Remember the Aereo streaming TV service? Wasn't it COOL? Well, it's pretty much dead now Embattled streaming TV service Aereo was dealt a fatal blow Thursday as a US judge barred the service from broadcasting live television streams. Judge Alison Nathan ruled in favor of the broadcasting companies looking to bar the service from showing their feeds to customers online, issuing a temporary injunction to block the …
After the Supreme Court said they were essentially a cable company, Aereo tried to do what cable companies do, retransmit and pay a fee to those whose signal they were retransmitting.
The broadcasters refused the deal.
Or rather, the companies that own the broadcast networks and a bunch of other non-broadcast channels they want bundled in with the broadcast stuff refused to only let Aereo pay them for, and only offer to customers, just the broadcast stuff.
In other words, the broadcasters are really trying to stick it to cord cutters who, because of geography or the rules of the buildings in which they live, cannot access the free over the air signals which they want, and which are all that they want.
If the broadcasters could figure out a legal way to do the same thing to people who get great over the air reception, they'd do that as well.
"But Me Lord..., t'is not us that are doing these acts. The individual titled owners of each defined signal path have full ownership and control of their individually owned system. Our only role is that of the essential management of the facility. For this we charge a monthly fee, to pay for power and our Management Services."
We just need to make sure there is no central instance you can turn off. Peer to Peer video streaming should be possible, and if latency is not an issue, it might even work via Tor hidden services.
Just set up a few Tor hidden services as well as "mirrors" or cashing proxies and you should be set.
American TV networks are due for a sudden epic failure. Cable TV fees continue rocketing upwards long after people have reached the point where they no longer want to pay for it. To have TV networks sue Aereo for improving penetration into the targeted advertising market must feel like a big F-U to their other source of income. A point of no return will be reached where broadcasters are so despised that no tweaking to the price model is going to fix it.
It's a shame that this must happen now because IPTV isn't at all ready to take over. There are no widely adopted systems ready for distributing massive amounts of subscription video and there are few ISPs that aren't owned by broadcast network. Cable TV/Internet/Broadcast companies will laugh at the collapse and start selling expensive video data passes to "protect" their networks. People won't pay that either so it will just become a long, ugly standoff.
I live at the bottom of a large hill and I as well as many residents here in my town have a difficult time getting Broadcast TV because all the stations (except Canada) transmitters are blocked by the hill.
Cable TV is my only option as satellite is blocked by the same hill or the multitude of trees and there is no fiber here. How is Aereo causing an issue for Broadcast here?
Aereo or some other streaming service would be great except buying subscriptions to EVERY streaming service (HULU, Netflix, etc etc.) would end up being as costly as the crap I have with Time Warner once you figure in the cost of Internet needed to access the streams.
SOMEONE (Do you hear me FCC?) needs to competently regulate the various transfer mediums and each of the vendors so there is competition in EACH market, even against Broadcast or Cable.
"SOMEONE (Do you hear me FCC?) needs to competently regulate the various transfer mediums and each of the vendors so there is competition in EACH market, even against Broadcast or Cable."
We've got a regulator in the UK that doesn't seem to be doing much, maybe they'd be interested in a trip overseas? Nobody here would notice their absence...
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