3 ms·

You are carefully omitting that broadcasters are distributing their content over public airwaves, a right that they have only been granted to first and foremost

You are carefully omitting that broadcasters are distributing their content over public airwaves, a right that they have only been granted to first and foremost serve the public interest. Relevant regulations forbid them from, for example, encrypting their content (despite proven commercial solutions; we wouldn't be having this discussion if they could). So we are in the peculiar situation that broadcasters have to simultaneously restrict access to their content to make money from it, while satisfying FCC regulation that forces them to make it available such as to serve the public interest. That's a Rube Goldberg contraption of a business model if I've ever seen one: it requires the government to continue its practice of giving broadcasters a practically free distribution channel, while relying on lobbyism and legal threats to make the government forget about the public mandate.

rayiner 13y ago
There's absolutely nothing Rube Goldbergian about the business model. Broadcasters generally have a right to control the distribution of their content, with the exception that in return for being able to use the airwaves, they must allow people to receive over the air television freely. That's the bargain. It's a clearly defined benefit coupled to a clearly defined obligation. Obviously, the broadcasters have a legitimate interest in not wanting companies like Aereo to game that loophole for their own profit. The public mandate isn't implicated at all. Nobody is talking about cutting off conventional over the air TV. Streaming service like Aereo was never part of that bargain.
- revelation 13y ago
  This is where we reach the crux of the issue at hand. The question being: what is special about airwaves? As you explain it, broadcasters must allow me to receive their over the air content freely, but when I receive the same content from a 3rd party that took it from the air and made it available to me over cable, internet, smoke signals.. they are illegally rebroadcasting. So between congress establishing this bargain (where the only obvious medium for broadcasting was over-the-air) and today, where there are many ways to transmit TV, it suddenly became important over which medium I receive their content under the license granted to me by the bargain the broadcasters entered into. This seems like an odd situation we find ourselves in, because when the FCC started giving out licenses for spectrum nobody gave any thought to other mediums; there simply were no others. I say we end this charade, broadcasters stop transmitting over the public airwaves, we repurpose their spectrum for something useful and everybody keeps watching their favourite show on cable, as they are already doing.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    I quite agree that there are better things to do with all that spectrum than broadcast TV. But until we do that, it seems quite obvious to me that when Congress and the broadcasters carved out the special case for over the air TV, what everyone had in mind was being able to receive signals on an antenna attached to your TV. Given that, Aereo's service is just a legal and technical hack to game that special case.
jsz0 13y ago
The local broadcasters / network affiliates do need to maintain a viable business model to serve the public interest. Their real value to the public is the local news/weather programming they produce which plays an important role in public safety. It's very arguable that a company like Areo disrupting this model serves the public interest at this point. We need local news/weather, emergency weather alerts, school/road closings, etc way more than we need it to be easier to watch re-runs of Wheel of Fortune via Areo.
- revelation 13y ago
  How did they make their money before cable existed and we got into this retransmission mess? Nobody was paying them for the content received over-the-air. (I think the answer is advertisements, but I'm open to other possibilities.)
  - jsz0 13y ago
    Yep it was mostly local advertising. The biggest problem for local broadcasters is their costs for have gone up dramatically while viewership has declined. Bad mix.
- keyhole_downs 13y ago
  So how many iterations or higher courts or lower courts and judgements and how much time and money is going to be wasted until Aero and Broadcasters are allowed speak in frank terms about who owns the analytics inherent to a broadcast instead all this wrangling over whether Aero as a platform and technology is allowed to exist? Or is that just "the price of doing innovation" or "market forces" at work?

rayiner 13y ago

There's absolutely nothing Rube Goldbergian about the business model. Broadcasters generally have a right to control the distribution of their content, with the exception that in return for being able to use the airwaves, they must allow people to receive over the air television freely. That's the bargain. It's a clearly defined benefit coupled to a clearly defined obligation. Obviously, the broadcasters have a legitimate interest in not wanting companies like Aereo to game that loophole for their own profit. The public mandate isn't implicated at all. Nobody is talking about cutting off conventional over the air TV. Streaming service like Aereo was never part of that bargain.

revelation 13y ago
This is where we reach the crux of the issue at hand. The question being: what is special about airwaves? As you explain it, broadcasters must allow me to receive their over the air content freely, but when I receive the same content from a 3rd party that took it from the air and made it available to me over cable, internet, smoke signals.. they are illegally rebroadcasting. So between congress establishing this bargain (where the only obvious medium for broadcasting was over-the-air) and today, where there are many ways to transmit TV, it suddenly became important over which medium I receive their content under the license granted to me by the bargain the broadcasters entered into. This seems like an odd situation we find ourselves in, because when the FCC started giving out licenses for spectrum nobody gave any thought to other mediums; there simply were no others. I say we end this charade, broadcasters stop transmitting over the public airwaves, we repurpose their spectrum for something useful and everybody keeps watching their favourite show on cable, as they are already doing.
- rayiner 13y ago
  I quite agree that there are better things to do with all that spectrum than broadcast TV. But until we do that, it seems quite obvious to me that when Congress and the broadcasters carved out the special case for over the air TV, what everyone had in mind was being able to receive signals on an antenna attached to your TV. Given that, Aereo's service is just a legal and technical hack to game that special case.

jsz0 13y ago

The local broadcasters / network affiliates do need to maintain a viable business model to serve the public interest. Their real value to the public is the local news/weather programming they produce which plays an important role in public safety. It's very arguable that a company like Areo disrupting this model serves the public interest at this point. We need local news/weather, emergency weather alerts, school/road closings, etc way more than we need it to be easier to watch re-runs of Wheel of Fortune via Areo.

revelation 13y ago
How did they make their money before cable existed and we got into this retransmission mess? Nobody was paying them for the content received over-the-air. (I think the answer is advertisements, but I'm open to other possibilities.)
- jsz0 13y ago
  Yep it was mostly local advertising. The biggest problem for local broadcasters is their costs for have gone up dramatically while viewership has declined. Bad mix.
keyhole_downs 13y ago
So how many iterations or higher courts or lower courts and judgements and how much time and money is going to be wasted until Aero and Broadcasters are allowed speak in frank terms about who owns the analytics inherent to a broadcast instead all this wrangling over whether Aero as a platform and technology is allowed to exist? Or is that just "the price of doing innovation" or "market forces" at work?