OT - Aereo killed by Supreme Court
Chalk a win up for CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX. I'm definitely on the fence with the legal arguments in this case, even though it's hard for me to feel bad for any company (broadcast, provider, etc.) that is responsible for the insane price of cable TV.
The Aereo business model was cool though, and I REALLY hope this decision doesn't halt the movement towards a-la-carte TV options and start-ups focused on internet TV options.
Also, for those not familiar with Aereo (it was only in maybe 10 cities I think).
what I really object to is this patently absurd notion from the same conpanies that AFTER I purchase something that I'm not free to give it to someone else or let them access it.
STOP. Just STOP.
It is not stealing. It really isn't legally defined as stealing. You can not *steal* IP. The whole reason the legal figment of IP was created is because it is not stealing to take it. Notice, that even in civil or criminal cases involving Intelectual Property, the legal charges don't contain anything about stealing.
It is violation of copyright law. It is not theft. It is not stealing. Both require the proper owner to be without property. Violation of copyright law does not remove any property from the owner. It merely creates an unlicensed copy. The orignial is still there.
I won't even get into how perverted and outright broken copyright law has become. But calling a violation of copyright law stealing or theft is flat out incorrect and shows only ignorance.
What you're describing (the taking of another's property with the intent to permanently deprive them of it) is larceny. IP theft isn't larceny. However, "stealing" and "theft" are colloquial terms meaning "the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use." It isn't captured as stealing under most older criminal anti-theft statutes, but is nevertheless very much 'stealing.'
As an example, theft of trade secrets is a federal crime (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1831).
Is identity theft a violation of copyright law then? Your original identity still exists, you are able to use it and have not been deprived of it. Sure its value is lower but if you don't think being able to easily get free copies of things doesn't lower their market value then I don't know what to tell you.
I think there's more grey area here than you're allowing for. What % of the population actually knows how to download something illegally? 25%? Now what % of paying viewers of a show are a result of word of mouth or general promotion from those viewers who have viewed illegally? Is it enough to offset the reduction in market value coming from illegal viewing? Is it more? Can I ask more questions in one post?
Point is, advertisers pay more for the most popular shows, those shows get popular not only from "legal" or "paying" means.
How on earth is this stealing?? The viewer is simply paying somone to hoist antenna. The decision is total nonsense...I don't see theft,but GREED from the BIG telecorporations.
Aereo definitely exploited a convenient loophole in the law. The law is there to protect the folks who want to put an antenna on their roofs and still receive broadcast televsion. I suppose it was only a matter of time before somebody found a way to monetize that.
It's disappointing because in 2 years Aereo has built a system that is far superior to Comcast's. Their guide is easier to use. Their DVR is better. More connectivity options. Everything.
But yes, it all comes down to greed. If Aereo were allowed to exist, then the deals that Comcast, DirecTV, etc. have with NBC/ABC/CBS/Fox would have to be redone.
Then NBC can't afford to pay the NFL. Then the NFL moves to 100% cable.
If anything, this ruling shows more than ever that we need a truly a la carte model. People are more than willing to pay $8 per month just for 10 basic channels, as Aereo has proven.
Corporate greed keeps us from having nice things.
It's not really $8 for the 10 basic channels, though, right? It's $8 plus whatever your internet service costs. And would that internet service remain the same under an a la carte model? I'd have to think that right now, with the vast majority of people still getting the vast majority of their TV from their cable/satelite provider, cable companies are willing to tolerate some cord cutters and price the internet as an add-on service for the more lucritive tv service. If there was suddenly little to no money in the TV business for the internet provider, they'll sure as hell be asking for a lot more money for the internet service.
This is where the cord cutting model always comes apart. People like to simply look at how much each channel costs their cable provider, add it to current internet service costs and say that's the cost of a hypothetical a la carte model. But that's not how it will work. The internet/cable provider is going to want the same amount of money under a new system and will charge accordingly. ESPN is going to need the same amount of money and will charge substantially more under an a la carte method to get there. The only way it really results in a substantial cost savings for all consumers is if there' some fundemental change in how the American Consumer gets its internet which cuts out the current cable/telecon companies that provide the service and also own a substantial amount of the content. Everything today is just too interconnected with the companies making too much money to just let changing the cable model result in substantial savings for the consumers.
Agreed. The telecom companys are operating like the 5 families in The Godfather. They all agree to stay out of each other's turf and, now with Net Nuetrality near dead, they'll be sending Tiny down to your grandpa's party store and charging him extra to operate in "their" neighborhood.
They've even gone as far as reaching non-compete clauses with city government's in exchange for the governments agreement to not install government run fiber. Because it is actually super affordable for local governments to instal fiber.
The first major dominos that need to be toppled over are the colluded shared monolpoly that the cable companies have.
The second major domino is classifying the internet as a utility. It is safe to say that the internet is more important than land-line telephone now-a-days.
The third major domino is some kind of ruling that stops the ESPNs and AMCs of the world from creating n-ary networks that they then bundle to the telecoms, who force the prices down to the customer.
Unfortunately we'll likely never see it in our day. Netflix and Google are helping, but they'll only get so far.
i think google already sees that scenario occurring and that is why they are creating google fiber. less internet access means less money for google and they arent going to let rising internet prices keep them from making money.
crazily, comcast actually has some really good deals for cord cutters right now. i just got 25 mbps and hbogo (and 10 channels of cable) for 29.99 a month and those prices and features are good for a year.
obviously they are thowing in the 10 channels so it looks like they arent losing cable subscribers, but either way, it benefits me because i assume i can add BTN for 5 bucks a month come football/basketball season.
plus, i have an xbox one which has live espn on it (not espn3 - real espn), and my 7 dollar tv antenna off amazon picks up 30-40 channels.
all in all, this ruling was a step back for cable cutters, but hopefully a la carte comes soon
In what part of the country do you live? I got the same deal but for $49.99 about 4 months ago...
Aereo, like any individual, has the right to put up an antenna to collect over-the-air transmissions; but no one has the right to re-transmit those signals for their own gain without paiying for the right to do so.
Corporations are very sensitive to price points. They charge what they think the market will accept because they are very afraid of the scenario when costs become prohibitive, both in terms of a dropoff in viewership as well as getting, God forbid, congressional involvement.
As you know, the battle for a la carte purchasing of content is being waged, although I'm a bit nervous that the law of unintended consequences might rear its ugly head and we find that the model that we are all dumping on might not have been so bad in hindsight.
Most economic studies done on unbundled cable show it being more expensive for the average customer and terrible for sports fans, not sure why so many people on this blog think it will be so great.
...say whatever the entity who paid for them wants them to say, but maybe I'm being overly cynical.
Don't know what studies you've read, but all the ones I've read show it to be a major win for consumers. The majority of consumers will pay significantly less in an a la carte model. In addition, the only reason the sports fan would suffer at all is because the current models encourages bigger and bigger TV contracts. In an a la carte world, the TV sports contracts would drastically shrink because the money simply wouldn't be there to pay for them. AKA, the only reason that the sports contracts have gotten so big is because of the perversion of the bundling model and without that model, there is actually significant downward pricing pressure.
It depends how you define a gain for consumers. Is paying $60 for five chanels better than paying $90 for 120? What does unbundling really mean? Disney owns a few different channels, do you think they won't package those together? This article sums up my thoughts pretty well http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/mccain_s_la_car… .
Pretty much it sounds great in theory, and if you live alone or with a group of friends that watch similar shows you can save money. If you have a family where you want to watch sports, one kid wants to watch disney, the other wants to watch nickolodean, a third wants to watch cartoon network and your wife wants to watch bravo (or switch around the wifes role and your role, top chef is great and women like sports too). The point is by the time you get all of these channels you won't actually be saving very much and when march madness rolls around you will miss the all the games on tnt or trutv.
Without cable subscriber fees, what incentive does AMC have to make Breaking Bad or Walking Dead? Why would FX produce Justified or Sons of Anarchy? They wouldn't. Simple economics.
You may get away with free riding under the current system, but if things go the way you seem to want them to, you would wind up with fewer options. Either content would be produced in lower quantities or the resulting ala carte fees would wind up with you paying the same amount for sign
Idi antsy fewer channels.
Either way: less choice.
Your so called simple economics are dead wrong. Those channels would make those shows to entice people to subscribe. Channels that put out quality content like FX, AMC, and HBO would do just fine under the a la carte pricing model, it's the channels that don't have great programing that would suffer. You'd lose channels like Lifetime or Hallmark which don't produce enough value to justify the costs but survive because everyone who has cable pays them $.25.
Yes you'd have less choice, but quality would go up as competition increases. I bet you'd even get some channels that try to stay free and make money via advertising instead of fees.
Sports would definitely suffer as channels like ESPN are already expensive and they have huge contracts with major sports for broadcasting rights. If ESPN suddenly couldn't get $7 from every household with cable and 80% of current cable customers aren't interested in sports, they would have to charge $35 a month. You might get an influx of people who cut cable because they didn't want to pay $100 but would pay $35 just for sports but you'd also lose some casual sports fans who think $35 is too much for watching a couple games a month.
The real losers in a la carte would be large families with diverse interests because they would still want most of the channels but per channel cost could go up 5 fold. I could see a hybrid model where you can get everything for a discount or pay a lot more for just the select few channels you want.
So I guess that's why there are multiple TV shows not being produced purely for Internet distribution over multiple companies. Or that so far those TV shows products for distribution outside of the cable monopoly bundle infrastructure are some of the best out there. Or that the best producer of TV shows (HBO), isn't part of any bundled cable plan(its an a la carte addon!).
Why is this a win for broadcasters? Isn't their goal to be on as many screens as possible, so that their advertisers get more exposure?
This is just another example of the influence of big money on politics.
Also, this is why Brandon is a genius and the B1G expansion is great. It's all about bundled cable services and the BTN! Pay per channel or event will never happen.
I'm by no means an expert in the business of broadcasting and content production, but I understand the major broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) to have two major streams of revenue - advertising and fees from cable/satellite providers (e.g., comcast, DirecTV). Let's throw cable/premium TV channels out of this discussion, because Aereo wasn't able to pull the ESPNs, AMCs, HBOs, etc. off the airwaves by antenna and broadcast to their customers via internet. The focus, instead, was on the network channels of these broadcasters (around 8 or 10 I think in total). The broadcasters get major fees from the likes of Comcast and DirecTV for the right to broadcast those channels via set top boxes. These are the fees that Aereo was not paying under the argument that they were only doing what a regular John Doe with their own personal antenna were doing - just pulling down broadcasts from the free public airwaves.
TLDR - The broadcasters were going after the cable provider fees that Aereo was not paying. Presumably, an Aereo subscriber is just moving from one cable access point to another, one where the broadcasters weren't getting their cut, so I would guess advertising dollars didn't have much to do with this.
I haven't done the research, but thought OTA channels that are available through an antenna don't recieve much, if any money from cable companies. I thought their major revenue source was advertisers. That's why this decision is troubling.
As an aside, the Supreme Court has been bought by corporations, which is probably a positive thing if you are an M grad, but...