Aereo was just put out of business by the Supreme Court

[squarecut1]

Bread and circuses. People will stop paying credit cards or mortgages before they lose their access to football or their iPhone.

Unfortunately, there is truth in what you say.

 

[Phoenix86]

Yet despite it being illegal how does Aereo harm the TV industry? Please explain that to me, i have not seen anyone show how harm is performed by Aereo.

This is a wonderful argument.

For a change in laws.

However, it is not a good argument for the case at hand.

 

[Zee]

They're next.

FOX is already leading the charge against Dish and Sling

 

[boomerang]

FOX is already leading the charge against Dish and Sling

Hows that? First I heard.

 

[Markbnj]

Actually the SCOTUS seemed satisfied that their technology worked as they claimed, they just ruled that even working as claimed it was illegal. If it was just that they had cut some corner they, or a competitor, could just make it work that way and all would be fine.

Is that really true? Did Aereo ever convincingly show that each individual subscriber had a physical, dedicated antenna? How could that possibly scale? It's ridiculous.

 

[Zee]

Hows that? First I heard.

Nothing big. they just keep trying to sue Dish over their Hopper and Sling technology. They made it no secret that they will always continue to try

 

[Golgatha]

What Aereo was/is doing is no different than what I currently do. Namely, I use a single antennae to grab shows that are broadcast openly, record those shows to a HDD, and access them over the internet. The only difference is I'm "broadcasting" to myself instead of someone else. What if I now charged someone to use my setup in my same town and didn't use it myself? Am I now illegally rebroadcasting copyrighted material just because I'm not sending the recorded content to myself? I would say no. The SCOTUS says yes apparently and it's just an incorrect ruling IMO. Not to mention the downstream implications it will negatively have for the American people. IMO this is the fiscal branch of government hard at work for the united corporations of America.

 

[Golgatha]

Is that really true? Did Aereo ever convincingly show that each individual subscriber had a physical, dedicated antenna? How could that possibly scale? It's ridiculous.

They had a PCB with individual metal traces hooked to a physical, albeit very tiny, antennae. This was hooked up to a dedicated DVR, which streamed what was recorded to a single customer. The customer basically rented the setup from them for their own individual use. I seriously fail to see how this is remotely similar to CATV rebroadcasting where you receive, amplify, and then rebroadcast a signal to say an entire city full of people for free.

 

[Ichinisan]

This is very sad. Technology should improve our lives, and this ruling stifles innovation.

 

[cubby1223]

There's no way the technology works as they claim. It would be far too difficult of a setup to maintain.

You can always create a small scale demonstration to show that such a setup could be made work, but to build and maintain it is something completely different.

 

[Markbnj]

They had a PCB with individual metal traces hooked to a physical, albeit very tiny, antennae. This was hooked up to a dedicated DVR, which streamed what was recorded to a single customer. The customer basically rented the setup from them for their own individual use. I seriously fail to see how this is remotely similar to CATV rebroadcasting where you receive, amplify, and then rebroadcast a signal to say an entire city full of people for free.

It's not, I agree. But on the other hand, it's a completely backward-looking, unscalable model, so its success would have been no big win, imo, and its failure is no big loss.

 

[smackababy]

They had a PCB with individual metal traces hooked to a physical, albeit very tiny, antennae. This was hooked up to a dedicated DVR, which streamed what was recorded to a single customer. The customer basically rented the setup from them for their own individual use. I seriously fail to see how this is remotely similar to CATV rebroadcasting where you receive, amplify, and then rebroadcast a signal to say an entire city full of people for free.

That is what they claimed, but did they ever prove this? That is the big question. Each individual set up would need all of it's own parts, including DVR and antenna. While the concept isn't hard to proof, actually doing it is a huge waste of resources.

Do you actually believe they were recording every individual OTA channel for each customer on a separate feed and then only allowing a single customer access to that? That seems highly unlikely.

 

[momeNt]

How could they prove it in concrete terms without basically providing all their engineering for the entire world to copy or engineer something similar in capability but different enough to avoid patent infringement!

 

[poofyhairguy]

Yet despite it being illegal how does Aereo harm the TV industry? Please explain that to me, i have not seen anyone show how harm is performed by Aereo.

It harms the industry because if the ruling passed instead of cable companies paying fees for access to OTA network stations (aka CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox) they would have copied Aereo to avoid paying those fees. The networks could have lost up to $3+ billion dollars a year:

What Aereo was/is doing is no different than what I currently do.

Yes it is. You aren't trying to sell what you do as a service.

That is why I think Slingbox is safe. The issue is not format shifting, the courts don't care about format shifting (I have NEVER heard of a consumer DMCA prosecution for ripping DVDs or something like that).

They care when you try to make money on some else's content.

 

[KeithP]

I agree what Aereo was doing is illegal. They could provide no evidence they were operating how they claimed; providing each individual with a rented antenna for local content. They were, instead, simply collecting the OTA feeds and rebroadcasting them over the internet for profit.

If you really thought they would win, you're an idiot.

I didn't think they would win, I just thought they were right. And, as far as being idiot goes, I think your post removes all doubt.

-KeithP

 

[Phoenix86]

That is why I think Slingbox is safe. The issue is not format shifting, the courts don't care about format shifting (I have NEVER heard of a consumer DMCA prosecution for ripping DVDs or something like that).

They care when you try to make money on some else's content.

Or broadcast.

People seem to not understand the difference between a stream to a single device and a broadcast to multiple devices (or multiple streams to multiple devices).

All you would have to do to show aereo wasn't streaming from each device is to compare multiple streams. Are they identical? I bet they are...

 

[Lonyo]

Or broadcast.

People seem to not understand the difference between a stream to a single device and a broadcast to multiple devices (or multiple streams to multiple devices).

All you would have to do to show aereo wasn't streaming from each device is to compare multiple streams. Are they identical? I bet they are...

If you get two computers to calculate Pi using SuperPi to 1m decimal places, will they give the same result? I bet they will.
Because it's two identical systems doing the same processes to the same source.

Your argument proves nothing other than software can consistently do the same thing to the same source data when run on the same hardware.

 

[DCal430]

They had a PCB with individual metal traces hooked to a physical, albeit very tiny, antennae. This was hooked up to a dedicated DVR, which streamed what was recorded to a single customer. The customer basically rented the setup from them for their own individual use. I seriously fail to see how this is remotely similar to CATV rebroadcasting where you receive, amplify, and then rebroadcast a signal to say an entire city full of people for free.

Again they claimed it worked like this, but their antennas are all connected together in an array. They never showed they acted independently. Multiple experts a have doubted aereo works like the company claims.

 

[smackababy]

Again they claimed it worked like this, but their antennas are all connected together in an array. They never showed they acted independently. Multiple experts a have doubted aereo works like the company claims.

And even if all the antennas worked independently, they then had to have multiple (thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands) of individual DVRs for each subscriber as well. Even if they had a way to virtualize this, it is still at such a ridiculous scale, it is hard to believe they weren't recording a single feed from each area and broadcasting off that.

 

[JimKiler]

It harms the industry because if the ruling passed instead of cable companies paying fees for access to OTA network stations (aka CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox) they would have copied Aereo to avoid paying those fees. The networks could have lost up to $3+ billion dollars a year:

Yes it is. You aren't trying to sell what you do as a service.

That is why I think Slingbox is safe. The issue is not format shifting, the courts don't care about format shifting (I have NEVER heard of a consumer DMCA prosecution for ripping DVDs or something like that).

They care when you try to make money on some else's content.

Thanks that makes sense, although we can say the internet is doing the same thing to broadcast fees and maybe Aereo was hastening that decline in revenue. Albeit internet people cut the cord, and Aereo people still watch TV but for free.

The TV industry does a lot of things that do not make sense.

This is a wonderful argument.

For a change in laws.

However, it is not a good argument for the case at hand.

I Concur, and based on the SCOTUS opinion their decision makes sense.

 

[SMOGZINN]

And even if all the antennas worked independently, they then had to have multiple (thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands) of individual DVRs for each subscriber as well. Even if they had a way to virtualize this, it is still at such a ridiculous scale, it is hard to believe they weren't recording a single feed from each area and broadcasting off that.

None of this matters because the court flat out said that even if they are operating the way they claimed it is illegal.

 

[smackababy]

None of this matters because the court flat out said that even if they are operating the way they claimed it is illegal.

So, if the laws are bad, change them. Don't go crying afoul because the Supreme Court found that using technology to skirt around existing laws violates the spirit of said laws and is illegal doesn't mean they are corrupt or the system is broken. It is the system working. You want to be a rules lawyer and find loopholes, SCOTUS is there to say "no subscribers for you!".


I have no problem with this ruling. Aereo has failed to demonstrate they are actually using a nonsustainable business model to circumvent the spirit of broadcast law. The SCOTUS decided that even if they were using said technology, it is irrelevant because a loophole is a loophole and they are setting a precedent of closing it.

Does this have implications for things like Slingbox? Sure, but since that isn't a pay for use service, the networks don't particularly care to go after them.

 

[who?]

Cable companies used to be able to provide the local OTA stations without having to pay them but now they do. If Aereo had won the cable companies might have sued the local OTA stations to stop having to pay them.

 

[smackababy]

Cable companies used to be able to provide the local OTA stations without having to pay them but now they do. If Aereo had won the cable companies might have sued the local OTA stations to stop having to pay them.

That was a large implication. The OTA networks would lose a ton of revenue because cable companies could easily replicate such a set up.

 

[HumblePie]

LOL, Supreme court got this wrong and even Scalia showed how the decision left open a loophole based on the ruling for Aereo.

Basically Aereo can now just record the OTA transmissions continually, record them, and allow viewers to watch them out of time-sink to the actual broadcast time frame to be "legal" according to the ruling made. Which is stupid.