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They say "subject to capacity" all over their site so I have a feeling if everyone in town is trying to watch the Super Bowl some people aren't going to be able

by evan_ 13y ago

They say "subject to capacity" all over their site so I have a feeling if everyone in town is trying to watch the Super Bowl some people aren't going to be able to. I have a feeling they're hoping that long-term they'll be able to ditch the one-antenna-per-stream nonsense. With that one tiny (!) little tweak it suddenly becomes wildly profitable.

rayiner 13y ago
> I have a feeling they're hoping that long-term they'll be able to ditch the one-antenna-per-stream nonsense. With that one tiny (!) little tweak it suddenly becomes wildly profitable. For a short time, maybe. But such a court ruling would basically declare open season on broadcast content, such that anybody would be able to quickly start an Aereo competitor and retransmit OTA television. With AWS, it would be a cinch. So the price of the service would quickly drop to nothing.
- evan_ 13y ago
  True, Aereo would probably still have an advantage just because they'd have a more mature product and some market share.
- acjohnson55 13y ago
  I strongly disagree that this would be "a cinch". If AWS were suitable for this, why would Aereo themselves be using rooms full of transcoders instead of the cloud? I think the only people willing to make the investment in Aereo-like infrastructure are existing cable and satellite TV companies, looking to escape retransmission fees. But they it seems unlikely they'd want to unbundle that from their non-OTA content.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Aereo has to maintain the pretense that they're just "renting out" a time-shifting DVR. That's why they need rooms full of transcoders. But the premise of the comment 'evan_ made is what if the law was changed so they didn't need to maintain that pretense? In that case, Aereo's costs would go down, but it would also become ridiculously easy to start a competitor.
    - acjohnson55 13y ago
      I don't think anyone is under the impression that anything about the model of charging retransmission fees for one-to-many streaming is going anywhere. If it did, then sure, cable companies could do what they do today and simply not pay fees. But that possibility isn't even on the table right now. I don't think DVR fundamentally has anything to do with the transcoding. You could just store and time-shift the native stream and get rid of the transcoders. I suspect that the transcoding is done primarily to conserve bandwidth. To me, the DVR is pretty much a settled question under Cartoon Network vs. Cablevision [1]. The real question is whether Aereo is allowed to rent you an antenna. [1] http://betanews.com/2009/06/29/cable-dvrs-are-legal-supreme-court-denies-appeal-of-cablevision-decision/ http://betanews.com/2009/06/29/cable-dvrs-are-legal-supreme-...
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    You would no longer need "a room full of transcoders". You would have a control plane that would determine what people were watching (a la Netflix), and then use RTMP, HLS, HDS, DASH, etc to serve "channels" across your CDN, and subscribe end-user devices to these channels. Disclaimer: I work for a news startup majority-owned by a major market broadcaster.
acjohnson55 13y ago
It's already established that without one-antenna-per-stream, it is considered a public performance of copyright content, and therefore the content must be licensed. This is how it works with the cable TV providers.

by evan_ 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago

> I have a feeling they're hoping that long-term they'll be able to ditch the one-antenna-per-stream nonsense. With that one tiny (!) little tweak it suddenly becomes wildly profitable. For a short time, maybe. But such a court ruling would basically declare open season on broadcast content, such that anybody would be able to quickly start an Aereo competitor and retransmit OTA television. With AWS, it would be a cinch. So the price of the service would quickly drop to nothing.

evan_ 13y ago
True, Aereo would probably still have an advantage just because they'd have a more mature product and some market share.
acjohnson55 13y ago
I strongly disagree that this would be "a cinch". If AWS were suitable for this, why would Aereo themselves be using rooms full of transcoders instead of the cloud? I think the only people willing to make the investment in Aereo-like infrastructure are existing cable and satellite TV companies, looking to escape retransmission fees. But they it seems unlikely they'd want to unbundle that from their non-OTA content.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Aereo has to maintain the pretense that they're just "renting out" a time-shifting DVR. That's why they need rooms full of transcoders. But the premise of the comment 'evan_ made is what if the law was changed so they didn't need to maintain that pretense? In that case, Aereo's costs would go down, but it would also become ridiculously easy to start a competitor.
  - acjohnson55 13y ago
    I don't think anyone is under the impression that anything about the model of charging retransmission fees for one-to-many streaming is going anywhere. If it did, then sure, cable companies could do what they do today and simply not pay fees. But that possibility isn't even on the table right now. I don't think DVR fundamentally has anything to do with the transcoding. You could just store and time-shift the native stream and get rid of the transcoders. I suspect that the transcoding is done primarily to conserve bandwidth. To me, the DVR is pretty much a settled question under Cartoon Network vs. Cablevision [1]. The real question is whether Aereo is allowed to rent you an antenna. [1] http://betanews.com/2009/06/29/cable-dvrs-are-legal-supreme-court-denies-appeal-of-cablevision-decision/ http://betanews.com/2009/06/29/cable-dvrs-are-legal-supreme-...
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  You would no longer need "a room full of transcoders". You would have a control plane that would determine what people were watching (a la Netflix), and then use RTMP, HLS, HDS, DASH, etc to serve "channels" across your CDN, and subscribe end-user devices to these channels. Disclaimer: I work for a news startup majority-owned by a major market broadcaster.

acjohnson55 13y ago

It's already established that without one-antenna-per-stream, it is considered a public performance of copyright content, and therefore the content must be licensed. This is how it works with the cable TV providers.