Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing "antiquated" about the business method here. Spending a lot of money to create content, and then distributing that content to customers is as viable as a business as ever. What broadcasters are objecting to is Aereo's trying to work a loophole in the copyright law with respect to over the air content. Normally, if a company wants to stream NBC's content to its customers, it will have to sign a contract (and pay money to) NBC. This is exactly the same as any other business where a middle man (like Aereo, or Netflix, or Amazon) sits between the customer and the producer. What Aereo is trying to do is distribute NBC's content to customers without paying for it.

This is not an example of "technological innovation" challenging "antiquated business methods." It's a company using a Rube Goldberg contraption to try and exploit a loophole of copyright, to profit from someone else's product without paying for it.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

I agree with you, but the network over-the-air broadcast method and license for the spectrum in the public interest (which has made them such huge networks) leaves them open to businesses like Aereo picking up their content via antennae.

Once networks ditch the spectrum that is given to them by the government, then they can start complaining about people using antennae to pick up their signals. Until then, I am unsympathetic.

What Aereo is trying to do is distribute NBC's content to customers without paying for it.

How far away from my TV am I allowed to place my VCR/DVR?

What should be the distance limit?

Can I stream my in-home DVR to my TV over WiFi or CAT5?

How far away can my DVR be when I stream it?

I'm guessing it's legal for me to have a DVR in my living-room and stream content acquired from over-the-air broadcasts from it to my garage over a network or wireless.

If so, what changes when my DVR is colocated?

This all seems like a "color of bits" issue.

The "DVR in the cloud" argument was settled a long time ago with the Cablevision lawsuit. Personal DVRs in the cloud are legal as long as the data is not shared between consumers.

The question here seems to be, how far from the receiving antenna can your TV be?

Those users can't buy the service they want from the broadcasters. We'd all have much more sympathy for the broadcasters if they were offering a replacement service for Aereo. You might as well argue that a car companies battery technology is being exploited for free by after market sound system companies. As to the loophole, if your going to argue the spirit of the law was meant to stop companies like aereo existing I'll point out that I doubt the spirit of the law would be to stop me from physically renting an antennae and placing it on a high pole on my neighbors property for compensation and then connecting that to my house in the most efficient way possible. I don't see that in the spirit of the law, so I'd believe if it's a loophole then it's an appropriate one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com