Aereo - "supreme" court hearing arguments

[CZroe]

You rent so the property is legally under your control.

If I plugged into a common facility-operated antenna at my rented property then I'd be no more in control than when I rent Aereo's antennas.

 

[Ichinisan]

You rent so the property is legally under your control.

The origin of cable TV was community shared antennas in the late 1940s -- and no one ever questioned the legality of it back then.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United_States

In fact, local broadcasters knew they would be at a disadvantage if a local cable operator carried competing stations and didn't carry their own. The FCC passed a ruling allowing stations to require a cable company to carry a particular station ("must carry"). Decades later, long after after cable-exclusive national non-OTA networks appeared, the local broadcasters got greedy. In a peculiar move, the OTA broadcast networks lobbied regulators to give them the right to deny cable operators from carrying their channel ("retransmission consent"). For ad-supported over-the-air networks, this makes absolutely no sense.

Sure enough, they've exploited that provision to extort ridiculous retransmission rates from TV services providers. Every 6-12 months, the rates are renegotiated and the rates are increasing much faster than the rate of inflation. This leads to higher costs for cable and satellite service, and there's nothing the TV service providers can do about it.

 

[lamedude]

AIUI it was Ted Turner that opened Pandora's box. I guess you can't get your cable channels carried if the cable company has to carry all those pesky OTA stations.