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News Corp. Threatens to Pull Fox Off the Airwaves If Aereo Wins
- sultezdukes 14y agoTaking out of context, but I found "Having a television antenna is every American’s right.” to be pretty funny.
- dmckeon 14y agoFrom a UK context, it may be less funny: 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
- hp50g 14y agoBargain. The content is great across the board. I happily pay my license.
- jrockway 14y agoAre there ads?
- VLM 14y ago10 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.
- hp50g 14y agoI think the interesting part about the BBC is that I agree they transmit at IQ average 100, but the upper standard deviation is quite high too :)
- dkulchenko 14y agoAs 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.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoIt is rather nice. You guys ought to try it.
- twoodfin 14y agoI'd put Netflix ($8/month) + Amazon Prime Video ($6.50/month and Prime shipping included!) up against the BBC's streaming library any time.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoIts 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.
- tomrod 14y agoDr. Who--does Amazon Prime update more frequently than Netflix?
- sultezdukes 14y agoEver heard of Cable or Satellite?
- dkulchenko 14y agoBritish 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.
- marssaxman 14y agoLet's hope Aereo wins, then.
- rayiner 14y agoI 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.
- dkl 14y agoDon't they have to because they use the public airwaves?
- betterunix 14y agoThey could try using this instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
- leethax0r 14y agoWow, that sounds really neat.
- GHFigs 14y agoThe 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.
- betterunix 14y agoI 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).
- umsm 14y ago
- eykanal 14y agoCan'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.
- jrockway 14y agoTheir 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.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoMurdoch has a fundamental problem : 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
- leethax0r 14y agoWhat does that quote even /mean/?
- defen 14y agoCracks knuckles "It really would be a shame if that nice reputation of yours were to be damaged in any way..."
- lifeisstillgood 14y agodefn 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. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/07/24/geoffrey-robertson-murdoch-will-survive.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/07/24/geoffrey-ro...
- ichtet31 14y agoPlease do, you will not be missed.
- revelation 14y agoLet's piece this together. 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.
- w1ntermute 14y agoThe 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.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoSo, basically, the entire broadcast television industry is built on a wishy-washy technicality in a court ruling, that's just begging to be hacked?
- dsr_ 14y agoNo, the cable industry is built on the technicality. Broadcasters have the right to negotiate with cable companies for carriage. http://www.fcc.gov/guides/cable-carriage-broadcast-stations 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.
- 14y ago
- baggachipz 14y agoButtHurt [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."
- mtgx 14y agoSounds like win-win to me.
- trotsky 14y agoCan 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 http://www.boxee.tv/dvr cloud dvr, stream live tv to multidevice - launched in some markets.
- robterrell 14y agoI 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 is the broadcast area? It's called a Designated Market Area or Television Market Area (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_market 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.
- trotsky 14y agoThanks a lot for taking the time to explain, I really appreciate it.
- ctdonath 14y agoNo 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 http://www.iheart.com app service, making broadcast radio available everywhere free - rescuing many stations from oblivion. Whither "I Heart TV"?
- DanielBMarkham 14y agoIt 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.
- venomsnake 14y agoSo ... 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 ...
- malkia 14y agoPlease don't forget to cabelize Faux News too.
- thatthatis 14y agoMore people are watching NYC area stations -> charge more for advertising on those stations => why is this a problem? 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"
- forgotAgain 14y agoAero 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.
- mdip 14y agoI 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.
- taylodl 14y agoI'll sure miss Fox when they pull off the airwaves said no one ever.
- cycomachead 14y agoPulling Fox News off the air seems to be yet another argument for Aereo.
- nhebb 14y agoReading 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.
- kyllo 14y agoI 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.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI wonder if News Corp realizes just how many people support Aereo now given this threat.