28 ms·

Locast’s free TV service shuts down after losing copyright ruling

63 points by davidclark22 5y ago

jordemort 5y ago
This is disappointing. I got the email from them the other day saying they were going to stop interrupting programming to ask for donations, but I guess upon further discussion with their lawyers, they decided that wasn't enough to cover them? I wish we had an FCC that was more aggressively on the side of the consumer, that would get much more than just the money they currently get from the broadcasters in exchange for the valuable spectrum that they're permitted to occupy.
300bps 5y ago
I've been using Locast for about a year - $5.50 per month to get streaming local channels. Now people who generally want to follow the rules will be faced with jailbreaking their firestick or paying exorbitant rates for Cable for channels they have no interest in.
- dtparr 5y ago
  It obviously depends on your location/line-of-sight/etc., but if you're appropriately located, a cheap antenna + network tuner like HDHomeRun or Tablo can provide the 'live streaming' of local channels to a variety of streaming devices, and some models do DVR as well. There's also the HTPC or NAS-based recording option as well, but that's a bit more involved.
  - techsupporter 5y ago
    > It obviously depends on your location/line-of-sight/etc. And that’s the problem. Virtually everyone who gets Locast, including me, can’t get reliable reception. This is exactly what retransmission non-profits are supposed to help with. But in response to Locast, people say “just put up an antenna.” I would love to but I live in a city of hills and trees that eat RF for breakfast and dinner. I have paid for Locast since it arrived in my market and I’m immensely sad to see it go.
    - dtparr 5y ago
      Yeah, I understand. Where I grew up and my parents still live is ~60 mi from the nearest stations, and during the digital transition they all went from high power VHF to UHF and they lost the ability to get anything even with a 40' tower with a rotating antenna. Still, I've found a lot of people who CAN get signal just grew up on cable and don't really know how to even check for OTA availability or what to do to get it if they have it, so I like to mention it for their benefit. Not trying to minimize how frustrating it is for folks who can't though.
  - torgoguys 5y ago
    I'm always surprised that more people don't just use antennas. For truly local channels, it's generally going to work and be a one-time cost to get things going instead of a monthly one. Plus (if it matters to you) the video quality will generally exceed getting the channel via most other methods. As you mention, some situations may not have reception due to special circumstances--and for them, I understand--but I think many people just don't think of just using an antenna these days. Or maybe they just want to hit the easy button and pay the monthly fee. (?)
    - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
      I've tried several times. When I lived in the middle of a big city, my condo windows faced the wrong direction and the building was mostly concrete and brick, so the signals couldn't penetrate very well. Now I live outside of the city but at the bottom of a hill that unfortunately is the direction of most of the broadcast towers, so I'm in an RF shadow. It's not too big of a loss for me since I can't stand to watch network tv with it's insane amount of advertising but for live sporting events, it would be a nice option to have.
    - zinekeller 5y ago
      > I'm always surprised that more people don't just use antennas. Even with suitable antennas, the broadcasting power of the transmitters has been significantly decreased, so in some cases you really are in an unlucky spot where the transmission isn't fully good. Moreover (specifically in the US), ATSC (before the recent 3.0 standard anyway) doesn't use OFDM, so when there's a weak signal it's a lot harder to lock on it.
    - toast0 5y ago
      If you've got trees and hills, you're probably going to need a roof mounted antenna, and likely a person to install it for you. It can get tricky to find someone who does that; the goto person in the bay area retired and I don't know if there's a new person. When I moved to the Seattle area, it was a challenge finding someone here.
    - enzanki_ars 5y ago
      I have one, but I still use Locast because I'm in an apartment. I don't have line of sight at all, and I have a lot of issues with signal quality. And I live 3 miles away from my local NBC station, and the only window I can point my antenna has a bit of line of sight, thought it is at about 70 degrees. Yet my recording of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies had severe compression artifacts due to missed parts of the signal every 2 minutes. Locast or paying nearly $70+ for cable is the only way I could watch over the air broadcasts, and I'm not going to pay $70 for cable to watch ad filled content that's 80% reruns and barely any of the sports content I want to watch.
  - classichasclass 5y ago
    I can't get OTA worth warm spit with an antenna where I'm located, but Locast worked great. I'd have to erect something much larger and there's just not enough content other than the occasional need to watch local news to justify it. I'd like to point out that during the analogue era, I got a fuzzy picture, but I got picture and sound. Now I get compression artifacts and stuttering and entire drop-outs.
  - AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
    > but if you're appropriately located And therein is the problem. I'm on a ground-level apartment unit. The OTA antenna I stick on the corner of a wall in the living room can't pick up shit.
  - hakfoo 5y ago
    I wonder if you could do a "micro-Aereo" (remember them) with a HDHomerun box and a VPN. You mount the box somewhere that allows for access to a good antenna, and something to proxy the data back to your local network. Might be feasible in places like apartment blocks where you'd want the antenna on the roof or a high story.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > will be faced with jailbreaking their firestick If you're in a market that can get locast, you can also buy a digital receiver for about $20 and get the same local channels that locast was broadcasting.
  - rockostrich 5y ago
    Some people can't get a good enough OTA signal for a digital receiver to work. In my previous apartment that was the case even though I was probably only 10 miles away from the stations I cared about. That led me to look into things like Locast and become a donator. It's also super convenient since you can watch things on a phone or tablet. I mainly used it for watching Jeopardy in the kitchen while watching on an iPad.
imglorp 5y ago
I don't understand why broadcasters are not grateful for someone amplifying and relaying their signals, ads and all, for more customers to consume. They routinely pay to physically transmit the same thing over the air. Having eyes on their ads seems to be their actual revenue stream and business metric.
- dtparr 5y ago
  Presumably because having an additional free or cheap option out there that's more user-friendly than OTA transmission reduces the value to the cable companies that pay for retransmission rights.
- ascagnel_ 5y ago
  Broadcasters have two options: - forego carriage fees in exchange for cable companies being forced to carry the channel - withhold their feed in exchange for negotiated carriage fees The big broadcast networks, at least in the US, have desirable content, so they demand payment for access to their feeds. Advertising is almost a secondary business at this point. Actual broadcast usage is on the rise, but is a dying business from the networks' point of view.
  - m-p-3 5y ago
    IMO there should be something done so that OTA broadcasts should also be made available online and free of charge, without DRMs, through a standardised protocol (including the tv guide whenever possible). It would be nice to have the option to map all these signals through a unified IPTV app.
    - zinekeller 5y ago
      It's more disappointing to think that, for example, the Whole of Europe (regardless if you're sitting in London, Amsterdam, or Moscow) has figured that if you're providing a free over-the-air service it's a good bother to set up an IP version of the thing you're broadcasting. Moreover, the UK has a FreeSat service so for a one-time payment, you can watch television live even in areas where their already-excellent FreeView service doesn't cover (or you want HD versions of some channels because having a license to broadcast (BBC, ITV plc and STV plc, Channel 4 Television Corporation, S4C Authority, Channel 5 Ltd., and others) and the operations of broadcasting (Arqiva) are totally separate). But maybe there's actually an indirect recurring fee in the form of TV licenses, so at the same time I dunno.
topherPedersen 5y ago
Over the air television and radio broadcasting is an obsolete technology. Not a smart move for this industry to ignore the internet. Locast was doing these networks a favor.
midwestemo 5y ago
Locast wouldn't let you watch over 15 mins before interrupting you to donate. Then you would need to exit out and join the channel back. To remove this you had to donate around $5/mo AFAIK when I used it last time. So it wasn't really "non-profit"
- banana_giraffe 5y ago
  Oddly enough, yesterday Locast thought removing this interruption was good enough for them to ride out this storm. Then today they shut down. I'd be curious to know what changed in 24 hours.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Perhaps their accountants saw how much of their budget was eaten up by bandwidth costs and concluded they couldn't stay afloat without donations.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  Non-profit just means they don't make a profit. Not free. I imagine serving a bunch of video over the net is not free.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    Well, the judges ruling says the opposite.
classichasclass 5y ago
The judge's summary judgment has an interesting criticism: "Plaintiffs set forth several arguments that defendants' Locast service does not come within the statutory exemption. For the most part, they present such conflicting characterizations of the facts that they are more suited to trial than a summary disposition." It seems like the judge did not find most of their statements persuasive, but rather than comment further and based on the 2019 hearing, limited himself to the sole determination that expansion of service was nowhere to be found in 17 USC 111. It would have been interesting to read more about what he didn't like about their filings. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.520217/gov.uscourts.nysd.520217.322.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.52... I didn't mind the interruptions when I was a free user, and didn't mind the $5. Unfortunately, the statute as interpreted seems to mean that unless your non-profit retransmission network exists in its entirety in whole cloth from the beginning, it can't be legal. I'm not sure this was intended either. I think the EFF does have some room to appeal.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> The free version of Locast's service interrupts programming every 15 minutes "with a fifteen-second video requesting donations," Stanton noted It doesn't seem like they actually needed to shut down. They didn't just interrupt the broadcast, the notifications would stop, and then exit out of the app. You could go back into it and watch for another fifteen minutes or so, and then you'd get another "give us some money or these notifications continue" notification. The judge's ruling was that this means of "forcing" of users to "donate" weren't voluntary donations at all and that locast was therefore not a non-profit. They could have continued by either actually making the donations truly voluntary or by operating as a for-profit.
- darknavi 5y ago
  I have an account and was not aware of any lawsuit so I am seeing this news only threw emails from Locast. Here is a brief rundown the emails I got: August 31, 2021: > Response to Summary Judgement > > In the big media companies' lawsuit against Locast, the court just issued a disappointing ruling. We are evaluating our options and will keep you posted as the situation develops. September 1, 2021: > Stopping the interrupt > > Locast is suspending immediately all programming interruptions to request donations. > This means that anyone located in a market we serve who signs up for Locast will get the service without interruption, regardless of whether or not they donate. > Of course, it is up to you whether or not to contribute to Locast. But if you currently contribute, we humbly request that you continue to do so. And if you don't contribute, we hope that you will do so if you can afford it. September 2, 2021: > Suspending Operations > > As a non-profit, Locast was designed from the very beginning to operate in accordance with the strict letter of the law, but in response to the court’s recent rulings, with which we respectfully disagree, we are hereby suspending operations, effective immediately. It seems like removing ads was not enough for someone, they turned their attitude very quickly.
  - rockostrich 5y ago
    I'm guessing that removing the ads was just a test to see what kind of donation conversion they would get without them and they quickly realized that it would be nowhere near sustainable.

63 points by davidclark22 5y ago

This is disappointing. I got the email from them the other day saying they were going to stop interrupting programming to ask for donations, but I guess upon further discussion with their lawyers, they decided that wasn't enough to cover them? I wish we had an FCC that was more aggressively on the side of the consumer, that would get much more than just the money they currently get from the broadcasters in exchange for the valuable spectrum that they're permitted to occupy.

300bps 5y ago

I've been using Locast for about a year - $5.50 per month to get streaming local channels. Now people who generally want to follow the rules will be faced with jailbreaking their firestick or paying exorbitant rates for Cable for channels they have no interest in.

dtparr 5y ago
It obviously depends on your location/line-of-sight/etc., but if you're appropriately located, a cheap antenna + network tuner like HDHomeRun or Tablo can provide the 'live streaming' of local channels to a variety of streaming devices, and some models do DVR as well. There's also the HTPC or NAS-based recording option as well, but that's a bit more involved.
- techsupporter 5y ago
  > It obviously depends on your location/line-of-sight/etc. And that’s the problem. Virtually everyone who gets Locast, including me, can’t get reliable reception. This is exactly what retransmission non-profits are supposed to help with. But in response to Locast, people say “just put up an antenna.” I would love to but I live in a city of hills and trees that eat RF for breakfast and dinner. I have paid for Locast since it arrived in my market and I’m immensely sad to see it go.
  - dtparr 5y ago
    Yeah, I understand. Where I grew up and my parents still live is ~60 mi from the nearest stations, and during the digital transition they all went from high power VHF to UHF and they lost the ability to get anything even with a 40' tower with a rotating antenna. Still, I've found a lot of people who CAN get signal just grew up on cable and don't really know how to even check for OTA availability or what to do to get it if they have it, so I like to mention it for their benefit. Not trying to minimize how frustrating it is for folks who can't though.
- torgoguys 5y ago
  I'm always surprised that more people don't just use antennas. For truly local channels, it's generally going to work and be a one-time cost to get things going instead of a monthly one. Plus (if it matters to you) the video quality will generally exceed getting the channel via most other methods. As you mention, some situations may not have reception due to special circumstances--and for them, I understand--but I think many people just don't think of just using an antenna these days. Or maybe they just want to hit the easy button and pay the monthly fee. (?)
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    I've tried several times. When I lived in the middle of a big city, my condo windows faced the wrong direction and the building was mostly concrete and brick, so the signals couldn't penetrate very well. Now I live outside of the city but at the bottom of a hill that unfortunately is the direction of most of the broadcast towers, so I'm in an RF shadow. It's not too big of a loss for me since I can't stand to watch network tv with it's insane amount of advertising but for live sporting events, it would be a nice option to have.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    > I'm always surprised that more people don't just use antennas. Even with suitable antennas, the broadcasting power of the transmitters has been significantly decreased, so in some cases you really are in an unlucky spot where the transmission isn't fully good. Moreover (specifically in the US), ATSC (before the recent 3.0 standard anyway) doesn't use OFDM, so when there's a weak signal it's a lot harder to lock on it.
  - toast0 5y ago
    If you've got trees and hills, you're probably going to need a roof mounted antenna, and likely a person to install it for you. It can get tricky to find someone who does that; the goto person in the bay area retired and I don't know if there's a new person. When I moved to the Seattle area, it was a challenge finding someone here.
  - enzanki_ars 5y ago
    I have one, but I still use Locast because I'm in an apartment. I don't have line of sight at all, and I have a lot of issues with signal quality. And I live 3 miles away from my local NBC station, and the only window I can point my antenna has a bit of line of sight, thought it is at about 70 degrees. Yet my recording of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies had severe compression artifacts due to missed parts of the signal every 2 minutes. Locast or paying nearly $70+ for cable is the only way I could watch over the air broadcasts, and I'm not going to pay $70 for cable to watch ad filled content that's 80% reruns and barely any of the sports content I want to watch.
- classichasclass 5y ago
  I can't get OTA worth warm spit with an antenna where I'm located, but Locast worked great. I'd have to erect something much larger and there's just not enough content other than the occasional need to watch local news to justify it. I'd like to point out that during the analogue era, I got a fuzzy picture, but I got picture and sound. Now I get compression artifacts and stuttering and entire drop-outs.
- AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
  > but if you're appropriately located And therein is the problem. I'm on a ground-level apartment unit. The OTA antenna I stick on the corner of a wall in the living room can't pick up shit.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  I wonder if you could do a "micro-Aereo" (remember them) with a HDHomerun box and a VPN. You mount the box somewhere that allows for access to a good antenna, and something to proxy the data back to your local network. Might be feasible in places like apartment blocks where you'd want the antenna on the roof or a high story.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> will be faced with jailbreaking their firestick If you're in a market that can get locast, you can also buy a digital receiver for about $20 and get the same local channels that locast was broadcasting.
- rockostrich 5y ago
  Some people can't get a good enough OTA signal for a digital receiver to work. In my previous apartment that was the case even though I was probably only 10 miles away from the stations I cared about. That led me to look into things like Locast and become a donator. It's also super convenient since you can watch things on a phone or tablet. I mainly used it for watching Jeopardy in the kitchen while watching on an iPad.

imglorp 5y ago

I don't understand why broadcasters are not grateful for someone amplifying and relaying their signals, ads and all, for more customers to consume. They routinely pay to physically transmit the same thing over the air. Having eyes on their ads seems to be their actual revenue stream and business metric.

dtparr 5y ago
Presumably because having an additional free or cheap option out there that's more user-friendly than OTA transmission reduces the value to the cable companies that pay for retransmission rights.
ascagnel_ 5y ago
Broadcasters have two options: - forego carriage fees in exchange for cable companies being forced to carry the channel - withhold their feed in exchange for negotiated carriage fees The big broadcast networks, at least in the US, have desirable content, so they demand payment for access to their feeds. Advertising is almost a secondary business at this point. Actual broadcast usage is on the rise, but is a dying business from the networks' point of view.
- m-p-3 5y ago
  IMO there should be something done so that OTA broadcasts should also be made available online and free of charge, without DRMs, through a standardised protocol (including the tv guide whenever possible). It would be nice to have the option to map all these signals through a unified IPTV app.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    It's more disappointing to think that, for example, the Whole of Europe (regardless if you're sitting in London, Amsterdam, or Moscow) has figured that if you're providing a free over-the-air service it's a good bother to set up an IP version of the thing you're broadcasting. Moreover, the UK has a FreeSat service so for a one-time payment, you can watch television live even in areas where their already-excellent FreeView service doesn't cover (or you want HD versions of some channels because having a license to broadcast (BBC, ITV plc and STV plc, Channel 4 Television Corporation, S4C Authority, Channel 5 Ltd., and others) and the operations of broadcasting (Arqiva) are totally separate). But maybe there's actually an indirect recurring fee in the form of TV licenses, so at the same time I dunno.

topherPedersen 5y ago

Over the air television and radio broadcasting is an obsolete technology. Not a smart move for this industry to ignore the internet. Locast was doing these networks a favor.

midwestemo 5y ago

Locast wouldn't let you watch over 15 mins before interrupting you to donate. Then you would need to exit out and join the channel back. To remove this you had to donate around $5/mo AFAIK when I used it last time. So it wasn't really "non-profit"

banana_giraffe 5y ago
Oddly enough, yesterday Locast thought removing this interruption was good enough for them to ride out this storm. Then today they shut down. I'd be curious to know what changed in 24 hours.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Perhaps their accountants saw how much of their budget was eaten up by bandwidth costs and concluded they couldn't stay afloat without donations.
salamandersauce 5y ago
Non-profit just means they don't make a profit. Not free. I imagine serving a bunch of video over the net is not free.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  Well, the judges ruling says the opposite.

classichasclass 5y ago

The judge's summary judgment has an interesting criticism: "Plaintiffs set forth several arguments that defendants' Locast service does not come within the statutory exemption. For the most part, they present such conflicting characterizations of the facts that they are more suited to trial than a summary disposition." It seems like the judge did not find most of their statements persuasive, but rather than comment further and based on the 2019 hearing, limited himself to the sole determination that expansion of service was nowhere to be found in 17 USC 111. It would have been interesting to read more about what he didn't like about their filings. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.520217/gov.uscourts.nysd.520217.322.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.52... I didn't mind the interruptions when I was a free user, and didn't mind the $5. Unfortunately, the statute as interpreted seems to mean that unless your non-profit retransmission network exists in its entirety in whole cloth from the beginning, it can't be legal. I'm not sure this was intended either. I think the EFF does have some room to appeal.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> The free version of Locast's service interrupts programming every 15 minutes "with a fifteen-second video requesting donations," Stanton noted It doesn't seem like they actually needed to shut down. They didn't just interrupt the broadcast, the notifications would stop, and then exit out of the app. You could go back into it and watch for another fifteen minutes or so, and then you'd get another "give us some money or these notifications continue" notification. The judge's ruling was that this means of "forcing" of users to "donate" weren't voluntary donations at all and that locast was therefore not a non-profit. They could have continued by either actually making the donations truly voluntary or by operating as a for-profit.

darknavi 5y ago
I have an account and was not aware of any lawsuit so I am seeing this news only threw emails from Locast. Here is a brief rundown the emails I got: August 31, 2021: > Response to Summary Judgement > > In the big media companies' lawsuit against Locast, the court just issued a disappointing ruling. We are evaluating our options and will keep you posted as the situation develops. September 1, 2021: > Stopping the interrupt > > Locast is suspending immediately all programming interruptions to request donations. > This means that anyone located in a market we serve who signs up for Locast will get the service without interruption, regardless of whether or not they donate. > Of course, it is up to you whether or not to contribute to Locast. But if you currently contribute, we humbly request that you continue to do so. And if you don't contribute, we hope that you will do so if you can afford it. September 2, 2021: > Suspending Operations > > As a non-profit, Locast was designed from the very beginning to operate in accordance with the strict letter of the law, but in response to the court’s recent rulings, with which we respectfully disagree, we are hereby suspending operations, effective immediately. It seems like removing ads was not enough for someone, they turned their attitude very quickly.
- rockostrich 5y ago
  I'm guessing that removing the ads was just a test to see what kind of donation conversion they would get without them and they quickly realized that it would be nowhere near sustainable.