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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

It's deeply ironic to paint Aereo as taking on those with "unfairly advantaged business positions." Aereo's whole business model was getting other peoples' content for free because of a loophole in the broadcasting laws. It's great to build a business delivering content other people create that you don't have to pay for, but that's the definition of "unfairly advantaged business position."

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I never felt that situation was clearly resolved in my mind. The essentially ran a subscription dvr service. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around how it's illegal for a business to do that, but just fine for me to do it myself.

I'm not talking about the law so much as the moralizing. Aereo was a middle-man. The only reason anyone ever paid them money was to get access to content that Aereo didn't create or even pay for. When that content became unavailable, Aereo collapsed because the entire value of their service was derived from other peoples' content.

Whether or not their "subscription DVR service" fit within the legal loophole they were trying to take advantage of doesn't change the fact that it's pretty rich to build a service like that and then go around saying that the people whose content you're distributing -- the people who create the content that is the sole basis for the existence of your business -- are "fat cats" with "unfairly advantaged business positions."

Nah. They were providing "dvr as a service" at a reasonable price. The "fat cats" are the cable monopolies that lobby to protect their unfair positions while drastically overcharging and providing poor customer value.

Aereo made it easy to take advantage of something that is already free (and free by law). That was going to cut into the fat cats margins, so the fat cats got them shut down.

To be clear - would you also be morally opposed to renting physical TV antennas? Assume that the only thing they are useful for is receiving broadcast television, they can't be repurposed for electronics hacking, hanging clothes, etc.

I'm not morally opposed to the service--I'm opposed to moralizing the issue and pretending that you're fighting "fat cats" even as you create a service that exists solely to sell their content to other people.

But that content is already being freely distributed over the airwaves. They just provided another means of accessing it. The only reason the broadcasters opposed Aereo is that they were afraid people might cut the cable. The current system is a bizarre pyramid of misincentives. I really believe the decision against Aereo came down to fear of what would happen if that pyramid needed to be fundamentally rethought, as it will eventually definitely need to be. It was basically a gift to the established players to hopefully give them another couple decent years before they actually have to innovate. It's rather telling that they could pretty trivially live stream their over-the-air content, obviating the purpose of an Aereo, but they simply choose not to.

The content is free because it is distributed over the public airwaves. If you distribute it in a way that does not use the public airwaves, the basis for making it free to the public disappears. Also, broadcasters couldn't care less if people cut the cable. They only reason they cared about Aereo is because they're in a bitter war with the cable companies over retransmission fees, and if Aereo can stream broadcast content for free, that could undermine broadcasters' leverage over cable companies.

The system definitely needs to be rethought. The sensible thing to do would be to simply get rid of free public broadcasting and the associated copyright exceptions. Free up the airwaves, and let broadcasters sell content directly to cable and internet companies. But as Netflix is finding out, content is king. There is little room for simple middle-men like Aereo to make money when they can't get content for free.

In other words, he was operating exactly how the cable companies did when they first started. And the west-coast movie companies. And American book publishers in the 1700s. And Irish book publishers before that.

But, but ... aren't all startups told to look for that "unfair competitive advantage" :)

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