushing down your throat better than pooling?
      3 fixed schedule better than on demand?

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    17. Re:TV on the pocket screen.... by ashpool7 · · Score: 1

      IP Multicast sounds great until you hit the cell tower. Aren't all those signals encrypted per-phone?

  2. Crap, I loved those chairs. by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 2

    Crap, I loved the old Aereo chairs.

    1. Re:Crap, I loved those chairs. by The+New+Guy+2.0 · · Score: 1

      I'm not understanding the joke... what were Aereo Chairs?

    2. Re:Crap, I loved those chairs. by Narcocide · · Score: 1

      He's talking about Aeron Chairs, a specific line of super over-priced but very comfy and futuristic-looking office chair that briefly became a status symbol during the post-dot-com ergonomics boom.

    3. Re:Crap, I loved those chairs. by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 1

      They are the Apple of office chairs: overhyped, overpriced, and the yardstick by which competing products are measured, but they fulfil the needs of some people so well that the higher price tag is justified. I had an Aeron at the office for a while, and liked it a lot; I subsequently got one for my home office as well.

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    4. Re:Crap, I loved those chairs. by Krishnoid · · Score: 1

      They were a secondary, less well-known product made from this very popular item. The bubbles improved cushioning and back support.

  3. Sucks for them, but... by sootman · · Score: 2

    ... I'm pretty sure "We are continuing to conserve resources while we chart our path forward" is code for "We executives are hiding money for ourselves until the inevitable shutdown." Unfair as the ruling is, I'm pretty sure they're hosed.

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    1. Re:Sucks for them, but... by The+New+Guy+2.0 · · Score: 1

      They claimed they were giving an antenna chip to their subscribers. You can't just run a community antenna system without paying each station involved.

    2. Re:Sucks for them, but... by FuzzNugget · · Score: 1

      Pretty sad, considering they went *far* out of their way to follow the letter of a bullshit law.

  4. Ok so Aereo wants to pay the FTA networks money... by jonwil · · Score: 1

    Aereo has offered to pay the FTA networks the same amount of money as they get paid by Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, Dish Network, DirecTV and all the others and broadcast the same content (ads included) to the same geographic area. Why aren't the FTA networks interested?

  5. Re:Catch-22 by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

    Aero's argument is logical -- we're just renting you an antenna and remote DVR system, which are legal devices in your home.

    The problem is this amounts to a cable TV system, at least the rebroadcasting part. Congress specifically covered this case in law by preventing cable companies from doing the exact same thing -- just acting as a fancy antenna to transmit local TV through their cable to your TV, which you could receive over the air anyway.

    But Congress decided to allow broadcast to get paid by cable for this. End of story. You can't do the logical thing.

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  6. Startup, startdown by gatkinso · · Score: 1

    This is the way of things. I am sure the execs will not be hurting. The employees? Go find another job, you,

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  7. Re:Ok so Aereo wants to pay the FTA networks money by The+New+Guy+2.0 · · Score: 1

    Because the OTA network want to bundle their cable channels in the packages. There's no standalone rate for just the broadcast channels, you have to carry all the channels such as NBC wanting to also package in CNBC, MSNBC, NBCSN, etc.