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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."

7 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 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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    2. 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).

    3. 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.

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

    Crap, I loved the old Aereo chairs.

  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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