Supreme court to decide if company can stream OTA tv over the internet

With MV, the show was often built around the music and it was like another character. With WKPR the music was just something going in the background to let you know it was a radio station. Of course that don't make it right (grin).

Reply to
Kurt Ullman
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A number of years ago, I bought one of those walkman types of portable TVs. Granted, I'd bought it "open box" which may have been a problem, but I rarely got any decent reception on it, despite living close to the local networks' combined candelabra tower. And it had a telescoping antenna that was, I don't know, 8-10" long; I'm not sure that would be too popular on a phone, although may on a table it wouldn't be too big. (Actually, I wish I could buy one of those walkman tvs now. It would come in handy during power outages when I wouldn't have wifi anyhow).

Aereo appears to be an interesting idea, but it only has the same channels I can get anyhow (still close to that candelabra). If it carried a few more channels like TNT, I'd be more interested.

Reply to
Lee B

The most egregious example of that I can think of is the "The Rebel" which when broadcast in primetime had the very catchy theme song sung by Johnny Cash. In syndication that song's nowhere to be heard.

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Using popular music has gotten a lot easier for TV producers (almost every dramatic show seems to have a pop music montage ending these days) but it still costs a pretty penny for nationally broadcast shows. I listen to the commentary on DVDs and the directors are always lamenting how much a tiny snippet of even a fairly out-of-date popular song costs.

Reply to
Robert Green

TNT isn't an OTA channel, and I think it's only OTA broadcasts that Aereo is relaying.

I doubt very much whether there is anything to stop you sending signals from your antenna to a bunch of neighbors by coaxial cable (transmitting would require a license for a frequency allocated to you), but the problem seems to be that Aereo is charging for the service, and CBS, NBC, etc., aren't getting a cut, as they do from the satellite and cable companies.

Perce

Reply to
Percival P. Cassidy

Sorry, I should have clarified. I realize that TNT is not OTA. There are a few non-OTA networks that I watch, TNT being one, and if I could figure how to get those "missing" channels, I'd be more willing to get rid of my cable and live with an OTA dvr or a service like Aereo which has a dvr of sorts. Truthfully, I'd be happy if I could just watch those few cable stations online for a small fee, but for now they only allow online viewing if you can prove you subscribe to a participating cable/sat company. Or maybe I'll just learn to live without them! In any case it will be interesting to see how this case turns out, and if Aereo wins, see if similar companies pop up.

Reply to
Lee B

I find their position a little disingenuous because they are supported by the ads interspersed with their broadcast content so they could actually claim *more* users and raise their ad rates. Not sure if Aereo's DVR has a commercial skip button (one of God's greatest gifts to mankind, IMHO) - that might get their panties in a bunch. I am trusting the Supremes to royally screw up this decision in the same way they've screwed up so many other decision. Throughout the years, both left and right leaning courts have shown remarkable ignorance when it comes to deciding technical issues. I've watched them testify in Congress about the court's technical needs and so far, only Justice Thomas seem to understand the basics of computers.

Justice Steven's new book really takes CJ Robert's to the woodshed:

Reply to
Robert Green

Sounds like you watched the same PBS special last night that I did. Pretty amazing stuff!

Reply to
Robert Green

Plenty of phones are bought directly by end-users.

And since when do the carriers dictate to the phone makers what features they can build into a phone?

The major phone makers are big enough to not have to take that sort of shit from the carriers.

Reply to
Home Guy

Total hogwash.

For one thing, the 700 mhz band was once used by UHF channels 53 through

  1. All TV stations in north america that were using those channels got kicked off them. The 700 mhz band has many excellent reception qualities for small devices with limited antenna space. It doesn't get that much worse for lower-freqency channels (like 20 through 52).

The VHF channels would be more problematic, but many TV stations have abandoned them in favor of UHF.

Combine that with the fact that your average TV transmitting is pumping out 10's of kwatt (at minimum) to several hundred thousand watts of RF power, and digital signals mean you either get a solid picture - or you don't, means that your argument has just been cut to horse shit.

Finally, there ARE cell phones in asia with built-in ATSC tuners.

There are many more different types of consumer electronics products in asia that are not seen in the US market, like digital versions of the good-old VCR (not talking about cable boxes with hard drives either).

Reply to
Home Guy

If instead of selling you a TV antenna and installing it for, oh, say $250, what if I rented it to you for $5 a month?

What if I included a box that was a tuner and digital VCR combination that let you record stuff on a schedule for you to watch later? All you do is connect your TV via hdmi and use it like a monitor.

You cancel the service, I take back the box and antenna.

How would that be any different, from a content rights point of view, than what Aereo is doing?

Can the internet connection that Aereo is using be considered as having "common carrier" status, and hence can't be discriminated against in terms of being a private communications channel?

Reply to
Home Guy

Not really. These are people in their coverage area so they are most likely already counted and just move (essentially) from one method of delivery to another. The TV people only break even. Now the Cable guys (initially anyway) had such an argument because they would often pick up the signal in an area that was either not well covered or where the signal was spotty (thus cable originally being Community ANTENNA Television or CATV).

Reply to
Kurt Ullman

That's not what I read. They are targeting people who *should* be in the signal area but because of the "urban canyon" effect can't receive a good signal where they live. I'm suburban and it's one reason I am keeping cable a little while longer. I am on the side of a hill and TV stations on the other side of the hill just don't come in well. That's why Aereo is big in cities like NYC that can have close to zero reception in areas blocked by very tall buildings.

What bothers me most about the case is that the Supremes showed little to no concern over the concept that local broadcast stations allowed to transmit their broadcasts over public airwaves on the condition that they keep these broadcasts free for viewing. The networks allege that Aereo's technology is designed simply to evade copyright law (and more importantly to the TV broadcasters) and the enormous retransmission fees that cable companies pay them. Even though OTA content has been free, all along, to most anyone with a TV.

Are you *sure* about that? There have been some pretty big numbers thrown around re: the retransmission fees that locals have been able to squeeze out of cable companies for retransmission. This case is about those fees and not really about much else. Why would cable companies still keep paying them if Aereo makes that content available for far less? If the broadcasters aren't making enough money it *could* be because they've upset their own episodic TV model for cheap, reality shows and ten different versions of "Dancing with American Idol's the Voice" or whatever.

You don't have to remember very far back to when the TV industry was apoplectic about the Beta-max and were proclaiming it was the end of broadcast TV, just as they're whining now about Aereo. Yet the tape and DVD aftermarket made them more money in the long run than retransmission fees and advertising revenue.

Which is exactly what Aereo is doing, without paying fees that the TV cabal had agreed to and that's why they are so hot. Technology has knocked them out of a very lucrative loop. What makes me laught are the threats by broadcasters that they'll stop public broadcasts. I'd like to see Aereo succeed just to make liars out of all those crying "we can't survive in a world with Aereo." Pull the plug on their license to use the public airwaves to make money? That will be the day.

The case that brought the matter to the Supreme Court is here:

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Reply to
Robert Green

You can get them here if you know where to look:

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$40 for an ATSC HD personal video recorder at Amazon. Just add a USB stick or external HD. Just bought one for every TV in the house. Has four kinds of outputs (RF, HDMI, composite, component) to accommodate virtually any TV ever made.

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Personally I think they haven't put TV's in phones because not many people are crazed enough about TV to want to suffer through looking at it on a 4" screen with a 1/2" speaker. There are some, obviously, but I suspect many more people find built in GPS navigation for more useful in a phone.

Reply to
Robert Green

So, then it is serving as a CATV or cable system, just w/o the the cable. Sorta like charging for ethernet but not for wifi.

And they are OTA. Even the more aggressive FCC of today hasn't pretended that that extends to having people take the signal and retransmit and get paid for it w/o cutting in the others. The signal is free as originally and completely intended, OTA. The networks allege that Aereo's technology is designed simply to

And still is OTA. It has never been free for cable people, so why shouldn't the TV people get a cut. Those who don't want to pay for it, can still get it for free OTA.

You were talking about how TV stations could get more money because of the increased eyeballs through Aereo. But this was just a movement of the same eyeballs from one form of delivery to another. It was the number of people (and thus advertising revenue) that would stay the same. That I am sure about.

I think you are talking two different things here. The local stations, which is what we are talking about here, don't have any access to the aftermarket.

Not really. It is theft.

What makes me laught are the threats by

PR hyperbole by the networks? Shocking, I say, shocking!

Reply to
Kurt Ullman

Define plenty. By far the largest customers of the cell phone manufacturers are the carriers. Most consumers get their phones from a carrier or a channel that sells a particular carrier's cell phones.

Good grief. Since the beginning of time sellers have listened to what their major customers want or don't want in products.

Take what S***? The only one clammering for a TV in their phone is apparently you. Before introducing new products, manufacturer's routinely give major customers previews of what they are thinking of in terms of features for new products, to solicite feedback. Say LG told their top 10 customers that they were thinking of putting a TV into the phone and most of them had strong objections, why in the world would LG then do it? And the relationship between carriers and cell phone companies is probably one of the strongest out there. They have to be in sync with new technology rollouts. It wouldn't work very well if the cell phone companies just made up a phone for next year with 7R technology and found out that the carriers couldn't and wouldn't support it. So of course they are heavily dependent on each other.

Reply to
trader_4

Show me something like that, but with an internal SATA hard drive (either built-in or optional).

The big draw is, I would think, people watching sports - any games that are still broadcast OTA these days.

Reply to
Home Guy

----------- Apple Wants to Sell More iPhones Through Its Own Stores ? But Can It? July 17, 2013

Apple sells a lot of iPhones through its retail stores ? but not nearly as many as it would like. Indeed, at a recent gathering of Apple Store leaders, sources said CEO Tim Cook was dismayed that only 20 percent of all iPhones are sold through Apple Stores, and that he?d like to see that number rise in the months ahead.

The biggest and most obvious constraint on such an effort is the size of Apple?s retail operations. In the U.S., for example, Apple has about 250 retail locations ? most, if not all, very well-trafficked. But its carrier partners together have about 9,000, according to CIRP. Add to that 1,000 or so Best Buy stores, and a bunch of other retail outlets like RadioShack, and Apple?s plan to claim iPhone sa

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I'm assuing that when you buy a phone at an istore, you are 100% buying the phone in a single transaction, vs when you "obtain" a phone through a cellular provider you are paying for it $20 a month for 2 years as part of your cellular service.

I know that one factor is cost - and many people simply can't afford to pay $500 in one shot up front for a phone. Strange that the article doesn't mention that.

I'm not expecting that a tv tuner would go into ALL phones made by any given manufacturer.

I'm wondering why a few models or even just one model wouldn't have a built-in tuner as an advanced feature, meant to give a marketing advantage for those people that do purchase their phones outright before signing up for a plan.

Reply to
Home Guy

And I gave you one possible reason, but you ignore it. That is that the vast majority of cell phones are sold through the cell phone carriers. Even your own Apple data confirms that. Just

20% of their phones are sold via their own stores. I'd bet that the majority are sold through carriers. So, if you were Apple or LG and your 4 major customers that account for over half your sales were telling you they didn't want to see a TV in the phone because they prefer to see customers run up airtime data minutes, what would you do? Maybe that's the wrong question. What would a reasonable business person do? Note that I'm not saying that is what is going on, only that it's possibly one of the reasons.

Other factors could be the size of the smallest TV tuner is too large, the power required, interference from the cell phone transmitter that is an inch away. Someone else also pointed out the antenna size. In the city, folks have rabbit ears to get TV reception. Outside the city you typically have a Yaggi antenna. Where would you put those for a cellphone? You're going to look pretty crazy walking around with a yaggi on your head. And even if it could work with a tiny antenna inside the phone that would work in part of a city, maybe they figured out it's not robust enough, won't work well enough for enough people, in enough areas to make it a useful feature. Didn't we just have a thread about an allegedly "unusable" cell phone? Maybe the cell phone companies don't want a bunch of dissatisfied customers with something that they know would only work half-assed.

Reply to
trader_4

Nope. At least through Sprint it is pretty much the same as going through a Sprint store, except the wait times at Sprint stores are MUCH less.

Reply to
Kurt Ullman

There's always a tendency to characterize new technology in terms of existing stuff. It's a lot like CATV but then again, it's not. (-" That's one reason why courts have been ruling differently on the subject and why it's risen to a dispute in front of the Supremes. Will nine judges who basically live in a bubble and have "people" to do all of the mundane things like computer maintenance and technology management be able to make the right call here? I have my very serious doubts.

Of course this is where the "rub" comes in? Once it's put out on the public airwaves for free, does the OTA signal regain rights it didn't really have AS an OTA signal?

I'm not sure that view is consistent with the Court's view in the Cablevision case. Yes, OTA broadcasters have been getting retransmission fees, but that's been a voluntary arrangement and not necessarily one that controls in all cases. Aereo was careful to use separate "antennalets" for each customer in an attempt to maintain the concept that the end user is receiving an OTA broadcast through a signal antenna specific to that user. I think dissenter Denny Chin called it a fiction (or maybe it was an end run) but he basically agreed with your contention that it's exactly like CATV - except that system does not provide antennas on a one-to-one basis so it is, technically speaking, slightly different. Aereo and Barry Diller are betting/hoping the distinction is enough (and it has been in lower courts) to set it apart, legally speaking, from CATV.

Citation? My understanding was very strongly that this would ADD eyeballs, especially from the people who get lousy local reception of OTA signals. I think it's a much more important consideration in the age of DTV. With analog you could tolerate a snowy or ghosted image if you *really* wanted to watch something OTA with bad reception.

With DTV, bad reception usually means severe pixelation or complete dropouts for seconds at a time. That's unwatchable in my book, and those are the people that Aereo is bringing to the stations who are complaining vociferously about a loss that they really can't quantify. Yes, CATV companies pay for retransmission but I am not sure that means anyone that re-transmits an OTA signal *has* to pay as well. That may be the real fear here - that if Aereo breaks down that paradigm that the CATV operators will push to end retransmission fees and succeed.

I was generalizing to point out that parties often come to court predicting horrible and dire consequences if the court doesn't side with them. Just as often, it seems, those predictions are not only wrong, but totally wrong. The collapse of the broadcast TV industry posited by the plaintiffs in Aereo is a lot like what the plaintiffs in Betamax said - "this will be the end of us" but of course, it wasn't. It was the beginning of a huge new revenue source that dwarfed the money they were getting from ads. Yes, the concept of "aftermarket" doesn't directly apply in Aereo. However it's well-established that broadcasters put out an advertiser supported signal to be viewed by as many potential clients of those advertisers as possible. Except now they don't seem to really want as many viewers as possible, they want retransmission fees (which have caused some serious battles in recent years) for doing nothing. Wouldn't we all like to collect fat fees for doing nothing. That's the crux of this case.

I respectfully submit that the US Court of Appeals decided it wasn't. A bad analogy would be that the signal, once broadcast, is like putting your garbage at the curb and complaining that someone took it and sold it for scrap and they should give you a cut. Now I am not saying American Idol is garbage. Wait, maybe I am. (-:

Indubitably.

It's a little like saying we're going to kill the goose that lays golden eggs because the eggs aren't quite as big as they used to be. The horror.

Reply to
Robert Green

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