In the United Kingdom and the Crown Dependencies, any household watching or recording live television transmissions as they are being broadcast (terrestrial, satellite, cable, or internet) is required to hold a television licence. Since 1 April 2010 the annual licence fee has been £145.50 for colour and £49.00 for black and white.
10 seconds on wikipedia would show the answer is "no".
This is kind of a problem when trying to import UK shows into the US, aside from being two nations separated by language, its hard to figure out how to shoehorn "an hour" of show into our 1/3 advertisement schedules. Even PBS has about 10 minutes of ads and "sponsorship ads" per hour.
My superficial opinion is BBC shows transmit at an IQ around 100 or local population average, compared to USA TV around an IQ of 60 or so. I believe this discrepancy is demanded by advertisers wanting the eyeballs to be more gullible, a more easily duped audience. So aside from imports being "too long" for US viewers, imports assume the viewers actually graduated high school, etc, which is another impedance mismatch. Its hilarious comparing shows that jumped the pond, like scrapheap challenge/junkyard wars. Similar, yes, but a definite class distinction of being aimed at grade school level vs high school level.
As someone living in the U.S., I'd happily pay the ~$18.50/month to have unlimited access to the programming (plus web streaming) that U.K. citizens do.
Its not the library (well, 70 years of back catalogue quality helps) - its the production. Both Netflix and Amazon know this, and are starting up as production companies. Now put that against an organisation who has been world leader since the industry was invented.
We have somehow ended up with a jewel that keeps producing fantastic quality work. It will find a way to navigate entertainment for the next 70 years too, I hope.
British TV license = no ads. Cable/satellite = I'm paying $40 a month and getting ads interrupting what I'm watching every 5 minutes.
Also, have you seen British television? The quality of the original programming far surpasses most of the networks we have in the U.S., and is easily on par with premium channels like HBO.
The British TV licence pays for BBC TV, and BBC Radio, (Now including the World Service, which used to be funded from the Foreign Office department of government) and the BBC Website stuff.
It's amazing.
There are some quirks, though. Buying the licence allows you to watch or record tv broadcasts.
So, it's possible for a person to never ever use any BBC services but still need a TV Licence.
And it's also possible for a person to listen to BBC Radio all day every day, and to heavily use the website, and to watch BBC programmes using the catch up service, but not need to buy a licence.
And a lot of people (mostly women) were in prison because they did not pay the fines they got for not having a tv licence. Prison's probably not the right solution for that problem.
I thought the Aereo decision was contrived, but I have to say: if you want to control distribution of your content, don't broadcast it unencrypted across the whole country.
The downside is that it's unlikely that all of the 50 million Americans that use an antenna for broadcast television can afford a computer and internet access. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and what content is on the public airwaves in five or ten years.
I think the problem there is not that those people will be unable to get their entertainment, but that they are being excluded from the Internet age. The solution is not to hold back the wheels of progress for the sake of their entertainment, it is to deploy Internet access in ways that are affordable and which are not locked down to any specific vendor. This is about more than television; people without Internet access are excluded from an increasing number of businesses, sources of education, and news (the non-entertainment kind).
I think they can offer this as an option, but not as the only option.
* Not everyone has high-speed internet to support high-def video
* Not everyone has the latest and greatest internet-enabled TV
* Sometimes you just want to turn something on and have it "Just work" instead of "Loading..."
I think it's a pretty clear solution to the problem, honestly. Broadcasting is very clearly defined, and Aereo is very clearly unicasting.
If Aereo was using a single antenna and capturing the source to send to multiple clients, they'd be broadcasting:
*===\
*===A===S
*===/
But instead, they're providing a 1:1 receive-and-transmit, basically turning them into a DVR with a really long cable:
*===A===\
*===A====S
*===A===/
I think it was really the right ruling. The stations are upset that Aereo is capitalizing on their content, but what Aereo is selling is a DVR, not their content. They aren't broadcasting by any means.
Can't blame News Corp, really... moving to cable would be a sound business move. They have their bottom line to protect, and if their revenue source is threatened, they should investigate moving to a different revenue model.
Their revenue source is ads. They are not going to give up their ad revenue to get a tiny, tiny bit of retransmission revenue. This is all a bluff and the only correct response is to roll your eyes so sarcastically that they hurt a little bit afterwards.
The value of a newspaper / journalism outlet is its wide distribution. He famously said to a (probably many) politicians "you can have headlines praising you, or you can have a bucket of shit in your doorstep each morning"
The more paywalls he erects (wsj, the times, and now fox) the smaller his distribution and the less value.
It's not the end of the world now, but there is a value in say the Democratic Party funding it's own free newspaper
defn is quite right - Murdoch famously threatened a politician with "a headline a day or a bucket of shit a day" - a clear "abuse" of journalistic power in exchange for political influence. Horror.
Whether or not that actual threat occurred, the press, lead by the Murdoch press, have used their considerable power to threaten, bully and cajole politicians, police and others into doing what they the newspapers wanted.
(infamously the phone hacking scandal in the UK, where the CEO of murdochs empire, and the prime ministers press head honcho have both been charged with a range of such crimes, and Murdoch only avoided it because no one found the emaisl or phone conversations where he was told where his newspapers were getting good stories from.) I am a little bit bitter about "freedom of the press" being seen as a right without duties.
The whole problem here for the broadcast networks is that Aereo sets a precedent for the cable companies to also avoid paying the retransmission fees by setting up a million tiny antennas instead of one big one. Nowadays, the broadcast networks get 70% of their revenue from retransmission fees, and only 30% from other sources, such as advertisements.
Aereo and its users themselves don't matter - they're totally insignificant. But the court ruling does matter, because if the cable companies stop paying the retransmission fees, the broadcast networks are fucked.
They either have the right to demand that they be carried (in which case it is for free) or to demand that they be compensated (in which case the cable company does not have to carry them).
Every three years they get to re-decide. Without either the must-carry notification or the negotiated contract, cable companies can't carry them.
You would have to be a rather rich individual in an unusual locale to license a new TV station in an area developed enough to have a cable company, but undeveloped enough to convince the FCC to issue the license without interference with existing stations. This is not a "new tech startup" model, at least not now. The goldrush was over about a quarter century ago.
See the comment below about rarity for individuals, but note that basically every town or city has the power to write a similar compulsion to force a cable company to carry a community access station as a price for operation. If all you want is to get some airtime for a non-commercial message, you can probably go to a community access channel for free.
It's not really a technicality. The business model is such:
1) The broadcast networks distribute content freely over the airwaves.
2) The broadcast networks also sell that content to cable networks who then retransmit it.
Forget the law. Is it reasonable for the cable networks to just capture the over-the-air stream and retransmit? I think you can argue both sides. On one hand, there is a public benefit to free over the air TV, but that specific benefit is not served when a for-profit cable provider retransmits that content to paying cable customers. On the other hand, how do you distinguish in a principled way the spectrum between an individual receiving the content with his antenna and what Time Warner Cable might do, with services like Aereo in the middle?
I know we're all about advertising these days, but it's not an unreasonable business model to produce content, then sell that content to distributors who in turn distribute it to paying customers.
It might, however, be unreasonable to be able to expect to do this while also cashing in on advertising revenue by freely broadcasting that same content over the air.
"On the other hand, how do you distinguish in a principled way the spectrum between an individual receiving the content with his antenna and what Time Warner Cable might do, with services like Aereo in the middle?"
Isn't this a bit like asking why I can read something from a particular website online for free but someone can't take that free content and have me read it in it's entirety on another website? (Or am I misunderstanding the point you are making?)
One point though regardless that matters is that is that if I have a service that I charge money for and I use your product to provide value to my customers (even for free) shouldn't you be compensated for that even if those customers could have gotten the same content another way?
> Isn't this a bit like asking why I can read something from a particular website online for free but someone can't take that free content and have me read it in it's entirety on another website? (Or am I misunderstanding the point you are making?)
It's a lot like that, except with the angle of: what does that mean for a company like Aereo, which ostensibly just offers you a "really big antenna" to watch the broadcasters' content?
The problem seems to be that you (some people) want to give some leeway to companies like Aereo to do space shifting of broadcast content, without having to say "okay cable providers, you don't have to pay for anything you can capture on the air."
>Isn't this a bit like asking why I can read something from a particular website online for free but someone can't take that free content and have me read it in it's entirety on another website? (Or am I misunderstanding the point you are making?)
It is kind of the same thing -- but it has the same issue. Suppose I set up a public proxy server, or a Tor exit node, or a service like AWS that anyone can route traffic through. Now all the content on "your" website is available through "my" server. Do you suppose that to be unreasonable? That's pretty much what Aereo is doing with broadcasts, isn't it?
One point though regardless that matters is that is that if I have a service that I charge money for and I use your product to provide value to my customers (even for free) shouldn't you be compensated for that even if those customers could have gotten the same content another way?
Isn't this what every ISP is doing with the content of every website in the world?
What about TV antenna installers - their product is virtually useless without all that broadcast content that they don't compensate the producers for?
Maybe technicality is the wrong word, but their business is built on the court's decision of what constitutes redistribution. Such a decision is open to 1) reinterpretation and 2) gaming. It just feels... like a rather brittle business model. Their major customers (cable companies) are only working with them out of the force of law.
It's hard to argue against the business model as it's been stunningly successful, I'm just surprised it's taken this long to be disrupted.
The business model is brittle in the sense of trying to capitalize both on free unencrypted OTA and also cable retransmission, no doubt. But either business model by itself is quite reasonable.
So you disagree that it's brittle to base on a business model on a court ruling? That is, to repeat myself, open to reinterpretation/challenges and open to gaming (as Aereo is doing now)?
I misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about the broadcasters, not Aereo. But yeah, companies built business models on court rulings (e.g. Sony VCR's).
This is the best explanation of the current issue that I have seen.
In my opinion by Aereo taking this to court and having a legal precedence created they will be ineffect (finally) changing the way the free broadcast networks work in America.
It sounds like the broadcast TV industry needs to update its business model to deal with new technology and new market realities. Not that this is news to anyone.
As a practical matter, if the broadcast TV folks can't protect their content directly, they'll have to go the way of the Googles and Facebooks of the world, and figure out ways of spying on you and your kids' TV watching habits so they can figure out ever more elaborate ways of selling you and them cheap plastic crap manufactured in China.
That's what "updating your business model" means in 2013.
Or they could go to a subscription model. To be honest, when it comes to entertainment I see little problem with paywalls (unlike news, academic publications, etc.).
The whole problem here for the broadcast networks is that Aereo sets a precedent for the cable companies to also avoid paying the retransmission fees by setting up a million tiny antennas instead of one big one
This isn't correct. Aereo only rebroadcasts local market channels to local market subscribers. I in SF can't get NY based content, this would get shutdown quick (See Ivi TV [1])
This also only affects the local "Over The Air" affiliates usually Fox/NBC/ABC/CBS and a few other small niche channels. This is why in the article Fox is threatening to move content from the main Fox "OTA" channel to its cable only offerings.
Which is also why its never going to happen, this would effectively kill all the local market channels which are extremely powerful.
Long story short, Aereo really isn't that great a threat to that many people, and really unless you start getting folks like Netflix to start buying up local market TV Channels to distribute content there's not a lot here. And this really only affects a very small subset of available channels.
> This isn't correct. Aereo only rebroadcasts local market channels to local market subscribers. I in SF can't get NY based content, this would get shutdown quick (See Ivi TV [1])
You're missing the point. Cable companies also only rebroadcast local market channels to local market subscribers. The difference is that they pay the broadcast networks for that right. But if Aereo can get away with not paying, so can they.
Mostly correct, but what's at stake here isn't the cable fees so much as the local/affiliate fees. Those are still a decent business for companies like NewsCorp (and others), but let's face it: local affiliate television is dying on the vine, one way or the other. It faces a fundamental challenge much more significant than the one posed by Aereo.
The entire premise behind affiliate television is that local station owners can license the rights to national programming, and then exercise a quasi-monopoly over distribution of that content to local markets. (If I'm the FOX affiliate in NYC, for instance, I pay FOX for the rights to its shows, and I have exclusive rights to air those shows in NYC).
This business model was threatened the minute the internet took hold, really, because the very idea of local exclusivity is anachronistic now. It's one of the two horse-and-buggy concepts of the 21st century content distribution business (the other being time-bound content viewership). It is threatened much more extensively by Netflix, by YouTube, by Hulu, by Microsoft, by iTunes, etc., than by any one startup. It is threatened by virtue of its irrelevancy in the modern, globally connected era.
The idea of moving television networks to paid subscription models has been bandied about for at least a decade now. IIRC, it was NBC who first proposed this idea in the early 2000s. Indeed, this may come to pass at some point: not because of the likes of Aereo, but because broadcast television starts to make less and less business sense as time goes on (whereas content ownership and distributorship is still viable). Eventually, we'll probably have nothing but content shops, who distribute their wares across all channels -- perhaps offering different tiers of the products at different prices in different channels, and/or extracting licensing fees to different distributors.
As a consumer, expect a generally upward trend in content pricing in the long run (i.e., free to paid). It'll just depend on whom you're paying. Advertising-subsizided, free content will still exist to the extent that distribution channels like YouTube continue to thrive.
A good detailed analysis but don't overlook the first-mover disadvantage in that the first network to defect and throw the local channels to the wolves, has maybe a 25% chance of bankruptcy, but the last guy to drop locals won't lose much, so there's little motivation to begin the inevitable transition. So you're most likely to see the phase transition begin when an existing network is almost about to go bankrupt so there's not as much to loose, or perhaps right after a bankruptcy. Maybe if someone pays 10 billion for the olympics but only pulls in a quarter bil of advertising, that kind of disaster. Or a campaign finance reform law limits commercial TV spending. Maybe the only way it can happen is something like PBS dropping the locals to bootstrap the infrastructure.
I'm not sure what the point would be of a large number of independents... in 20 years there may only be PBS affiliates out there and empty spectrum. Where I live there's only enough independent viewers (mostly syndicated) to keep two quasi independents alive, so tossing another 4+ onto the fire might well result in all of them going out of business.
> Mostly correct, but what's at stake here isn't the cable fees so much as the local/affiliate fees.
I don't see how local affiliate fees themselves are directly at risk for the broadcast networks. The local OTA broadcasts of the public channels are generated by the local affiliates, who contribute local programming to the broadcast, such as news. The cable companies therefore have to pay the local affiliates, who in turn pay the national broadcast networks.
The local/affiliate fees are only the proximal revenue source for the broadcast networks - the original source is the cable fees.
This is an interesting-sounding analysis, but unfortunately your statement about the "premise" of affiliation is 100% backwards.
In major markets, historically it has been the networks who pay the stations an affiliation fee, not vice versa. The stations have something valuable (a broadcast license) and the networks want access to it so they can air their national ads.
Yes, of course the station also gets something valuable out of the affiliation. On balance, however, the money has tended to flow from network to station, not vice versa. For example, here in Boston, NBC pays Channel 7 an affiliation fee of $15 million a year (or did in 2000 and years afterward; I haven't kept up with it more recently).
Nowadays, the broadcast networks get 70% of their revenue from retransmission
I've been trying to find a source for this, and it's mighty hard. Especially because many sources mix up the national networks with the local networks, or mix up profits with revenue.
Do you have a citation? I'm asking to learn, not to challenge.
ButtHurt [buht-hert]. Noun. An inappropriately strong negative emotional response from a perceived personal insult. Characterized by strong feelings of shame. Frequently associated with a cessation of communication and overt hostility towards the "aggressor."
Can someone who has been following this story break down the practicalities of the current judicial environment for services like this? Not black and white answers, just the general consensus.
I know some others like boxee [1] are trialing services like this in some markets.
From a bootstrap/startup/DIY perspective what seems to be the current known framework?
1) content needs to be over the air
2) customer needs to be inside the content's broadcast area
3) needs to be a 1:1 correlation of receiver/antenna to viewer
those are my baseline understandings, are there any I missed
I wonder if anyone has any knowledge or informed opinions about:
What is the broadcast area? Is that a regulatory definition, or is it determined by if you can easily recieve the signal, or could it be anyone who could receive the signal even if using sensitive equipment and directional antennas
What would be acceptable in terms of customer is in the broadcast area? Credit card billing address? Physical mail sent? IP geolocation? mobile gps result?
Obviously you can compress the signal, but what about tampering with it? Would adding a scroll or bumpers to the stream change the legality?
Is this all based on live transmission only? Would store and forward (ie cloud dvr) change the picture?
Is there anything about charging that changes things? It could be free, no? What about subscribe vs. pay per use?
I realize this is a highly fluid situation, I'm just curious if anyone has any thoughts or insights thats been paying attention.
[1] http://www.boxee.tv/dvr cloud dvr, stream live tv to multidevice - launched in some markets.
I worked with a startup that wanted to do something similar to Aereo (they had an even better clever hack on the law, in my opinion) but they stopped after calculating the cost of the inevitable lawsuits and appeals.
> What would be acceptable in terms of customer is in the broadcast area?
I've heard it suggested that a current GPS location is the only thing that would stand up in court. But that idea has not been tested, as far as I know.
No talk of what audience they would pick up? I can't get the local broadcast stations, and would appreciate some service making them available via streaming data. I'm not signing up for "cable TV" at its price just to get what normally would be free save for quirks of geography.
Contrast the "I Heart Radio" http://www.iheart.com app service, making broadcast radio available everywhere free - rescuing many stations from oblivion. Whither "I Heart TV"?
It continues to amaze me how that once you do something one way for a few years (or a few decades) how established businesses are willing to fight tooth and nail to keep doing it that way even if it stops making any sense to the consumer to do so.
We have this same fight with RIAA, and with IP in general. Once a business model gets established, it's the dickens trying to change course.
This is what concerns me most about the internet: when we were putting this all together, it was just a bunch of hacks out there pressing buttons, seeing which ones would work. Web pages are a kind of location, like a street address? Okay, let's run with that. Search is a way to monitor user intent? Okay, that works. Facebook should be the new version of the yellowpages? Yeah, that's the ticket.
Watching all of this happen, I've been amused, concerned, and finally blasé. I mean if Facebook doesn't work as a universal phonebook, or if it starts thinking it owns the net, who cares? Surely somebody else will come along eventually. But it concerns me that the patterns we've set up over the last ten years or so are going to be just as hard, if not harder to overcome than these decades-established ones.
Everybody loves riding the rocketship up, and milking the cash cow. It's a completely different picture when technology starts making your model obsolete.
He has to know how weak his cards are. My money says they're bluffing. This is a cry for support, not a real option.
So ... we create a TV that shouts every day "we need no government, government is stupid, freedom, laises faire, WAAAAAAGH" ... and then we run to the government like the little crybabies that we are, when somebody does the things we preach ...
Aero must be really shaking up the cable companies for this degree of response. Its the cable companies pulling Fox's tail that's causing the outcry.
I'm currently in the sweet spot for Aero. I live in the Suburbs of NYC and I have to have cable because the over the air signal is weak in my area. That combined with the fact that cable companies own pretty much all of the suburban news channels means that without cable I don't have access to local news. There are millions of others in the same boat.
I heard about Aero about a month ago. I'll be dropping my cable television package over the summer.
I can't wait until this launches in my area. The reasons I want it are basically the original reasons Cable TV came to be and precisely what they advertise. I hope that my use case isn't unusual because I actually need the very long cable attached to rabbit ears somewhere other than where my vacation home is located.
I have a vacation home on the US side of Lake Huron. I can receive two stations OTA... Canadian (CBC and CityTV? I think). To receive those, I installed a couple of bow tie antennas on a poll ten feet above the roof of the second floor. It was a pain to install, performed poorly and looked tacky. A storm solved that for us. I'm not climbing on that ladder again. DirecTV/Dish aren't an option due to the tree line. Comcast offers service for about $50 a month that includes 20 fuzzy analog channels. The signal was unwatchable despite the installers insistence that it was "fine" which ended up being downgraded to "the best we can do". No competition means no expectation of quality service (I'm not knocking it, just stating the circumstances).
Surprisingly, DSL seems to be the only thing we can get up there that performs at speeds I was used to at home say, 6 years ago, which are fine for 3 "HD" streams from the usual internet streaming providers.
I have no problem with just using Netflix (and Hulu/Plex/etc). My parents, however, love sports/local news/the comfort of what they consider "normal TV viewing" at night. We tried SlingBox App + iPad + AppleTV but it disconnected too frequently due to upload speeds being lacking in the home the box was installed. This would eliminate that issue, and would provide the stations the rest of my family wants to watch on the weekends.
Reading the comments here, I think there is some confusion over which channel(s) this is referring to. News Corp owns Fox Entertainment Group, which in turn has a number of divisions. The Fox Broadcasting Company is just one of many TV divisions. The "Broadcasting" in the name refers the Fox channel broadcast over the airwaves. The cable channels like Fox News, Fx, National Geographic Channel, fox Sports, and so forth, are in separate divisions.
Its shows include Family Guy, Hell's Kitchen, Glee, NFL on Fox, etc. Of all the shows appearing on the broadcast channel, I suspect that NFL on Fox could be an issue. When the NFL sold them the broadcasting rights, I assume that broadcasting the games over public airwaves was a factor.
I won't miss it. Last time my wife and I moved, we simply declined to transfer our cable subscription to our new address. TV over the internet is an idea whose time has come, there's no stopping it now. The big TV companies will have to choose whether to adapt or die. They will fight it tooth-and-nail because it costs them money, but they will adapt.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 53.3 ms ] threadIn the United Kingdom and the Crown Dependencies, any household watching or recording live television transmissions as they are being broadcast (terrestrial, satellite, cable, or internet) is required to hold a television licence. Since 1 April 2010 the annual licence fee has been £145.50 for colour and £49.00 for black and white.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
I happily pay my license.
This is kind of a problem when trying to import UK shows into the US, aside from being two nations separated by language, its hard to figure out how to shoehorn "an hour" of show into our 1/3 advertisement schedules. Even PBS has about 10 minutes of ads and "sponsorship ads" per hour.
My superficial opinion is BBC shows transmit at an IQ around 100 or local population average, compared to USA TV around an IQ of 60 or so. I believe this discrepancy is demanded by advertisers wanting the eyeballs to be more gullible, a more easily duped audience. So aside from imports being "too long" for US viewers, imports assume the viewers actually graduated high school, etc, which is another impedance mismatch. Its hilarious comparing shows that jumped the pond, like scrapheap challenge/junkyard wars. Similar, yes, but a definite class distinction of being aimed at grade school level vs high school level.
You guys ought to try it.
We have somehow ended up with a jewel that keeps producing fantastic quality work. It will find a way to navigate entertainment for the next 70 years too, I hope.
Also, have you seen British television? The quality of the original programming far surpasses most of the networks we have in the U.S., and is easily on par with premium channels like HBO.
The British TV licence pays for BBC TV, and BBC Radio, (Now including the World Service, which used to be funded from the Foreign Office department of government) and the BBC Website stuff.
It's amazing.
There are some quirks, though. Buying the licence allows you to watch or record tv broadcasts.
So, it's possible for a person to never ever use any BBC services but still need a TV Licence.
And it's also possible for a person to listen to BBC Radio all day every day, and to heavily use the website, and to watch BBC programmes using the catch up service, but not need to buy a licence.
And a lot of people (mostly women) were in prison because they did not pay the fines they got for not having a tv licence. Prison's probably not the right solution for that problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
* Not everyone has high-speed internet to support high-def video * Not everyone has the latest and greatest internet-enabled TV * Sometimes you just want to turn something on and have it "Just work" instead of "Loading..."
If Aereo was using a single antenna and capturing the source to send to multiple clients, they'd be broadcasting:
But instead, they're providing a 1:1 receive-and-transmit, basically turning them into a DVR with a really long cable: I think it was really the right ruling. The stations are upset that Aereo is capitalizing on their content, but what Aereo is selling is a DVR, not their content. They aren't broadcasting by any means.The value of a newspaper / journalism outlet is its wide distribution. He famously said to a (probably many) politicians "you can have headlines praising you, or you can have a bucket of shit in your doorstep each morning"
The more paywalls he erects (wsj, the times, and now fox) the smaller his distribution and the less value.
It's not the end of the world now, but there is a value in say the Democratic Party funding it's own free newspaper
Whether or not that actual threat occurred, the press, lead by the Murdoch press, have used their considerable power to threaten, bully and cajole politicians, police and others into doing what they the newspapers wanted.
(infamously the phone hacking scandal in the UK, where the CEO of murdochs empire, and the prime ministers press head honcho have both been charged with a range of such crimes, and Murdoch only avoided it because no one found the emaisl or phone conversations where he was told where his newspapers were getting good stories from.) I am a little bit bitter about "freedom of the press" being seen as a right without duties.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/07/24/geoffrey-ro...
1) News Co transmits their content unencrypted over the air with kW+ senders
2) News Co finds that doing so enables people to watch that content
3) News Co does not want people to do that
4) News Co threatens to stop broadcasting their content on the publics valuable frequency spectrum
So why exactly have they not followed through? It seems like a proper conclusion and solution to their perceived problem.
Aereo and its users themselves don't matter - they're totally insignificant. But the court ruling does matter, because if the cable companies stop paying the retransmission fees, the broadcast networks are fucked.
Broadcasters have the right to negotiate with cable companies for carriage. http://www.fcc.gov/guides/cable-carriage-broadcast-stations
They either have the right to demand that they be carried (in which case it is for free) or to demand that they be compensated (in which case the cable company does not have to carry them).
Every three years they get to re-decide. Without either the must-carry notification or the negotiated contract, cable companies can't carry them.
What are the limits on this? Can an individual set up a low powered broadcast station and force the cable company to carry it?
1) The broadcast networks distribute content freely over the airwaves. 2) The broadcast networks also sell that content to cable networks who then retransmit it.
Forget the law. Is it reasonable for the cable networks to just capture the over-the-air stream and retransmit? I think you can argue both sides. On one hand, there is a public benefit to free over the air TV, but that specific benefit is not served when a for-profit cable provider retransmits that content to paying cable customers. On the other hand, how do you distinguish in a principled way the spectrum between an individual receiving the content with his antenna and what Time Warner Cable might do, with services like Aereo in the middle?
I know we're all about advertising these days, but it's not an unreasonable business model to produce content, then sell that content to distributors who in turn distribute it to paying customers.
It might, however, be unreasonable to be able to expect to do this while also cashing in on advertising revenue by freely broadcasting that same content over the air.
Isn't this a bit like asking why I can read something from a particular website online for free but someone can't take that free content and have me read it in it's entirety on another website? (Or am I misunderstanding the point you are making?)
One point though regardless that matters is that is that if I have a service that I charge money for and I use your product to provide value to my customers (even for free) shouldn't you be compensated for that even if those customers could have gotten the same content another way?
It's a lot like that, except with the angle of: what does that mean for a company like Aereo, which ostensibly just offers you a "really big antenna" to watch the broadcasters' content?
The problem seems to be that you (some people) want to give some leeway to companies like Aereo to do space shifting of broadcast content, without having to say "okay cable providers, you don't have to pay for anything you can capture on the air."
It is kind of the same thing -- but it has the same issue. Suppose I set up a public proxy server, or a Tor exit node, or a service like AWS that anyone can route traffic through. Now all the content on "your" website is available through "my" server. Do you suppose that to be unreasonable? That's pretty much what Aereo is doing with broadcasts, isn't it?
Isn't this what every ISP is doing with the content of every website in the world?
What about TV antenna installers - their product is virtually useless without all that broadcast content that they don't compensate the producers for?
It's hard to argue against the business model as it's been stunningly successful, I'm just surprised it's taken this long to be disrupted.
In my opinion by Aereo taking this to court and having a legal precedence created they will be ineffect (finally) changing the way the free broadcast networks work in America.
That's what "updating your business model" means in 2013.
This isn't correct. Aereo only rebroadcasts local market channels to local market subscribers. I in SF can't get NY based content, this would get shutdown quick (See Ivi TV [1])
This also only affects the local "Over The Air" affiliates usually Fox/NBC/ABC/CBS and a few other small niche channels. This is why in the article Fox is threatening to move content from the main Fox "OTA" channel to its cable only offerings.
Which is also why its never going to happen, this would effectively kill all the local market channels which are extremely powerful.
Long story short, Aereo really isn't that great a threat to that many people, and really unless you start getting folks like Netflix to start buying up local market TV Channels to distribute content there's not a lot here. And this really only affects a very small subset of available channels.
[1] http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-27/ivi-tv-loses-bid...
You're missing the point. Cable companies also only rebroadcast local market channels to local market subscribers. The difference is that they pay the broadcast networks for that right. But if Aereo can get away with not paying, so can they.
I had assumed the locals were paying to get content from the networks, but that doesn't seem to be the case (also indicated in another comment.)
The entire premise behind affiliate television is that local station owners can license the rights to national programming, and then exercise a quasi-monopoly over distribution of that content to local markets. (If I'm the FOX affiliate in NYC, for instance, I pay FOX for the rights to its shows, and I have exclusive rights to air those shows in NYC).
This business model was threatened the minute the internet took hold, really, because the very idea of local exclusivity is anachronistic now. It's one of the two horse-and-buggy concepts of the 21st century content distribution business (the other being time-bound content viewership). It is threatened much more extensively by Netflix, by YouTube, by Hulu, by Microsoft, by iTunes, etc., than by any one startup. It is threatened by virtue of its irrelevancy in the modern, globally connected era.
The idea of moving television networks to paid subscription models has been bandied about for at least a decade now. IIRC, it was NBC who first proposed this idea in the early 2000s. Indeed, this may come to pass at some point: not because of the likes of Aereo, but because broadcast television starts to make less and less business sense as time goes on (whereas content ownership and distributorship is still viable). Eventually, we'll probably have nothing but content shops, who distribute their wares across all channels -- perhaps offering different tiers of the products at different prices in different channels, and/or extracting licensing fees to different distributors.
As a consumer, expect a generally upward trend in content pricing in the long run (i.e., free to paid). It'll just depend on whom you're paying. Advertising-subsizided, free content will still exist to the extent that distribution channels like YouTube continue to thrive.
I'm not sure what the point would be of a large number of independents... in 20 years there may only be PBS affiliates out there and empty spectrum. Where I live there's only enough independent viewers (mostly syndicated) to keep two quasi independents alive, so tossing another 4+ onto the fire might well result in all of them going out of business.
I don't see how local affiliate fees themselves are directly at risk for the broadcast networks. The local OTA broadcasts of the public channels are generated by the local affiliates, who contribute local programming to the broadcast, such as news. The cable companies therefore have to pay the local affiliates, who in turn pay the national broadcast networks.
The local/affiliate fees are only the proximal revenue source for the broadcast networks - the original source is the cable fees.
In major markets, historically it has been the networks who pay the stations an affiliation fee, not vice versa. The stations have something valuable (a broadcast license) and the networks want access to it so they can air their national ads.
Yes, of course the station also gets something valuable out of the affiliation. On balance, however, the money has tended to flow from network to station, not vice versa. For example, here in Boston, NBC pays Channel 7 an affiliation fee of $15 million a year (or did in 2000 and years afterward; I haven't kept up with it more recently).
See http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput..., section 2.2 (page 4).
I've been trying to find a source for this, and it's mighty hard. Especially because many sources mix up the national networks with the local networks, or mix up profits with revenue.
Do you have a citation? I'm asking to learn, not to challenge.
I know some others like boxee [1] are trialing services like this in some markets.
From a bootstrap/startup/DIY perspective what seems to be the current known framework?
1) content needs to be over the air 2) customer needs to be inside the content's broadcast area 3) needs to be a 1:1 correlation of receiver/antenna to viewer
those are my baseline understandings, are there any I missed
I wonder if anyone has any knowledge or informed opinions about:
What is the broadcast area? Is that a regulatory definition, or is it determined by if you can easily recieve the signal, or could it be anyone who could receive the signal even if using sensitive equipment and directional antennas
What would be acceptable in terms of customer is in the broadcast area? Credit card billing address? Physical mail sent? IP geolocation? mobile gps result?
Obviously you can compress the signal, but what about tampering with it? Would adding a scroll or bumpers to the stream change the legality?
Is this all based on live transmission only? Would store and forward (ie cloud dvr) change the picture?
Is there anything about charging that changes things? It could be free, no? What about subscribe vs. pay per use?
I realize this is a highly fluid situation, I'm just curious if anyone has any thoughts or insights thats been paying attention.
[1] http://www.boxee.tv/dvr cloud dvr, stream live tv to multidevice - launched in some markets.
> What is the broadcast area?
It's called a Designated Market Area or Television Market Area (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_market). I've only hear TV people use the former term.
> What would be acceptable in terms of customer is in the broadcast area?
I've heard it suggested that a current GPS location is the only thing that would stand up in court. But that idea has not been tested, as far as I know.
Contrast the "I Heart Radio" http://www.iheart.com app service, making broadcast radio available everywhere free - rescuing many stations from oblivion. Whither "I Heart TV"?
We have this same fight with RIAA, and with IP in general. Once a business model gets established, it's the dickens trying to change course.
This is what concerns me most about the internet: when we were putting this all together, it was just a bunch of hacks out there pressing buttons, seeing which ones would work. Web pages are a kind of location, like a street address? Okay, let's run with that. Search is a way to monitor user intent? Okay, that works. Facebook should be the new version of the yellowpages? Yeah, that's the ticket.
Watching all of this happen, I've been amused, concerned, and finally blasé. I mean if Facebook doesn't work as a universal phonebook, or if it starts thinking it owns the net, who cares? Surely somebody else will come along eventually. But it concerns me that the patterns we've set up over the last ten years or so are going to be just as hard, if not harder to overcome than these decades-established ones.
Everybody loves riding the rocketship up, and milking the cash cow. It's a completely different picture when technology starts making your model obsolete.
He has to know how weak his cards are. My money says they're bluffing. This is a cry for support, not a real option.
Likewise the issue of "we won't get rebroadcast fees in this area" seems spurious. If people cut the cord, they won't get the rebroadcast fees either.
This seems to me to be more "change is scary" than "they're stealing our stuff and not paying us"
I'm currently in the sweet spot for Aero. I live in the Suburbs of NYC and I have to have cable because the over the air signal is weak in my area. That combined with the fact that cable companies own pretty much all of the suburban news channels means that without cable I don't have access to local news. There are millions of others in the same boat.
I heard about Aero about a month ago. I'll be dropping my cable television package over the summer.
I have a vacation home on the US side of Lake Huron. I can receive two stations OTA... Canadian (CBC and CityTV? I think). To receive those, I installed a couple of bow tie antennas on a poll ten feet above the roof of the second floor. It was a pain to install, performed poorly and looked tacky. A storm solved that for us. I'm not climbing on that ladder again. DirecTV/Dish aren't an option due to the tree line. Comcast offers service for about $50 a month that includes 20 fuzzy analog channels. The signal was unwatchable despite the installers insistence that it was "fine" which ended up being downgraded to "the best we can do". No competition means no expectation of quality service (I'm not knocking it, just stating the circumstances).
Surprisingly, DSL seems to be the only thing we can get up there that performs at speeds I was used to at home say, 6 years ago, which are fine for 3 "HD" streams from the usual internet streaming providers.
I have no problem with just using Netflix (and Hulu/Plex/etc). My parents, however, love sports/local news/the comfort of what they consider "normal TV viewing" at night. We tried SlingBox App + iPad + AppleTV but it disconnected too frequently due to upload speeds being lacking in the home the box was installed. This would eliminate that issue, and would provide the stations the rest of my family wants to watch on the weekends.
Its shows include Family Guy, Hell's Kitchen, Glee, NFL on Fox, etc. Of all the shows appearing on the broadcast channel, I suspect that NFL on Fox could be an issue. When the NFL sold them the broadcasting rights, I assume that broadcasting the games over public airwaves was a factor.