Telly bigwigs try to close down Aereo streaming service - again A US appeals court has refused to rehear major broadcasters' arguments for temporarily shutting down TV streaming service Aereo while another court decides whether or not it's legal. The telly bigwigs, including Disney's ABC and NBC Universal, have been trying to get the online TV service banned on the basis that it infringes …
If these guys were around 150 years earlier, we'd all be paying a 'horse and carriage' tax equal to 20% of the price of our car while they produce a single perfunctory horse-drawn buggy a year and spend the rest of the time counting the proceeds of questionable wealth redistribution.
If your model sucks, don't innovate, get the government to put de facto guns to people and force them to support you!
Commercial TV stations earn most of the money from advertising. Thanks to Aereo their broadcast can reach more people, hence their advertising revenue should benefit from it.
But Aereo is making money out of it and broadcasters don't get a cut. So screw bigger reach and bigger ad market, we're going to destroy you, unless you pay us!
I think "anger" got it mostly right. Broadcasters have to pay for programming based partially on the number of viewers. They sell advertising based on the number of viewers. But advertisers don't want to pay for channel-skipping DVR viewers while content providers do expect to be paid for those.
Plus we have the socialist redistributionist tradition of letting broadcast sources charge CATV systems for use of their signal. So broadcasters have come to expect the privilege of putting their hand in everyone's pocket. Sadly the early days of CATV didn't have a Charlie Ergen who was willing to say "NO" to broadcasters.
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Judge Chin's arrogance is showing. If a piece of legislation is flawed it is the job of the legislative body that crafted it in the first place to fix it. Each and every judge, heck, each and every individual, can make up his own idea of the "spirit" of a law but there is no authority to appeal to for saying just what that spirit is save the legislators who wrote it and voted for it. Chin's job is to hear evidence for and against the proposition that some party has violated a law or has damaged another party, not to impose his own creative view of what the law should mean.
"Commercial TV stations earn most of the money from advertising."
The problem is that in the US, commercial OTA broadcasters make a significant amount of revenue from mandatory payments by cable TV systems. If the OTA stations allow Aereo to exist, the exclusivity value they can extract from the cable companies drops and they receive less revenue in that channel. Worst case, the cable companies adopt the same scheme and don't pay local stations anything.
While true about the broadcasters, many of the stations are not owned by the network (i.e. Disney, NBC, etc.) and actually they have gone on record stating that they hate the broadcast method as it loses money. The cable TV channels do far better at revenue than their broadcast counterparts. So in reality, NBC, Disney, etc. are only doing this because their broadcasters are bitching and moaning. If Avreo succeeds are not, the networks really don't care. If the broadcast stations went under, the networks would still exist and could just sell their "station" to the cable companies and such directly.
There was a time we used to look up to the USA for inspiration .. Wow .. Did things ever change or what ! .. Now we look down upon it as the example not to follow . It slid and slides down the never ending spiral staircase. When money buys politicians , you know there's no democracy. When people try to interfere with othger businesses bscause they have an idea they didn't have you know the moral fiber of the place is gone to the dogs.
We had so much examples as of late that visiting the place is the last on the list after visiting the war zone of Afghanistan. What a pity. It's not just one event , it's the never ending succession of news and events. I pity the People to have to live in such a mess. Their system is as bad as it gets. Political . patent, copyright , spying the list is too long for a post. This is just one more of the symptoms of a society that's gone to the dogs. We used to look up to them .. we're now looking down. Hell life's good in Canada :)
> When money buys politicians...
Show me one country in the so-called democratic world where politicians are not bought... doesn't exist!
It may be more under wraps in some countries, but what do you think lobbying actually is? Isn't it just a fancy word for buying favours from politicians? And there are lobbyists in every nook and cranny...
"In my view, however, the system is a sham, as it was designed solely to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take advantage of a perceived loophole in the law,"
That sounds oddly familiar. Change "Copyright Act" for tax laws and talk about big international companies such as, oooohhh, Disney, Apple, MS, Google, Starbucks et al and how does it sound now Mr Disney ABC?
"its system of thousands of tiny antennas and unique copies designed to render these transmissions private".
"In my view, however, the system should be unnecessary, as it was designed solely to meet the requirements of an outdated and non-intuitively interpreted Copyright Act, but this is the only way of meeting the now onerous interpretations of that law," he said.
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