19 thoughts on “Inside Aereo's Boston Rooftop Antenna Farm”

  1. Will be interesting and historic should they prevail… Oral arguments are tomorrow with a Supreme Court ruling expected in late June or July. Can’t help but wonder if the delayed DC launch has anything to do with the ongoing litigation.

  2. I think it’s quite clever what they’ve done.

    I also think it’s stupid that they exist. Broadcasters making it hard to get their signals has never made sense to me. I know it’s a labyrinth of decades of laws upon laws and lawsuits upon lawsuits but, really, the local broadcasters want me to watch. Why is it such a big deal?

    Someone like Aereo should be able to come into a market and say to the broadcasters, “Hey, I have this great idea on internet streaming. How about you give me a feed and we can work together. You’ll have more eyes and I’ll make money from the internet distribution.” No need for antennas.

    Even the notion that they have to have multiple antennas seems dumb. I get why, legally, they have to do it but it’s still dumb, practically.

  3. “but, really, the local broadcasters want me to watch. Why is it such a big deal?”

    Local broadcasters get cable retransmission payments. Aereo cuts out those payments.

  4. Yeah, in the short term it’s a small number of cord cutters. Should Aereo prevail and long term, the cable industry itself could launch antenna farms OR contract out Aereo (as Mari has suggested on multiple occasions). Of course, the local affiliates and their parent broadcasting companies, could have offered their own service along these lines, either as something new of via their Hulu investment, and headed this whole thing off.

  5. “Will be interesting and historic should they prevail”

    Interesting, yes. Historic, (even if decided in favor of Aereo, which I’d take in an even money bet), not necessarily.

    The administration brief is asking the court to decide on as narrow grounds as possible. And I’ve always thought that Aereo’s likelihood of prevailing stood on the peculiar facts of public ownership of the airwaves.

    So even if Aereo wins, I don’t think it has much broader implications, and thus not quite reaching to “historic” levels of changing the teevee market in drastic ways. (And, of course, the broadcasters might actually not be bluffing about going cable-only if Aereo wins. Which would have the side-effect of killing the OTA market.)

  6. “Should Aereo prevail and long term, the cable industry itself could launch antenna farms OR contract out Aereo (as Mari has suggested on multiple occasions).”

    But CBS excepted, all the other broadcasters have multiple valuable cable properties. So if an MSO were to try such a thing, they would likely find it would affect their prices on the broadcasters cable properties, which is why I’ve always been bearish on that scenario playing out.

    (And, again, even that scenario relies on the broadcasters bluffing about going cable-only if Aereo wins.)

  7. If you’re interested in ‘the legal angle of the case written so the layman can actually understand it’, head over to Scotusblog and read the venerable and invaluable Lyle Denniston report on the case. (h/t Toeman’s RSS.)

    (For whatever reason, I’m having trouble proving a working link directly to Denniston’s article, but it’s near the top of the site.)

  8. “Local broadcasters get cable retransmission payments. Aereo cuts out those payments.”

    I get that but that only exists because of the 1994 cable act (which was to keep the costs of cable down .. haha).

    My point is that, if you go back to the core of it all without all of the nonsense that’s been added on top of it through various acts and lawsuits, the broadcasters want your eyes so that they can sell them to advertisers. Everything else has just skewed it into the, “Let’s have a huge board with thousands of tiny antennas..”-nonsense that we have now.

  9. “My point is that, if you go back to the core of it all without all of the nonsense that’s been added on top of it through various acts and lawsuits, the broadcasters want your eyes so that they can sell them to advertisers. “

    The broadcasters do indeed want your eyes to sell to advertisers, but while I don’t have the figures at hand, my recollection is that somewhere around 50% of the broadcasters’ profit comes from retransmission fees. So it’s not quite that simple…

    (And this helps explains why the broadcasters didn’t have any problem with the transition to digital OTA, which cut a good chunk of the country off from adequate OTA reception.)

  10. BradB, I feel exactly the same way. It’s cool technology but it’s completely RIDICULOUS. Seriously, hundreds of thousands of tiny antennae? Hundreds of thousands of video streams of the exact same content? It’s completely bonkers.

    This only exists to exploit a loophole in the legal code. Ideally, that loophole would be closed, and then reform would change the underlying code to eliminate retransmission fees altogether.

  11. To think, cable companies started out with a kind of mutually beneficial relationship with broadcasters.

    I think, eventually, local broadcasters are going to be dropped. If I have to pay a fee (last I looked it was getting quite expensive for ‘locals only’) to the local broadcasters via my cable company then it seems like I should be able to opt out of that and not have locals. I don’t mind paying Aereo a fee for doing what they’re doing but if the local broadcasters come in and demand a fee through Aereo then I just won’t have Aereo nor will I watch local broadcast (I rarely watch them as it is, it won’t take much to push me over the edge).

    I think local broadcasters, and the networks, are cutting their own throat with this stuff. It’s not like content has gotten better over the years. It’s pretty crappy stuff. Mostly I just use it for local news/weather and, even then, it’s not a ritual.

  12. Two interesting factoids from the arguments, and a more overall point:

    – Justice Sotomayor has a Roku.

    – Justice Scalia thinks HBO is OTA and unscrambled.

    – I was disappointed that the Aereo lawyer didn’t keep hammering home the concept that you are just renting an OTA antenna and DVR. He hammered it home, but when he got driven off script, it seemed to me that he missed a bunch of relevant moments to drive it right back to that point and hammer it home yet again, given that that is the core of Aereo’s case.

  13. And Justice Breyer owns a phonograph?

    Also, I would have thought Aereo could have better responded to the questions of skirting copyright law – is that relevant? They’re either legal or illegal.

  14. “And Justice Breyer owns a phonograph?”

    Too newfangled for him. He’s sticking with his player piano.

    (But seriously, I knew Sotomayor was a sharpie, but an oldster going Roku without a tech blogger child pointing them that way is pretty damn impressive.)

    “Also, I would have thought Aereo would have better responded to the question of skirting copyright law – is that relevant? They’re either legal or illegal.”

    Yup. Disappointing performance. I thought they had a reasonably clear winning case, and they may well have pissed it all away in half an hour of incompetence.

  15. Frankly, even with Scalia’s bizarreness, the weirdest by far performance came from John ‘Roger Taney’ Roberts:

    “Your technological model is based solely on circumventing legal prohibitions that you don’t want to comply with.”

    And he says it, (and repeats it), like it’s a bad thing! The whole reason I thought Aereo would prevail was precisely because it had found a valid loophole. I mean, if you find a valid legal loophole, how does that suddenly not count just because it’s a loophole?

    (And if I’d been the Aereo lawyer, I’d have emphasized and embraced that it had indeed chosen its technological model precisely to be on the right side the law. Why shy away from that? Isn’t that supposed to be what the courts are for?)

  16. Just remember that the Cablevision RS-DVR (cloud DVR) decision was based on exactly this sort of rube-goldberg mechanism. The RS-DVR we built had dedicated space for each user on a single disk with every recording kept separate from each other etc etc. Basically as much like a DVR rented over a long cable as we could make it. Obviously over time some of those things will be relaxed. Two users record the same show? Use deduplication in the file system level (carefully designed given variations in start times and such) to avoid making too copies at the physical hard drive level. Then slowly but surely step up the ladder until you eventually have only one copy from the start just like you should have done from the beginning. Once the legal basis for the thing to exist is established you can work from there.

  17. “Just remember that the Cablevision RS-DVR (cloud DVR) decision was based on exactly this sort of rube-goldberg mechanism … Once the legal basis for the thing to exist is established you can work from there.”

    Fully agreed. But judging from the oral arguments, I’m not so sure this Court is too keen on deciding this case on the basis of law. We’ve developed a bit of an unlawful Supreme Court of late, accelerating over the past couple of years…

  18. Yeah, its unfortunate that Alito decided he didn’t have to recuse himself, as that increased the likelihood of a 4-4 tie which would be almost as good as an Aereo win. Certainly they still win if the court kicks the thing back to the lower (eastern) courts, or simply declines to decide the case. But still, the court has been ruling in favor of big established businesses a little too often for my taste.

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