I've signed up for Aereo when it comes to Tampa. We currently have Netflix, HuluPlus, and often buy movies on Amazon Instant. $8 Aereo + $8 Netflix + $8 Hulu = $24. Add in $4/movie on Amazon for one/two movies a weekend and you can spend less than $50/mo and have access to near infinite amount of good content and live content when you want.
Cable companies didn't have to offer à la carte packages because the market, despite tremendous barriers, made that possible. Instead of picking channels, we pick the medium - Aereo (live local), Netflix (vast archived library and hopefully premium new content like House of Cards), Hulu (latest TV shows), and Amazon Instant (relatively new movies). This is very different from deciding if you want Discovery, HGTV, or HBO. Instead of picking genres, we're joining libraries. And I'm perfectly happy with that. In fact, I think this is a much better outcome than relying on cable companies to provide a good selection of TV channels.
My Roku and AppleTV can stream from many different libraries and I can turn the subscriptions on and off easily.
Why not just use an antenna? I'm missing something here. Aereo sounds nice for people who want to stay connected to their hometowns when living away, but if you're in Tampa why stream Tampa OTA TV when it's free over the air?
I tried. I spent $100+ dollars on various digital antennas but because of my location/trees/neighborhood, I barely get one or two channels, none of them clearly.
This is the first I've heard of what sounds like brilliant technology. It'll take the power away from the networks... so of COURSE it'll get shot down. The only reason I can see them hating this, is that a user seeing broadcast TV from NYC yet living in Salt Lake City is not likely to be spending any money at White Castle Hamburgers...so advertising dollars spent have the perceived effect of deflation. I don't think it's right at all. Would it be illegal if I bought the land, put up an antenna and ran a cable across the country?
I'd really like to see them challenge the FCC's silly geographical restriction too. There is no good reason not to let us watch NYC broadcast television from anywhere.
The geographical limitation is inextricable from the copyright limitation. Just because I intended to let you watch my TV show for free in NYC (by broadcasting it over the air) doesn't mean I wanted to let you watch it anywhere in the country.
Copyright holders are going to have to learn that the Internet is here to stay, that it is free from geographical restrictions, and that we are not going to halt the progress of technology for the sake of their antiquated business models. It takes less time to send a HD feature-length movie from Japan to New York than it takes to go to a video rental store. Times have changed, technology has improved, and we are not stuck with the same restrictions we had in the 1960s.
Red flag laws did not stop the automobile; why should copyright stop innovative uses of the Internet?
The fact that the internet is free from geographical restrictions doesn't mean that copyright holders don't get to impose whatever terms they want on your right to view the content they create.
> Red flag laws did not stop the automobile; why should copyright stop innovative uses of the Internet?
Terrible analogy. With red flag laws, the obsolete industry was just getting between the transactional relationship between car manufacturers and drivers. In this case, the "obsolete" industry is creating the thing that's of real value, the thing that people want: content.[1] There is nothing stopping internet-savvy content creators from allowing their content to be distributed over the internet under liberal terms, other than the fact that people don't want that content, they want the big name content from the big name content producers. And internet companies, like Youtube, etc, who make money off other peoples' content have tremendous incentive to make it seem like a battle of "progress versus outdated industries" when what they want is to be able to make a profit by inserting themselves in the middle of these transactions.
"The fact that the internet is free from geographical restrictions doesn't mean that copyright holders don't get to impose whatever terms they want on your right to view the content they create."
In fact, copyright holders cannot impose restrictions on my right to view their work. The only difference here is that the viewing involves the Internet and the outdated assumptions about copying and media distribution upon which copyright is based. A very long time ago, geographic restrictions made sense, but those days are decades past.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that the law is handed down from the heavens. Laws can be out of date, and laws that were once good at promoting progress can wind up impeding it.
"With red flag laws, the obsolete industry was just getting between the transactional relationship between car manufacturers and drivers"
No, with red flag laws an obsolete industry was trying to impose restrictions on the use of a new technology to the point of making it impractical. It had nothing to do with car manufacturers, it was a law that targeted the users of automobiles. That is exactly what is happening in this case: the broadcasters and media conglomerates are trying to impose enough restrictions on Aereo's technology that it becomes impractical.
The problem with your view of this is that you are connecting the production of entertainment to a specific business model. Broadcast TV killed Vaudeville, and the Internet is killing broadcast TV. We had entertainment before copyright, we have had it with copyright, and we will continue to have it in the hypothetical post-copyright world (if we are lucky enough to see such a day).
"Indeed, it's internet companies like Youtube, etc, trying to profit by getting in-between the content producers and the content consumers..."
You are ignoring the history of those companies. Youtube would never have existed had the RIAA and MPAA not conspired, lobbied, and abused the justice system for the purpose of killing peer to peer filesharing. A promising, decentralized technology that allowed anyone to broadcast entertainment on a global scale was destroyed and companies like Youtube took its place.
> That is exactly what is happening in this case: the broadcasters and media conglomerates are trying to impose enough restrictions on Aereo's technology that it becomes impractical.
What restrictions are they trying to impose exactly, other than "do whatever the hell you want just with your own damn content?" You're completely ignoring that crucial distinction between this situation and red flag laws. Cars were not taking advantage of horse driven carriages in any way. Aero exists only to distribute the content of the big media networks. Nobody would subscribe to their service without that content. Nobody is suing to restrict the technology--they're suing to force Aero to not free-ride on their content.
> A promising, decentralized technology that allowed anyone to broadcast entertainment on a global scale was destroyed and companies like Youtube took its place.
Nobody "killed" P2P. Last I checked, I could still torrent Ubuntu ISO's all day long.
You keep bringing up stuff like "allowed anyone to broadcast entertainment on a global scale" then ignore the fact that nobody has shut down the technology that allows people to do this. You can put together your 18th century murder mystery home movie and distribute it over Bittorrent and it's 100% legal. It's just that nobody wants the random crap filmed by some guy in their basement. They want $100 million Hollywood blockbusters.
What's happening is that content companies are fighting to protect companies like Napster, Youtube, etc, from free-riding on content they didn't create. And I don't think technology changes anything in this regard. Just because technology makes it easier to profit from other peoples' creations doesn't mean that it's "holding back innovation" to keep people from doing so.
Here is the one sentence summary of your argument: "Aereo is free to use their technology, just as long as it is not in any of the ways that would be useful!"
"What's happening is that content companies are fighting to protect companies like Napster, Youtube, etc, from free-riding on content they didn't create."
No one is stopping content companies from creating their own Napsters and Youtubes and making the money that the "free riders" are now taking. They have shown no willingness to do so even with so many profitable examples out there. If the companies had come out with something like Spotify back when Napster showed what the appetite for music was really like I suspect they'd be in a much better place now in both a PR and Profit sense.
>In fact, copyright holders cannot impose restrictions on my right to view their work.
I don't think there's such a thing as a "right" to view someone's work, unless it's granted by the copyright holder. (Where else would you get such a right?)
>A very long time ago, geographic restrictions made sense...
It doesn't matter if they make sense or not; I don't think there's anything in copyright law that says the terms of a license have to make sense to any particular person (and who would get to decide that, if there were?)
Also, it doesn't seem like geographic restrictions have anything (yet) to do with this; from what I've read, Aereo only works inside the normal broadcasting range of the channels it re-transmits.
>...an obsolete industry was trying to impose restrictions on the use of a new technology...
That would be a good explanation for the lawsuit, if it had been started by manufacturers of portable TVs who wanted it to be impractical for people to use their non-TV devices as though they were TVs. In this case, it's about a group of companies who hold public performance rights to certain works, trying to assert those rights. As it happens, a court has ruled that Aereo is not infringing those rights.
So there's nothing in this whole story to justify stripping content creators and copyright holders of any of their rights.
"I don't think there's such a thing as a "right" to view someone's work"
You do not think you have the right to use your eyes without first asking someone's permission? You have that right, and you are also free to listen to almost any radio transmission your equipment receives (the exceptions to this are not copyright related; it is more like restrictions on RADAR detectors).
"It doesn't matter if they make sense or not; I don't think there's anything in copyright law that says the terms of a license have to make sense to any particular person"
There are limits to what we allow licenses to cover. There is no reason we should still allow licenses to cover geographic regions in this day and age (but there is also no reason to continue clinging to copyright either).
"Also, it doesn't seem like geographic restrictions have anything (yet) to do with this; from what I've read, Aereo only works inside the normal broadcasting range of the channels it re-transmits."
They do that because of the law, because the law is so dangerously out of date. It is not as though someone sat down and said, "The Internet allows us to send streams to anyone in the world. Let's limit our service to New York City, and not take advantage of the technology available to us!" This was a decision that was motivated by a backwards, anachronistic legal framework.
"if it had been started by manufacturers of portable TVs who wanted it to be impractical for people to use their non-TV devices"
You seem to have missed the point: Broadcasting is the obsolete industry. We do not need centralized broadcasters with technology that cannot send video more than a couple hundred miles, because we have a decentralized system that can send video anywhere in the world.
"So there's nothing in this whole story to justify stripping content creators and copyright holders of any of their rights."
You don't think there is something wrong with having to build an individual antenna for every user of Aereo's service? You don't think there is something wrong with telling someone in rural Texas that they are not allowed to use Aereo's service because they live in the wrong place? Aereo's technology solves an artificial problem, one that results from a legal framework that now serves only to keep powerful corporations in power.
You speak of copyright as though it was handed down by God. Perhaps you should take a look at its history, before assuming that there is some moral imperative for it:
I don't see how the intention of copyright holders in this case is pertinent to what is legal. This line of thinking seems pretty similar to the arguments made in first sale doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine) intending to close grey markets.
If one can legally bridge a "free" over the air broadcast over TCPIP one mile (or whatever the size of a broadcast area is), why not one hundred miles or even across the country?
Using the analogy in the article, would it be illegal for me, sitting just outside the NY border, to watch NY broadcast television via a cable attached to an antenna that is inside NY?
I feel it's the beginning of the slow demise to the cable TV business model.
Aereo could easily add third tier cable stations or up and coming stations looking for an audience, i.e. Al Jazeera, Current TV and others. To fill in the void of no CNN, Fox News and others. ESPN though is a different story.
Why should they settle for third tier cable stations? I want HBO, Showtime, ESPN. If you're in the clear rebroadcasting Fox News you're in the clear with ESPN. How could -or would- you possibly see a difference? Copyrighted content is copyrighted content.
The issue is that they'd need an agreement with these stations. They don't need one with, say, NBC, because NBC is broadcasting their content over the air, and Aereo's arrays of tiny antennas are all receiving them. To do a similar thing for a cable station you'd need one cable subscription per user, which is pretty likely to wreck their business model. Third-tier stations looking for more viewers are more likely to license their stuff cheaply.
It's not really the copyright law that was silly, but the precedent case Cablevision that created this silly loophole to something being considered a "public performance."
No, it is copyright law that is "silly." When we need to build antenna arrays just to get around ludicrously outdated restrictions, the problem is the restrictions. What makes copyright worse is that the restrictions it imposes on our use of modern technology have not remained in place because the wheels of politics are slow, but because our politicians would rather protect anachronistic business models than push society into a new age.
The case made a big deal about the fact that Cablevision was streaming separate streams to each user, and therefore it wasn't a public performance. The correct answer would've been: IP unicast is never a public performance.
None of that would have been an issue if we simply did away with copyright and created a new system that made more sense in this day and age. We do not need a system that relies on huge, centralized monoliths to distribute our entertainment anymore, we made something better and are desperately hoping the law will catch up.
Last I checked, the law didn't do anything to keep consenting content creators and content consumers from using P2P or Youtube or whatever "something better" you're referring to. Absolutely nothing is stopping anyone from creating and using this whole alternative, 21st century system, and leaving those big bad media conglomerates in the dust. Other than the fact that people just want to watch House, or SNL, or a Sony BMG produced music video.
It's not copyright law that gives NBC, Viacom, etc, their power. It's the fact that people really want their products and aren't willing to settle for alternatives. All copyright does is keep the Youtubes of the world from cashing in on that demand by inserting themselves in the middle and trying to profit from the popularity of the big media products.
Reminds me of the DVD-streaming service Zediva that got legally badgered into shutting down; they were also trying to exploit a copyright "loophole" through clever use of hardware (the customer would rent an actual DVD that was played in an actual DVD player, and the content was then streamed to them): http://www.wired.com/business/2011/08/zediva-preliminary-inj...
I could see something like this being very useful for watching out of town sports teams. For the NFL, I might want to tune to the local Fox/CBS station to watch some game that I wouldn't normally get in my market. That is, assuming it's legal...
Fortunately, there are companies offering private mail boxes and forwarding services in most medium-to-large cities, so obtaining a billing address in the market of your choice isn't particularly difficult.
Right, but you'd also need a CC tied to that billing address, one that will presumably be billed monthly, so not a one-time throw-away. So you need a CC and a private mailbox service in every city you want to see TV. But that is really just circumventing the must-live-in-service-area rule, so subject to being found out and cut off.
The limitation on transmitting copyrighted works essentially creates a geographical monopoly with respect to television. Even if you could fly to another city and watch TV for free there, it is a copyright violation for a company to send you the signal from an antenna there. That's also why the Zediva rent-a-DVD-remotely was struck down: even if you own or rent the equipment, it seems illegal for the company to transmit the copyrighted work to you.
The ruling in the Aereo case gets around this because they limit their transmission to people who get the exact same free-to-air signal. There is still a transmission (which is what the dissenting judge based his argument upon), but the practical effect of getting the same content you would get otherwise seems to have prevailed, fortunately.
IANAL so I don't know how accurate that all is, but it's the understanding I've gotten from reading around.
IIRC, Aereo only lets you watch channels you could pick up with an antenna in your current location. So it's a DVR for the free channels you're already getting OTA, but with a much more convenient delivery mechanism (straight to your phone). And no need to set up an antenna, as they take care of that.
For that matter the 'private one copy per user', is even simpler to maintain without actually requiring to store multiple copies. All they need is a deduplication mechanism at the storage layer, and store the files block wise. Legally they could prove that they are recording a copy per user, while they would be paying close to a single copy cost in terms of storage.
I'm surprised that PBS was one of the plaintifs. I can't fathom how Aereo's service harms them, given that they do not show commercials. Do they believe that this is going to reduce the amount of people that watch telethons or buy their show on DVD?
PBS relies on syndication fees to fund their programming. If viewers were able to circumvent geographic broadcasts, it would undermine their national network system. Soon, only a handful of broadcasters or producers would be left, and anyone outside their area wouldn't have broadcasts any more.
Cable companies didn't have to offer à la carte packages because the market, despite tremendous barriers, made that possible. Instead of picking channels, we pick the medium - Aereo (live local), Netflix (vast archived library and hopefully premium new content like House of Cards), Hulu (latest TV shows), and Amazon Instant (relatively new movies). This is very different from deciding if you want Discovery, HGTV, or HBO. Instead of picking genres, we're joining libraries. And I'm perfectly happy with that. In fact, I think this is a much better outcome than relying on cable companies to provide a good selection of TV channels.
My Roku and AppleTV can stream from many different libraries and I can turn the subscriptions on and off easily.