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Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love to Get Sued (nytimes.com)
Want to watch the Super Bowl and other network TV for free? A start-up called Locast will let you, and (so far) the big broadcasters aren't trying to stop it. From a report: On the roof of a luxury building at the edge of Central Park, 585 feet above the concrete, a lawyer named David Goodfriend has attached a modest four-foot antenna that is a threat to the entire TV-industrial complex. The device is there to soak up TV signals coursing through the air -- content from NBC, ABC, Fox, PBS and CBS. Once plucked from the ether, the content is piped through the internet and assembled into an app called Locast. It's a streaming service, and it makes all of this network programming available to subscribers in ways that are more convenient than relying on a home antenna: It's viewable on almost any device, at any time, in pristine quality that doesn't cut in and out. It's also completely free.
If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Aereo, the Barry Diller-backed start-up that in 2012 threatened to upend the media industry by capturing over-the-air TV signals and streaming the content to subscribers for a fee -- while not paying broadcasters a dime. NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox banded together and sued, eventually convincing the Supreme Court that Aereo had violated copyright law. The clear implication for many: If you mess with the broadcasters, you'll file for bankruptcy and cost your investors more than $100 million.
Mr. Goodfriend took a different lesson. A former media executive with stints at the Federal Communications Commission and in the Clinton administration, he wondered if an Aereo-like offering that was structured as a noncommercial entity would remain within the law. Last January, he started Locast in New York. The service now has about 60,000 users in Houston, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas and Denver as well as New York, and will soon add more in Washington, D.C. Mr. Goodfriend, 50, said he hoped to cover the entire nation as quickly as possible. "I'm not stopping," he said. "I can't now." The comment is basically a dare to the networks to take legal action against him. By giving away TV, Mr. Goodfriend is undercutting the licensing fees that major broadcasters charge the cable and satellite companies -- a sum that will exceed $10 billion this year, according to the research firm Kagan S&P Global Market Intelligence. For cable customers, the traditional network channels typically add about $12 to a monthly bill.
If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Aereo, the Barry Diller-backed start-up that in 2012 threatened to upend the media industry by capturing over-the-air TV signals and streaming the content to subscribers for a fee -- while not paying broadcasters a dime. NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox banded together and sued, eventually convincing the Supreme Court that Aereo had violated copyright law. The clear implication for many: If you mess with the broadcasters, you'll file for bankruptcy and cost your investors more than $100 million.
Mr. Goodfriend took a different lesson. A former media executive with stints at the Federal Communications Commission and in the Clinton administration, he wondered if an Aereo-like offering that was structured as a noncommercial entity would remain within the law. Last January, he started Locast in New York. The service now has about 60,000 users in Houston, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas and Denver as well as New York, and will soon add more in Washington, D.C. Mr. Goodfriend, 50, said he hoped to cover the entire nation as quickly as possible. "I'm not stopping," he said. "I can't now." The comment is basically a dare to the networks to take legal action against him. By giving away TV, Mr. Goodfriend is undercutting the licensing fees that major broadcasters charge the cable and satellite companies -- a sum that will exceed $10 billion this year, according to the research firm Kagan S&P Global Market Intelligence. For cable customers, the traditional network channels typically add about $12 to a monthly bill.
but the lawyers won't. Looking forward to seeing how this pans out.
wow, this is inspiring, thank you slashdot for telling me about this bodacious use of technology
Thanks.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It's just not big enough yet to get enough attention to make it worth a lawsuit. The only way to avoid the same fate as the last guys who did this is to not grow.
So, have at it guys... Just make sure you have a way to isolate yourself and your personal assets from the company's assets so when you go bankrupt they won't be able to leave you in the poor house.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Tried it from Seattle, was told I wasn't in the right area.
How is the operation paying for itself? TANSTAFL.
So you didn't even bother reading the summary and you just jump straight to your bullshit unqualified illiterate zero-knowledge-of-law legal conclusions, eh? Fucking moron Bobbied lol. Hold your farts in next time you old gasbag.
Each Aero subscriber had his own antenna. When buy I an antenna, no one complains about that. Why can't I rent one?
a VPN that shows its location as being in one of the target cities?
I'm all for sticking it to cable companies but if this makes a serious dent in content creator's revenue we're going to see a serious decline in the quality (well, what little quality exists) and quantity of new programming available for traditional TV. Locast's success would be its end.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
undercutting the licensing fees that major broadcasters charge the cable and satellite companies
No he's not. He's place/time shifting OTA broadcasts. Cable and satellite companies don't enter into the mix.
Doesn't look like the service provides DVR. Not going back to watching commercials.
Local people sharing would eliminate possible legal troubles that come from a centrally owned system. Having a multi-node system would also eliminate the problems with traffic throttling due to a single ISP. Just need the hardware and spare network bandwidth by volunteers. ... Re-reading this kind of sounds like TOR with a new front end.
Broadcasters can charge for advertising based upon the population of their BTA (Broadcast Trade Area). A BTA has strictly-defined boundaries based on propagation studies, interference patterns, and other data, both calculated and measured.
There is room for a service like this if the BTA is recalculated to include recipients of OTA television by non-OTA means. Broadcasters can make money on higher advertising rates without the service provider having to pay royalties.
Just saying, that murdering new species is not necessarily the best first reaction to their presence in your space.
While the story is being covered by the, often paywalled, New York Times...
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
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On the plus side it does not seem to care from where you are watching.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Even if they were to win their future legal battle with the media networks, I don't feel particularly excited... All they are doing is extending the reach of the mainstream media to people who can't get free OTA reception. In essence, they are doing the work of the mainstream media for free, all while that same mainstream media is angling to shut them down with lawsuits. The mainstream media is clearly a bunch of idiots. Why help them at all?
A far better use of these peoples' time and efforts would be to bring lower cost Internet access to areas poorly served by the cable/telcom monopolies. But alas, I guess they have no ideas about how to do that...
Yet another socialistic democrat demanding everything be provided for free, pade for by hard working real americans.
...but it only serves places awash in local signals. When (as if) it serves places no signals reach, then it might be of some interest.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
If they relay the commercials too, what's the problem?
IcraveTV tried to do this back in 1999. I still have a business card from their compression engineer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
After many years of not using broadcast TV, trying out this service leads me to conclude that not only have I not been missing anything, but that free is too high a price for me to watch broadcast TV.
I wish them luck though! Surely someone will crack the legal nut that is re-transmission of public broadcasts.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This has been litigated already, it won't end well although the connections the CEO has to industry are interesting.
Cable companies originally started out exactly like Aero did. They put up an array of big antennas and then ran the antenna directly to the consumer's home along with amplifying it etc. Eventually the TV stations got a declaration making rebroadcast a copyright violation. At that point the cable companies began having to pay fees to carry the content.
This is the crux. It is a violation of copyright to rebroadcast anything without the express written consent of the creators.
It doesn't matter if the customer could hang an antenna out their window and get the same thing. The fact that you collect it and redistribute it is where the violation is.
Consider this. Is it legal for me to pick up a copy of the local newspaper, make a photocopy of it and mail the photocopy to my customers?
It doesn't matter if it's for profit or not. It is with some very well noted exceptions related to archival purposes the act of copying that violates copyright, not the act of distribution, which is the matter being violated.
This could be really good. I've moved around the country a bit and it's always a hassle being a fan of sports teams in cities where I no longer live. I wouldn't mind being able to watch the Astros or Rockets or Bears or Blackhawks without having to invest in an expensive package.
I think I'm gonna try this locast. Plus, on a day like today, it would be fun to watch a local news broadcast from Chicago, where it's -8 F while wearing shorts and sitting on my porch.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm behind a small hill, just big enough to interfere with broadcast signals coming from Philly. After replacing a couple of small cable boxes with Roku sticks I found this and installed it. It's good enough. If my cable supplier starts charging for their streaming app, I'll drop their tv stuff and go all streaming.
Got it on my phone too...
It works fine, at least for me in CO. The problem is that, so far, I have not found anything worth watching.
copyright is the ability of an owner to refuse someone else using their material in an unintended way.
Film the new release of starwars on my cell phone in the theater, copyright is what prevents me from distributing it.
Thus it's not a question of "can I do it" or "is it east to do". These waves are being broadcast freely. But the intended distance for viewing is the intended distance of the broadcast. not replication by extraordinary means.
THe rationale for copyright is that by restricting acces it creates market place and thus actually more goods and services will be produced. Any one item will be reproduced less but the profit and creative control of the producer creates and environment we all benefit from. it doesn't matter that its free to copy. it harms the marketplace. so it is a stealing from the common good even if you are giving it away
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Locast is a public service to Americans, providing local broadcast signals over the Internet in select cities. All you have to do is sign up online, provide your name and email address, and certify that you live in, and are logging on from, one of the select US cities (“Designated Market Area”). Then, you can select among local broadcasters and stream your favorite local station.
Locast.org is a “digital translator,” meaning that Locast.org operates just like a traditional broadcast translator service, except instead of using an over-the-air signal to boost a broadcaster’s reach, we stream the signal over the Internet to consumers located within select US cities.
Ever since the dawn of TV broadcasting in the mid-20th Century, non-profit organizations have provided “translator” TV stations as a public service. Where a primary broadcaster cannot reach a receiver with a strong enough signal, the translator amplifies that signal with another transmitter, allowing consumers who otherwise could not get the over-the-air signal to receive important programming, including local news, weather and of course, sports. Locast.org provides the same public service, except instead of an over-the-air signal transmitter, we provide the local broadcast signal via online streaming.
You need a broadband Internet connection for optimal performance. Using a laptop, smartphone, or computer connected to the Internet, point your browser to www.Locast.org to sign up. You then can choose which local broadcast station to watch from your Internet-enabled device.
This service is essentially no different, really, than what the earliest days of cable TV services were: a way for everyone in a market area to receive the television stations in that market area without having to have an antenna. I, myself, in the 70's and 80's in a housing tract where the HOA did not allow you to have an antenna on your roof; it was using the cable TV service or have an antenna in your attic or inside your house. We opted for cable TV. 'Locast' is, as it states, an internet-age updated version of that early 'antenna service'. So long as they can ensure within reasonable bounds that people outside the markets it's serving can't receive those stations, then I don't see a problem, really. They're not editing out commercials or inserting commercials, they're not recording content (if you don't count an AV data stream, even transcoded-on-the-fly, as 'recorded', that is) and they're not really 'selling' the signals themselves, they're selling a service to facilitate reception of stations within the market area to people who geographically-speaking should be able to receive it, but may not be able to do so for extenuating circumstances. So I can see why they'd want to be sued: if they win they create the legal precedent for services like this to be legally allowed.
I think broadcasters should welcome a service like this, if they want to save the OTA broadcast industry as a whole. I'm not saying they should ditch their megawatt transmitters and huge broadcast antennas, but they should allow services like this to exist as a supplement to OTA signals for the reason specified by Locast and companies like them: to fill in the gaps in signal coverage.
Are there going to be technically-inclined people who will find a way around technologically-enforced restrictions on who can stream what markets' stations? Yes, of course. But that will always be a minority; there's always going to be 'pilfering' of some kind with just about anything, and trying to stop 100% of it is an endless game of Whack-a-Mole, as the RIAA and MPAA damned well know, and as such it's not worth doing. There is a need for a service like this, which differs from 'streaming' services like Spotify or Hulu and their ilk, and I think it's time has come. The broadcast televsion industry would be wise to welcome it instead of fighting against it.
Copyright law doesn't say commercial distribution is prohibited while free distribution is allowed. It says the copyright holder has complete authority over distribution of their work. In fact that's why Aereo lost. Aereo wasn't actually charging for the broadcast TV content. They were charging you to rent an antenna from them (they went so far as to give each user their own individual antenna with their own encoder to generate their own individual stream, instead of using the signal from a single antenna to encode a single video stream broadcast to all their users). They were technically providing the TV broadcasts for free; you were only paying for equipment rental.
The Supreme Court ruled against them because the copyright holder has ultimate say over how their content is distributed, paid or free.
17 USC 111(a): "Certain Exempted. The secondary transmission of a performance or display of a work embodied in a primary transmission is not an infringement of copyright if... the secondary transmission is not made by a cable system but is made by a governmental body, or other nonprofit organization, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, and without charge to the recipients of the secondary transmission other than assessments necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service."
Law says it's legal if it's non-profit.
Good luck to locast users watching the Superbowl. The playoffs were so laggy via Locast that I gave up watching them.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
The parent post is very informative, but won't be seen by a lot of people because it's AC and doesn't have its own subject line.
Quoting the AC:
17 USC 111(a): "Certain Exempted. The secondary transmission of a performance or display of a work embodied in a primary transmission is not an infringement of copyright if... the secondary transmission is not made by a cable system but is made by a governmental body, or other nonprofit organization, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, and without charge to the recipients of the secondary transmission other than assessments necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service."
So the law is re-transmitting the broadcast is okay if it's done by a non-profit.
Note this is only about re-transmitting *broadcast* TV, which was already being sent out to everyone for free.
he has collected $10,000 in donations so far, mostly in $5 increments. He took out a high-interest loan, at around 15 percent, to fund the operation, which to date has cost more than $700,000.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
if the adverts are there.
I suppose the sports team are upset, but as a tax payer currently paying interest on bonds for 3 or 4 stadiums they can bite my shinny metal ass.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So I think they will get their wish. The MAFIAA thinks they have a right to royalties from all music, all video, forever. So yes, they will sue.
Corporatism != Free Market
The parent post is very informative, but won't be seen by a lot of people because it's AC and doesn't have its own subject line.
Quoting the AC:
17 USC 111(a): "Certain Exempted. The secondary transmission of a performance or display of a work embodied in a primary transmission is not an infringement of copyright if... the secondary transmission is not made by a cable system but is made by a governmental body, or other nonprofit organization, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, and without charge to the recipients of the secondary transmission other than assessments necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service."
So the law is re-transmitting the broadcast is okay if it's done by a non-profit.
Note this is only about re-transmitting *broadcast* TV, which was already being sent out to everyone for free.
So, a non-profit,in theory, could deliver broadcast TV only charging for the maintenance of the antennas/servers/internet used for delivery? Interesting...
Wow, spoofing is easy. Took me like 5 mintues! Downlaod an app for spoofing. Turn on developer mode on your phone. Tell your developer settings to use the GPS info provided by downloaded app. Launch app and start spoofing.
I tested it out and it was easy breezy!!!
The Android app checks for location to make sure you're streaming from the correct city. Use Fake Traveler to spoof your location.
Empire Carpets isnt going to come from NY to do your new shag rug in LA. DERP.
I notice in the website that they very clearly state that they are a not-for-profit service, which means they CAN make a profit (it's just not the goal of the enterprise), it does put limits to certain things (IANAL), but it's not as restrictive as a non-profit.
You may have seen a Superb Owl. That's all. No biggie.
Admittedly I haven't read the actual article but if he is only allowing people in the city that he has an antenna in to access that stream and isn't altering the content in any way (e.g. isn't stripping the commercials from the feeds) then is there really anything the broadcasters have to be upset with? If the feeds are unaltered and limited to the area the antenna is in then it is the same signal anyone with an antenna could get. This just guarantees that there is a strong signal and the feed isn't getting interrupted (at the viewer's end). In fact it could actually be better since the system is actually guaranteeing the the commercials reach the viewer (i.e. the commercial could suffer interference if the viewer used their own antenna).
Since Locast isn't profiting from this I can't see the broadcasters having much to complain about.
If the stored programs were the game-stopper, and each user had his own antenna (easy to do with a small antenna in a large metro area), then this might pass muster. even as a paid service. However, the industry reaction has been to load the public airways with crap, and keep things like the new Star Trek isolated to their own paid services.
I think the key there is non-profit. Does that mean 501(c)(3)-only or any individual who wants to share their network bandwidth?
This could be a win for bradcasters
If the guy can provide vieweship & demographics numbers, the networks can ask for more ad revenue from their respective advertisers. I don't know at which point the additional ad revenue will make up for the lost cable fees but those may be lost already. People are cutting the cord. Networks could be losing out to netflix, amazon, etc but this way they can still show ads to the cordcutters. Maybe the long play for them
Hummm..
1) Grab antenna TV
2) Stream it live for 'free' and soak up all that user data
3) 'Give' the user data to a 3rd party, so you're a non-profit
4) Third party sells user data for *profit*?
The broadcast television industry would be wise to welcome it instead of fighting against it.
Locast can only increase at no cost to them a station's/network's viewership (thus ad rates.) They should be (at least quietly) funding the legal battle.
Vote for Seattle; let's get some Locast broadcast TV access going in the Seattle area! I threw in $100 - what will you put in?
A Super Bowl goes hand in hand with a Super Bowel.
They'd need to pay me to watch that.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
You could vote it up....
I miss old slashdot, when people wouldn't diss ACs so much. Ok, ok, in the same way, at least ;)
If I had mod points, dear AC, I would have voted it up.
I see that now, those who had mod points did vote it up after I posted.
So when will we have a DVR version of this?
Then it would become truly useful.
Derp? Is it 2008 again?
Did you even bother reading all whopping FOUR sentences? Here's a clue: the last one covers your case.
You have added nothing to this conversation. Your comment isn't worth the few millivolts it took to transmit it across the Internet.
Shame on you for being so wasteful with energy.