This will change TV again... (Live streaming)
- Thread starter T4Runner
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I see a New "Aereo" Slingbox coming out soon, which you can buy at Best Buy or online and send to your local Aereo POP It will plus into the existing Aereo Antenna system and will allow you reception of your locals via your Slingbox. Aereo will then charge a monthly hosting fee instead of the DVR fee they are charging now.
Since the Slingbox has already been ruled as being legal this would get around all this crap once and for all.
Since the Slingbox has already been ruled as being legal this would get around all this crap once and for all.
Why not just rent one at the pop?
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This is a very sad day - Aero followed the law, as interpreted by the courts, by building a system with antennas and dvrs totally controlled by the user. But the court says it looks like a duck (cable TV) therefore it MUST be a duck.
At the risk of being made more unpopular than I already may be, wanting something to be legal is not the same as being legal. Aereo attempted to use modern technology to exploit a loophole because the technology at the time of the law (1976) could not contemplate this type of thing actually happening. But the intent of Congress was pretty clear that cable and cable-like services were to be covered by the law, and Aereo is pretty darn cable-like. The majority opinion was to basically say Congress meant for this type of service to be covered when it passed that law, even if this specific service could not have existed at the time.
For all the "greedy broadcaster" type opinions, I would point out that retransmission fees are meant to offset losses due to diluted ad sales. Think about it like this, if ABC cannot get retransmission dollars but ESPN can, where will all the sports end up? If TNT and AMC can get retransmission dollars but CBS cannot, where will all of the highest-quality programming end up? If there was no ESPN, TNT, or AMC, the networks would have 20% or more of viewers, and ad sales alone, without retransmission fees, would support the programming costs. Thus why OTA is available free but you pay for those signals on cable. But in an age where the major network can win an evening with less than 2% of viewers (and how many of those are using DVRs to skip the ads that are shown?), where else would such programming come from?
From a physics stand-point, the whole thing was a farce anyway. Placing hundreds of antennas on a single panel like that causes them to behave as a single antenna with hundreds of attachment points. Having thousands of tuners is hugely inefficient as opposed to having single receivers for each channel, like the cable companies do, and is pretty obviously designed to circumvent the spirit of the law through a loophole in the wording of the law, and is not designed to provide the most efficient or economical solution.
Just my unpopular opinion.
- Trip
For all the "greedy broadcaster" type opinions, I would point out that retransmission fees are meant to offset losses due to diluted ad sales. Think about it like this, if ABC cannot get retransmission dollars but ESPN can, where will all the sports end up? If TNT and AMC can get retransmission dollars but CBS cannot, where will all of the highest-quality programming end up? If there was no ESPN, TNT, or AMC, the networks would have 20% or more of viewers, and ad sales alone, without retransmission fees, would support the programming costs. Thus why OTA is available free but you pay for those signals on cable. But in an age where the major network can win an evening with less than 2% of viewers (and how many of those are using DVRs to skip the ads that are shown?), where else would such programming come from?
From a physics stand-point, the whole thing was a farce anyway. Placing hundreds of antennas on a single panel like that causes them to behave as a single antenna with hundreds of attachment points. Having thousands of tuners is hugely inefficient as opposed to having single receivers for each channel, like the cable companies do, and is pretty obviously designed to circumvent the spirit of the law through a loophole in the wording of the law, and is not designed to provide the most efficient or economical solution.
Just my unpopular opinion.
- Trip
Sounds like the same old company line BS to me. All that programming gets repeated on the cable networks within a day to a few days anyway and 98% of the sports other than the NFL has been moved to cable networks despite retransmission fees. We will be paying $5 per network before long and commercial time will go up to 25 to 27 mins per hour and the networks will still bitch and moan that they are at a competitive disadvantage.
Trip -
The broadcasters get spectrum from the government - they should be paying the cable companies for carriage, NOT the otherway around.
They need to get with the program or die. They pay for lobbyist and votes with the money they get from cable subscribers -- to protect their monopolies from a free market. IMHO
Bob
The broadcasters get spectrum from the government - they should be paying the cable companies for carriage, NOT the otherway around.
They need to get with the program or die. They pay for lobbyist and votes with the money they get from cable subscribers -- to protect their monopolies from a free market. IMHO
Bob
Most of the sports have moved to cable because the networks cannot afford the rights. ESPN by itself (not including ESPN 2, ESPN U, etc) gets more than $5 per basic cable subscriber, whether the subscriber watches it or not, while the ABC stations get something like $1, which is split 50/50 with the local affiliate. So ESPN has literally 10 times the retrans money to put toward that expensive sports programming. I won't disagree that it's a great argument for a la carte cable, but that's not the current market condition.
And then on top of that, with the proliferation of DVRs (which are a ton more convenient than VCRs ever were), ESPN is more likely to have live viewers who cannot skip commercials versus pre-recorded programming on ABC that can be DVRed for later with ads skipped. So ESPN has the sports rights because it has retrans dollars to use up front, then because it has those rights and ABC doesn't, makes more money on the ads than ABC does. (And yes, I'm aware that ABC and ESPN are commonly owned, but Disney isn't a charity and isn't going to use ESPN dollars to prop up ABC, just as the others won't use NBCSN dollars to prop up NBC or Fox Sports dollars to prop up Fox.)
First of all, most broadcasters did not get their spectrum free from the government. Stations licensed since the mid 1990s have been auctioned, so if you watch KRBK on your FTA dish, that station won the license in an auction just like a wireless company would have, and yet still has to comply with the same public interest requirements as any other station. Most stations licensed before that have been sold in more recent years, and I would find it to be very unlikely if spectrum value was not included in the sale price of such stations to other owners, at least in the more populated areas. While this still leaves stations like the New York network O&O stations which haven't been sold for their entire lives, it's a distinct minority of stations.
So what's your end game, the broadcasters go off the airwaves, encrypt their FTA feeds, and we lose all of their programming unless we're willing to pay for cable? How does that make your life (or mine) better? Because without the ability to negotiate for retrans fees, I guarantee you that's what would happen. That would be a free market action as well, but is that one we want?
Finally, I will point out that I've come to the conclusion that TV in general will move to the Internet long term anyway, primarily because most people don't actually care about efficiency or even saving money, really. (Or about people in rural areas.) People my age, myself included, are cord-cutting or the new buzz word, cord-nevers, which tends to consist of owning a DVR/antenna along with an Internet connection and a subscription to something like Netflix or Amazon Prime. (I don't have a DVR, I actually watch the ads, since I know they support what I watch.) As the numbers grow, cable numbers will drop. Those companies will eventually exit the business as show producers begin charging either per show or for Internet-based content sources like Netflix which are more a la carte and fees can be divvied up by accurate counts of views. Meanwhile, despite the fact that OTA programming will regain its status due to use of antennas, use of DVRs which skip ads will make those viewers worthless to the networks, who will also wind down their programming and follow suit. I don't doubt there will still be ad-supported content, but it will be on the Internet where you don't need millions of dollars in infrastructure and you can enforce unskippable ads more so than you can over the air (where you can't at all).
- Trip
I think this is the first time an IPTV service has been classified as a cable television service.This is a very sad day - Aero followed the law, as interpreted by the courts, by building a system with antennas and dvrs totally controlled by the user. But the court says it looks like a duck (cable TV) therefore it MUST be a duck.
Wonder what this means for Roku, Apple TV etc... are they cable companies now too?
So are you saying that ABC / ESPN / DISNEY overpaid for sports to keep their own network from being able to air them?
Me if I were a broadcaster I would welcome Aereo with open arms, as they are bringing my signal to viewers in my area, meaning I can charge more for advertising. The issue is the networks don't care about the local station, and in all honestly would be happy if there were no affiliates so they could sell direct and sell for more.
We get the spectrum back and put it to use for more beneficial things.
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Except the forces of evil don't give spectrum back to the public, they keep selling it for things that you have to pay for, like mobile internet. Broadcast spectrum should NEVER be converted to non-broadcast purposes! If a broadcast station's allocation is taken for mobile phone or mobile internet, that mobile service should also be available to the public for free!
Wait a minute.. Are you telling me that Dish is charging me $5 a month for ESPN?
If you have a package with ESPN in it, yes. And if you have ESPN2, that's another $2 and change.
I don't think so, because it's not live streaming content from TV stations.
What is interesting to me is that, and I could be wrong, but I think it opens the door for Sky Angel to be a cable company, which is something they've wanted to be classified as for some time.
So are you saying that ABC / ESPN / DISNEY overpaid for sports to keep their own network from being able to air them?
Not quite. ESPN overpaid for sports to keep it from the competitors, be they NBC or NBCSN or Fox or Fox Sports 1.
But are most people actually using it for that? I somehow doubt it. Cable TV (then called Community Access TV--CATV) started out by delivering signal to weak signal and rural areas, but is now mostly used by people in cities who could easily get reception if they tried for it. Aereo is only available to people with high-speed Internet; how many of those people do you suppose are in rural areas?
So you, as a broadcaster, would give up a guaranteed 50 cents (or more) from a cable subscriber in exchange for a small chance that person is watching and increasing your advertising rate by some fraction of a penny? How many 50 cent payments would you have to give up for your ad rate to budge in the upward direction? (Bearing in mind that you get that 50 cents regardless of whether or not the viewer actually turns your station on in that month.) And, of course, if that viewer is watching you on Aereo, for 0 cents, they almost certainly would have also watched you on cable as well where you would have gotten 50 cents, so does your viewership actually rise?
Jim S. hit the nail on the head, in the part of it I quoted. Not to mention, one person's "beneficial things" are someone else's waste of spectrum. Free broadcasting exists because such spectrum has regulations that keep it that way; it requires that free service to be made available instead of everyone being required to pay for service there. Would paid wireless Internet from Verizon and AT&T on those frequencies be a "more beneficial thing"?
- Trip
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